Service Design Experience with Tiong Bahru Market
This is the 3rd challenge and this time round, it’s about designing a service experience for visitors to a hawker centre. It is an individual work with a 2 weeks timeline. After reading through the brief requirements, I went down with my group to the Tiong Bahru hawker centre and its immediate surroundings to understand the current situation and some field research on it.
We observed the place such as how people interacted, the Singapore culture of “chopeing” seats and tray returning, and we conducted some context inquiry on a few people around the hawker centre such as why stalls are closed on mondays and observed long queues which usually indicates famous stalls.
We took down notes of its amenities, facilities, signages and stalls before wrapping up and preparing the content that we have mapped out for the card sort and to identify problems/opportunities for the service design.
The persona that I have chose to focus on is Christina, who is a local.
She enjoys dinner outing with her friends and her needs are :
finding seats when she dines with her friends,
trying similar dishes from different stalls,
she’s a diabetic and needs health information on the food she takes,
her pain points are despite being a local she feels embarrassed that she hasn’t tried some famous dishes from malay or indian cuisines,
and finally stalls that are closed at dinner time.
For my secondary persona Lina, she is a business traveller, doesn’t has much time and hates researching. I wrote her job story and these are my partial feature priorizations for her :
“As I am only staying a few days, I need to check what facilities are around the area so that I know what’s convenient for my needs.”
“As I have never been to the place before, I want to know what food is available so that I can find new ones to try.”
Translating Christina’s needs into features, I start to map out her journey map to tell the story of the customer’s experience: from initial contact to engagement to end point.
Through this storytelling analysis, I identify her bad experiences stemming from online research and when finding food around the hawker centre.
I also mapped out the service blueprint as an operational planning tool to look at the interaction points of a typical customer, showing physical evidence and how the service and support activities is delivered to the customer. Areas of opportunity could be shortening the time of the customer’s flow tasks. e.g. arriving at hawker center to finding seats, ordering food, returning trays, washroom and finally leaving.
Armed with information, it is now time to prepare the card sorting, which is finding users to help design the information architecture of a site by learning how users will group these information.
I used the open sorting method to let five of my users organise the informational items into groups. I asked questions, took notes and observations, as well as encouraging them to talk about their thought processes, dilemna in sorting and their choices.
After I finished the open sorting, I got a good set of data to work on the close sorting. Spotting common patterns, I was able to start labelling categories. I conducted the close card sorting to learn how users sort content items into each category to see how well the category labels work. With the results I was able to map out the site map below.
Working in parallel, I was doing a comparitive analysis of the Tiong Bahru Website and my earlier findings from the physical site visit. I came up with a rough sketch of the hawker centre as seen below.
From the comparative analysis, I found areas of opportunity to improve the service design of the hawker centre. But first, some of my highlight takeaways for the website were :
The current website had a clear map overview.
The color markings blue, yellow, reds are visual cues and could help users orient themselves in the hawker center.
The labelled numberings were clear as well and you could hover over to retrieve details like stall names, opening hours and stall food menu.
The website wasn’t built with responsive design in mind.
However, physically it didn’t seem to reflect what i mentioned as well as it did. I didn’t notice the color markings despite viewing the website pictorial map first, until I looked back at some photos I took. The color markings indeed exist, a thin strip at the top of each stalls. Thinking back, it’s noticeable if you look out specifically for it.
The stall number signages were also not prominent and not what I would expect to see as what the map shows. Each individual stall had their own arrangement style of showing the stall address signages, and thus it was difficult to find specific stalls. Also it was impossible to spot stall numbers from afar.
I drew out my experience map for the tiong bahru market and proposed a few improvements to the physical design to address the brief requirements and persona’s needs.
- Add larger physical stall number signages that is more prominent from far distance.
- Add proximity sensor to side of tables (more on that later)
- Place additional stall signages at side entrances
- Install a brochure stand at entrances for tourists showing map layout, recommended food, culture (chope/tray return) and heritage history of Tiong Bahru Market. (For Lina)
For the digital prototype, I decided to prioritise on mobile website as the current website isn’t responsive. From the card sorting activity, this was the UI and navigation main menu for my final prototype.
Some proposed ideas I came up with :
Build on existing resources e.g. UI
Use new / revamped modules
Integrate and bridge closer physical to digital touchpoints.
The below pic depicts the user flow scenario for my persona Christina, to help her find recommended malay/indian food from different stalls so that she and her friends can find out what’s the best dishes.
Usability Testing and Next Steps
Basic assumptions for the persona were, research is done prior to visiting the hawker centre. From my usability testing findings, I gave my testers generic assumptions and scenarios at each phase without giving away the task I want them to do. For example, Christina is having her lunch break and wants to research for her dinner outing tonight, what would you do first?
The prototype went through a series of iterations, as the digital point used is the navigation of finding seats and stalls location, and providing relevant details for customers online research. The testers did a walkthrough test with my service design experience map and the mobile digital prototype.
Early iterations indicated visual related struggles, a result of cramping too many features in a scenario flow. Resolving that by simplifying the flow allowed subsequent testers to complete the scenario. This is the beauty of rapid prototyping, refining and reiterating again that is tailored for the user and not you.
Testers were able to complete the digital tasks crossing over to physical tasks and a few things I did not expect were considerations for proximity. Using the experience map walkthrough — If testers arrived at the hawker centre, I was expecting them to look for available seats through the mobile web app. Instead since they knew what stalls they are heading to, they would walk along to the stalls and physically scan for seats around there.
I had responses like :
“I’ll use the phone to find seats near my stall if it is far away.”
“I’ll check for seats if the place is too busy”
“Hawker centres honestly isn’t that big, it’s pretty fast to finish walking around the area while exploring for food”
I learn that users do provide many sensible points and seek the most effective ways of performing tasks. It is important to listen more than heeding your own bias.
Thanks for reading, Ciao for now!
