Service Redesign for Lau Pa Sat
After conquering the UXSG app, I moved on to Project 3. My third design challenge for General Assembly Singapore’s User Experience Immersive Course was a two-week solo project — imagine if we were hired by Singapore Tourism Board and National Environment Agency to improve the hawker centre experience for tourists.
I am always longed to work on projects close to my lifestyle. As a Singaporean, I visit our hawker centres almost every day. I felt excited and slightly nervous due to the uncertainties of this project.
Unlike our past projects where we had to create digital solutions for the physical world, this project required us to recommend improvements to the physical space as well. On top of that, we had to apply content strategy and Information Architecture best practices, as we were expecting that our tourists might be overwhelmed by the large set of content (food choices) in our hawker centres.
Problematic Physical Space
I was assigned to Lau Pa Sat together with three of my classmates, Cassandra, Jaden and Colin. Although this was a solo project, we gathered and shared data as a group. Lau Pa Sat has 56 stalls, the least number of stalls compared to the hawker centres assigned to the other classmates. My initial thought was we were lucky to get the “easy” one.
But I remember getting lost in Lau Pa Sat in the past. This time round I got lost again trying to get to the top-up kiosk at the entrance. We realised that this was due to the unique octagon shape of Lau Pa Sat. The uniformed stall signboards and stall positions, which created blind spots did not help.
To make things worse, tables lacked numbers and colours. There were NO directional signage for key facilities such as toilets, wash basins as well as entrance.
I felt that anyone (be it locals or tourists) would need this information. Perhaps Lau Pa Sat did not see the need as it is a relatively small hawker centre. But in fact, people were lost walking in circles and not remembering the direction they were facing.
Signage is needed. Looking at the map, I discovered these two rings are suitable for signages as there are not blocked by stalls.
Open Card Sorting
After the Lau Pa Sat trip, we translated information into cards ready for card sorting. Each of us came up with our own deck. 80% of my cards were dish names, 20% were facilities. That night I happened to meet my friend, Shilpa from India. She had lived in Singapore for about two years and is a vegetarian.
Despite her best effort, I realised some “mistakes” in her card sorting.
These were my two key takeaways:
- As a vegetarian, she only cared about the food she could eat. She also told me she always made it a point to check if a place had vegetarian food before visiting.
- Due to her lack of exploration, many dishes were unknown to her. I realised a lot of tourists who were here for short stays, would not have enough time to understand our food options too.
My recommendations to improve her experience include:
1) Highlight concerns of people with special dietary needs such as food allergies
2) Allow pre-planning of food order before visiting
3) Reduce decision-making by having a recommended food list for tourist.
I conducted another open card sorting with Luke, my instructor. Luke does not have a special dietary need and is willing to explore food recommended by locals. He organised his cards into 4 main piles (and other miscellaneous piles):
- Dishes he has tried and would like to eat again
- Dishes he has not tried but would like to try (heard from others)
- Dishes he has tried and won’t not try again
- Dishes that are unknown to him
As expected, Luke had a pile of unknown dishes that were neither recommended nor heard by him. This confirmed my decision of having a recommended list. After all, locals know best! :)
I continued more open card sorting with my local classmates who I deemed as experts. I noticed there was a trend of sorting by cuisine, stalls or food types (e.g. noodle, rice etc.).
As for the 20% facilities cards, all participants sorted by facilities within and facilities outside of Lau Pa Sat.
Closed Card Sorting
From the open card sorting sessions, I came up with categories. Participants did not need to create their own categories but rather organised cards into categories I have created for them.
I realised that everyone had a slightly different set of “Must Try” dishes, although everyone chose “Chilli Crab” as they felt it’s the food that best represented Singapore. I felt that more sample data was needed to decide which dishes to put in my category of Must Try” dishes. That said, my findings had already enabled me to come up with the following categories which both locals and foreigners would find them useful.
Persona
For the project, we picked one out of three given personas.
Persona 1: Lina, a busy business traveller. She wants to try a few famous local food in the quickest amount of time due to the short stay she has in town. Her allergies to nuts will affect which foods she can have.
Persona 2: Tony travels the world with his two active boys, Sam, 6 years old, and Carl, 4 years old. Time is not an issue for him. But he has to manage his boys and find activities that can keep them entertained.
Persona 3: As a Singaporean she is very familiar with hawker centres but she has never tried some Indian or Malay dishes. Christina is a diabetic so she needs to take extra note of her food intake.
