Introducing the Better Journey Service Patterns
There are a lot of things happening right now to make life safer — but how inclusive are they? This is a question we set out to explore in the midst of lockdown.
Who are we? Andy (from Go Upstream) creates opportunities for people with disabilities, primarily people with dementia, to work with transport providers to raise awareness of travel challenges and to work on designing solutions. Ness (from Snook) is a service designer and has involved people in the co-design of public services for over 10 years, including trains, bikes, planes and bikes-on-trains. We discovered we had a shared frustration of the recurring accessibility challenges we’ve seen over several years and a shared passion for making transport services better by designing for inclusion.
So, we began plotting last year, using the Three Horizons framework to map out current challenges, future hopes and ideas to bring about a different future, where people are not disabled by transport services that do not meet their needs. We landed on the idea of co-designing common solutions to repeated challenges — we call these design patterns, more on this later.
Then COVID happened and stories began to emerge of changes being made to transport services and the idea felt even more relevant. Services might have been made COVID-secure, but are they inclusive and accessible? Distancing measures, one-way systems, closed toilets and lots of confusing, multi-coloured signage. Had more travel barriers inadvertently been created?
We knew that the only way to really find out was to work with people living with disabilities who have long experienced exclusion and discrimination. Lack of confidence to use public transport has always been a barrier for people living with disabilities. Transport providers have tended to implement accessibility improvements individually, resulting in a disjointed experience and inefficient use of resources. Journeys involving multiple modes of transport were especially hard to navigate.
In the context of the climate crisis, we also needed to be getting back onto public transport to avoid a carbon-intensive car-led recovery. Yet as the UK emerged from the pandemic, data showed reduced public transport use and increased car journeys (Apple’s Mobility Index, July 2020). Despite the safety measures in place, many people were still reporting a lack of confidence in using public transport.
If we worked together, we could assess reconfigured services based on real-life experience and create some guidance to help operators make their new services more inclusive.
So we started something called the Future Journeys Observatory to collect and make sense of these service changes and challenges.
We review articles and examples of transport responses emerging from around the world and invite people to join an online community to discuss what this means for inclusion and accessibility. Meeting every Thursday at 2pm since May, our group has involved 20 people, including those living with a range of disabilities, staff from transport providers, people working in policymaking and disability advocacy organisations. We’ve kept things small as we develop the process and get things right. The group has been a lot of fun and a nice anchor for many of us over the past few months.
We developed a 4-week process to identify common challenges, pick one to research in more detail, discuss emerging changes and potential solutions, then document our high-level recommendations as a set of service design patterns that we are calling the Better Journey Service Patterns.
This has surfaced the real concerns and priorities that people have. Things like understanding the new rules, how to deal with difficult situations, and staying safe when you need assistance. We never had to think of these before. We realised that this would enable us to bring value to service providers.
As the project developed and more groups got in touch, we shared our patterns with others to review and validate.
What are patterns?
You may already be familiar with design patterns, but if you are wondering what on earth we are on about… Patterns, or pattern language, stem from architecture. Architects use patterns to design repeated features, such as steps, to ensure that designs are regular, familiar and easier for people to use.
“Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice” Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language.
Patterns have been adopted in digital and service design to provide reusable solutions to common interactions and service problems. See GDS, Projects by If and Snook’s work with The Catalyst and the Mental Health Patterns Library. As Snook’s Sarah Drummond described:
“Service patterns help scale good services, help others solve similar problems, create consistent service experiences, reduce common mistakes and bad designs, make good use of resources and help document successful designs.”
The Better Journey Service Patterns
We have prototyped three Better Journey Service Patterns for ‘Understanding New Rules’, ‘Exceptions to Rules’ and ‘Etiquette’, identified by the group as critical to building their confidence to travel again. By the end of this week, we will also finish a pattern about assistance called ‘Finding Help Along the Journey’.
Here’s a mock-up of the ‘Exception to Rules’ pattern:
We are launching the patterns as open-source, so that they are freely accessible in the UK and beyond, and are exploring paid-for options to sustain the project, such as a bespoke implementation offering — helping operators to implement the patterns and prototype new services.
We are confident that if implemented, our patterns will improve services not just for people living with disabilities but for all other passengers too. We’ve had some great feedback from people, policymakers and providers too:
“Having operators working alongside those with lived experience will greatly help the emergence of fuller co-designed concepts, more likely to succeed in practice.” Service Provider
“We definitely think the document [pattern] would have a positive impact on how providers approach accessibility.” Policymaker
What have we learnt so far?
- When we asked people what their concerns are, we heard about very human things like the discomfort involved in adopting new behaviours and a lack of confidence. These are not being addressed by the safety measures being put in place by operators. To deliver good journeys, we need to involve people with lived experience in decision making.
- When we shared the challenges with wider groups of users to verify, they told us we had identified issues that come up again and again. This makes us even more certain that service design patterns are the right approach to create reusable solutions for recurring issues and make efficient use of provider’s limited resources.
- Starting small and gradually involving more people has allowed us to (try to) learn how to make our process inclusive. We have been able to focus on developing a process so it works for everyone, without the pressure of an existing project budget or timeline.
What next?
This has been an unfunded trial and people have been very generous with their time and expertise. Now we need to find funding to do the work justice and to realise the interest that is growing.
Go Upstream and Snook are looking for people and partners to develop the patterns together and get them to implementation. Such as working closely with transport providers to test, adapt and implement the patterns, and working with wider disability groups (or individuals) to validate the challenges and continue iterating the patterns.
We have a long list of other patterns from our research that we want to design, from accessible timetables and ticket booking, to how to find a toilet and guidance for good signage.
Call to action
Are you a transport provider with responsibility for delivering services? Do you have valuable lived experience or ideas to share? Are you working in policy and could draw inspiration from the evidence-based challenges we have identified?
We’d love to hear from anyone interested in collaborating, to build, test and implement the patterns.
Get in touch via ness.wright@wearesnook.com and hello@upstream.scot
