As the warm weather arrived and Letchworth basked in glorious sunshine, we brought our service design project to a close.
Over five months, eight workshops, multiple team sessions and via plenty of post-its, we’ve gone from knowing nothing about service design, to being converted designers in waiting.
Our brief was and remains simple, “how might we create a Letchworth community space that provides access to information and resources for residents and visitors alike”. Our journey to unearth the answers has been less so.
If you’ve got the inclination, you can read through our blogs (see the ‘You may also be interested in’ section in the footer of this page) that chart the journey we’ve been on with this project. If not, I’ll try to recap.
A journey
We started this project by trying to identify who the users of the Local and Tourist Information Centre (TIC) are. What do they want from the Centre, what stops them using it, what impedes their experience?
Having drawn up these user personas, we then went out and talked to real people, trying to find out if our assumptions were right. Were there barriers that we missed, were peoples’ experiences different to our expectation?
Armed with this feedback, we then set about thinking of ways we could improve the services delivered by the Centre. Once we’d got these ideas together and identified ones which looked feasible and useful, we needed to test them.
This led us in to our prototyping build and test session. Using cardboard and paper, we invited people to test our ideas, give their feedback and help us identify changes that could improve them further.
What next?
We embarked upon this project because the TIC is going to be moving to a new home. It provides a great opportunity to reimagine how the Centre works and what services and facilities it can provide to the community and visitors to Letchworth.
We now have a clear set of user-defined principles and services that we know will make the space a brilliant visual and informative experience. We’re looking forward to seeing it take shape over the coming months. We will of course keep you in the loop.
Until then however, we thought we’d give you a flavour of the personal journey our project team (myself included) have been on during this project. Click on the images below to see the team member and their learnings about service design.
