Designing travel experiences

How design changes the city

London wouldn’t be the city it is — vibrant, always changing — without its vast transport network and its long history of transport design.

Millions of people spend their days moving around the city, travelling to work, meeting friends and colleagues, finding new areas to explore and going out at night. Transport is never just a means to an end, it defines a city’s culture and its design fundamentally influences everyday experiences.

Transport design in London

The Tube map alone — one of the most important pieces of 20th-century communication design — does not only make sense of a complex network, but defines the shape of the city as a whole and how individuals relate to it. In many ways, it defines where the city starts and ends, where its main arteries run, where to find its nooks and crannies.

The growth and sustainability of London has always depended on how integrated and frictionless transport is and how easily people can transition from walking to taking a bus and from cycling or driving to taking a train. Each mode offers a different way of experiencing the city — from exploring quiet alleyways on a bike to travelling long distances on the train.

Everything in our design environment contributes to that — our wayfinding system, signage, station architecture and street design, typeface and advertising, pedestrian maps and payment systems, ‘Art on the Underground’ (public art in the underground stations) and London Tube map. These artefacts make the city usable and liveable and have become inseparable from London’s culture and identity.

Adding to this, new digital services continue to emerge and connect infrastructure and people in new ways, changing how cities work.

A continuous flow of online and offline experiences are shaping our lives. As we dip in and out of digital services, we discover new things, make decisions, plan, pay, find our way, change our mind, and perhaps adopt new habits.

The many conversations and neverending transactions, wherever they take place, have become the fabric of our relationships with each other and the private and public services we rely on. What matters is the experience — how quick it is, how surprising, how painless, whether it can start here and continue there.

Building a strategic design team

To be able to respond to this new environment, we had to rethink our approach to design. Everyday experiences, such as paying for services and navigating London, have been and always will be changing. What could a future digital service look like and what kind of team would we need to create these new experiences? How could we build a team around experiences, not channels?

Design has always played an important role in our organisation. So when we set out to develop our team we had good foundations to build on. We had the design thinking of Harry Beck and Edward Johnston, but also Frank Pick’s vision of design shaping a city.

We felt that it was important that designers could work on products long term — together with product managers, technical leads and content designers. The strategic, digital experience design team would co-own, shape and reinvent our future digital service across products, rather than respond to short-term project briefs.

To do this, we had to change our design culture and cut down on distractions. We focused on getting experienced design leads on board, who could bring colleagues from across the business together across disciplines and departments.

We also had to create a culture where designers would be able to build on each other’s ideas and not have to work in isolation, in order to translate strategy into experiences that make sense and are consistent across a wide range of touchpoints.

Our design leads work on both propositions and experiences. We also integrate innovation, so that experimentation with new technologies and platforms are now part of our everyday work.

We are now a team of thirteen designers working across all digital channels — our websites, apps, digital displays and TravelBot — looking at the whole service rather than single products and touchpoints. Our Digital Studio provides the space for interdisciplinary product teams to come together and work closely with colleagues from across the organisation, to do research, develop propositions and strategies, explore concepts, and design and code.

No longer moving from project to project, we are able to think deeper about our products and connect aspects of the experience in new ways. Our investment in depth rather than breadth and in focus rather than responsiveness has paid off and we are now beginning to see how design-led innovation will be able to shape the future.

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Hanna Kops works as Head of Experience for Transport for London where she leads a team of digital designers. She also teaches design in London.