I decided to choose Tony as my primary persona. This is his complete persona profile:
Although we did not need to conduct user interviews this time (not part of project requirement), I felt that interviews would facilitate in creating a more accurate Journey Map.
Journey Map
I interviewed my classmate, Ailin and my sister. Both of them have two young children who are active. I was surprised that they avoid bringing their kids to hawker centres alone. They are concerned about not being able to hold their kids’ hand while handling the food tray and looking for a table. I mapped out the journey map and came up with solutions for every step, especially the pain points.
Service Blueprint
My initial service blueprint was similar to Journey Map. Luke pointed out that I should include more physical factors. This resulted in my second trip to Lau Pa Sat with my classmates. This time, I focused on observing signage (or lack of) from MRT station to Lau Pa Sat. We also interviewed different stakeholders that contributed to the hawker centre experience.
Stakeholder 1 — A tourist: He would try Asian food in general, he was not limiting himself to just local food. However, he told us he would definitely use an app that provided food recommendations.
Stakeholder 2 — Stall owner: We received many rejections from stall owners until we finally talked to this stall owner. He told us that tourists usually pointed food to him if they had a problem in communicating.
My recommendation to improve experience: Provide food pronunciation for tourists
Stakeholder 3 — Cleaner auntie: who told us that Lau Pa Sat assigned three cleaners to a lane. During peak hours, she would start clearing some plates as diners were eating. For non-peak hours, she would wait for people to leave the table before clearing. We felt good to hear that Lau Pa Sat was not short of cleaners and the current system worked well.
This is my final service blueprint:
Feature List
As the research process went on, I kept a list of features along the way. This is my final unfiltered list:
Feature Prioritisation & My final solution
I decided to place my emphasis on this flow:
- At the hotel, Tony logged on to Lau Pa Sat website. He planned food to order before making a trip to Lau Pa Sat.
- At Lau Pa Sat, Tony entered the website again. He notified the website that he was with kids.
- He went around adding more food to his order list by scanning NFC tags on food signboard.
- He saw empty seats. He scanned NFC tags of these seats to reserve them. Chairs had (green and red) lights to symbolise whether chairs were reserved.
- He finally confirmed his food order. Hawkers received alert that Tony was with kids.
- He received notification whenever his food is ready.
- He returned to the stalls, with his kids in the tow, to pay and collect his food. Food was packed into bags by hawkers to ease carrying.
- He returned to seats. The seats were fancy chairs of animals theme to keep the kids entertained. These seats were also higher than usual so that kids can have a clearer view of their food.
I removed features that were good-to-have and were not part of the intended flow:
Throughout the process, Tony will not tied to a location. With the help of hawkers, Tony could carry food in bags while holding his kids’ hands. And fancy seats could help increase the duration of his kids sitting still,which meant Tony got to eat too!
UI Sketching & Content Inventory
Once I decided my feature list, I moved on to UI Sketching. These are some of my sketches.
I continuously updated this “live” content inventory document as I worked on high fidelity mockup.
Experience Prototype
After I was done with high fidelity mockup, I moved on to create 3D experience prototype. Signage was placed at the 2 rings (highlighted in yellow) which I had previously identified as ideal zones for signage.
With my 3d experience prototype and high fidelity mockup, I moved on to test out the redesign experience of Lau Pa Sat with users.
Design Iterations & Final Mockup
My final mockup fulfilled my intended flow. I also added in bite-sized cultural information that Tony might be interested.
During my testing, I also noticed NFC technology was new to many people. So I recreated the food poster with clearer instruction and photo.
I also added a 10-minute limit on reserving seats without any order. This was to prevent misuse of tables.
You can access my final mockup here: https://invis.io/5T6O38Z8P
Next Step
If I were to continue this project in the future, I would like to add:
- Sort rating according to different groups of people (Local vs Foreigner) — Foreigners might have different taste from Singaporeans.
- Payment: Use google wallet or EZ-Link — Cashless transaction
- Auto meal planner by entering headcount — Further reduce decision-making
- Augmented Reality to show stall direction — Ease in finding stalls without referring back to floor plan.
After Thoughts
This is by far my favourite project! I enjoyed myself throughout the whole project. Many of us felt that this should be a group project as more works could be done. In the future, I hope to conduct experience prototype at the actual venue. I feel this would be the best way to verify users’ experience with physical improvement in place.
I’m looking forward to more fun projects to come.
Thank you for reading!
