A digital future for TfL

UX, DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, PRODUCT DESIGN

Senior Design Manager, BAE Detica

2000 - 2013

Background

The Transport for London (TfL) website gets 250 million hits every year and is one of the most visited transportation sites in the world. Millions of visitors, tourists and commuters rely on TfL to help get them to their destination ontime.

In 2011, I worked as part of a BAE team that won the bid to become TfL's digital partner. It was an exciting time for London with the 2012 Olympics on the horizon, but challenges with the existing TfL website and competition from third-party services meant there was a lot of work to do in establishing and securing TfL's digital future.

We were given a fairly vague brief: imagine the digital future for TfL.

Discovery

To unpick the brief we kicked off a number of activities. We held 'imagine the future' workshops with TfL management teams, carried out guerilla research with people travelling in London, and had sessions with TfL's user experience team. We had strategic briefings from Marketing, Strategy, and Communications, and Customer Research teams.

We discovered a huge number of themes and synthesised them into the first set of experience principles. We played these back to TfL and refined them further until a final set of principles emerged. These would inform everything TfL did going forward.

We produced a detailed document that told the story of how and why we came up with these principles for the senior team to communicate to everyone at TfL.

Using the principles to guide us, we proposed the first step in the digital upgrade - a beta homepage launch to get business and user feedback.

We brought in technical and business specialists from BAE Detica to work alongside and inform the UX workstream. These would combine to deliver a new bold and modern homepage for web and mobile, and a set of robust, flexible templates for future content.

We looked at existing site analytics, user research, stakeholder research and gap analysis to identify user groups and high-level scenarios. We looked at design and branding across the network, reviewed competitors and the sector in general. A key area of focus was in personalised, relevant content.

Definition and design

We produced user and stakeholder requirements and went through a device-agnostic UX and design process with TfL. We delivered UX, design and code templates aligned with the operational efficiency workstream.

We explored a range of innovative applications to create a world-class digital experience across all devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. We also looked at how tech could be used for fun, engaging visual information posters.

What we delivered

The project transformed TfL's digital presence.

We delivered a real-time journey planner service in tandem with the creation of an updated website, providing up-to-the-minute travel information and reliable journey planning tools.

A new ‘nearby’ function was launched to provide real-time updates across all local transport modes, from Barclays Cycle Hire to the Tube. This enabled a seamless digital and user-friendly planning experience across multiple platforms.

An interactive version of the London Tube Map was also developed where sections can be highlighted in real-time, enabling users to easily see and interact with the latest updates relevant to their journey.

We delivered design and code templates aligned with the operational efficiency workstream so TfL had the capability to efficiently and consistently grow its digital footprint.

The new website supports TfL's Open Data policy through the creation of a single, externally facing API which as of Sept 2022 has attracted over 17,000 registered developers.

This API promotes the Government’s Open Data agenda for increasing economic growth by offering 3rd party developers high-quality, live TfL data to support hundreds of travel applications and help millions of people every day.

Impact

In the ten weeks following the launch of the new site, TfL saw journey planner visits increase by 10%, while weekday traffic from mobile devices soared 54%.

The new website proved popular with end users and we won the People’s Lovie Award for Best Government and Civic website in 2014.