A Customer-Centric Approach to Universal Transit Planning
By Ryan Gates, Creative Director, Method
“What would it look like if we put people at the center of transit planning — if we designed a friendly system grounded in the needs, wants and preferences of all riders? Would transit be more useful? Would more people ride it?”
— Arielle Fleisher, SPUR
At first glance, this provocation may seem to be ridiculous, with an obvious-enough answer: “Yes. Please?”
But how is it possible that the organizations charged with developing our transit systems do not think about people when designing them? In reality, planners do think about people, but because they have to think about so many types of people, they fall into an inevitable trap of overgeneralizing, creating something that’s usable and accessible, but not particularly enjoyable or intuitive.
Taking a Design Approach to Transit Planning
In 2017, we, the public, demand more savvy and responsive public services, and that requires a more rigorous approach to attending to actual rider needs.
One organization that recognizes this need for new approaches to transit planning is SPUR (San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association). SPUR is a civic planning organization that brings people together from across the political spectrum to advocate for solutions to significant problems that our cities face.
To support their mission of transit innovation, SPUR founded their annual Transit + Design event, which unites transit policy wonks, transit administrators, urban planning representatives from local and regional transit districts, urban planning agencies, community advocates, and other transit enthusiasts to introduce new methodologies and design-based approaches to solving these big problems.
SPUR’s 2017 Transit + Design theme, “Putting the ‘Me’ in Transit” highlights the issue that transit agencies don’t often think of the individual rider when planning transportation services.
For this year’s event, we (Method) were invited to host 100+ people across six different breakout sessions, demonstrating a design method that could apply to transit planning. We teamed up with Nelson\Nygaard, a transportation planning firm, and introduced participants to a “tool” we regularly use for defining valuable customer-focused services, the customer journey map.
Understanding the actual customer journey is the best way to put people — the riders, patrons, or customers — at the center of a service or product design.
To demonstrate the customer journey map, we were privileged to have real transit partners with real issues, rather than hypothetical ones, to bring the maps to life. One session, with Laura Tolkoff of SPUR San Jose, looked at managing curb space at Diridon Station. Another with Tim Chan of BART looked at making transit stations work for tourists, and our third session with Sara Barz and Carol Kuester from MTC looked at reimagining the Clipper experience to meet the needs of people with limited incomes. These transit professionals brought a wealth of experience to the sessions and also benefited from a different perspective on their pressing issues, from us on the Method-Nelson\Nygaard team as well as from the workshop participants.
Mapping the Customer Journey
At Method, we begin mapping the customer journey from the client’s perspective, validate and elaborate the mapped journey with end-users based on their perspective, then follow up with our client to compare the two views. With both viewpoints combined, we’re able to have an informed conversation about opportunities that are compatible with customer needs. This framework provides fertile ground for shedding long-held — but not always accurate — beliefs, and contextualizes the role of the complete experience, not merely the services offered by the particular organization or agency. You can download this customer journey worksheet to get a sense of the dimensions of the customer journey map.
WHY MAKE ONE?
The customer journey map is a diagram that depicts the key moments in a customer’s interaction with a product, service, or experience. Mapping the customer journey helps us focus on what the customer needs at different stages of their engagement with their organization. While not new for those in the service design or product design field, this is an invaluable tool for expanding our vision of how customers perceive our product or service and unearth new opportunities to improve their overall experience.
BENEFITS
Going through the process of mapping your customer journey has many advantages:
- You can visualize and organize the many moving parts along a customer’s engagement with your business.
- You’re able to identify missed opportunities by superimposing what a customer needs from you on top of how your business currently measures up.
- It provides a common framework for problem-solving in large teams.
- It focuses product design brainstorms around specific pain points.
- You can clearly identify opportunities to expand or refocus your offering.
- It helps attune branding and communications strategy to emotional needs of customers at different moments
TIPS FOR SUCCESS
To get the most out of a customer journey map, you must define your target customer precisely — different customers have different needs, and designing for the median customer results in bland ideas. Here are some ways to ensure you’re getting the right amount of detail:
- Get out and observe your customer — conducting field observations and one-on-one interviews with your customers can often be more valuable than surveys and focus groups.
- Think carefully about where the customer’s journey starts — it likely begins well before they encounter your product or service.
- Make journey maps for several different target customers, and then compare and contrast their experiences to find shared and distinct needs to serve.
- Treat the customer journey as a living document — as your understanding of various stages and opportunities changes, adjust the map accordingly. It should always represent your best understanding of the problem and opportunity state.
Completing the Picture
As we walked through the customer journeys with our transit agency partners and participants, it became evident that the opportunities and pain points surfacing for each specific user would be an invaluable complement to a more general space or program plan.
From the way our partners characterized them, I imagine traditional transit planning approach to be like an X-ray. The value of X-ray is broadly in the definition of the edges of bone. Adding to this general vantage point, it’s often necessary to overlay the X-ray with an MRI, to examine the internal structures and soft tissue. Only then can you make more informed decisions about complex issues.
The customer journey map (the MRI) and the site or service plan (the X-ray) could work well together. Traditional transit planning seems very attentive to defining the edges of a space and planning for how everyone accesses that space. However, if transit agencies had a better idea of how and why different people move through a station they could set up more patron-appropriate spaces, enabling technology, supportive services, and wayfinding mechanisms. They would be equipped to create more appropriate entrances, exits, kiosks, signage, parking, security, sound schemes, announcements, and vendor bays that fit patrons’ actual patterns of use.
What if transit agencies committed to understanding how their different types of patrons actually used — not just arrived at — their facilities? Would they create better services and policies? Would transit be more useful? Would more people ride it?
The answer is obvious-enough: “Yes. Please.”
