Communicating User Insights with Travel Mindsets and Experience Personas in Intra-city Bus Context

Design of attractive services for the bus travel context is important because of the aim to increase the usage of sustainable travel modes of public transportation. In bus travel, both user experience of the digital services and the broader service design context of the public transportation need to be addressed. Experience-Driven Design (EDD) can be used to take the passengers’ needs and experiences in the core of the design process. This paper presents a qualitative diary and interview study on bus travel experience with 20 passengers in two major cities in Finland. The aim of this study was to identify and communicate frequent bus passengers’ needs, experiences, values and activities as user insights to support experience-driven service design in the public transportation context. Based on the data analysis, we derived ten Travel Mindsets: Abstracted, Efficient, Enjoyer, In-control, Isolation, Observer, Off-line, Relaxed, Sensitive, and Social. To communicate the study findings on bus passengers’ travel experience, Travel Experience Personas were created. The personas include primary and secondary travel mindsets, specific needs related to bus travel, insights on mobile device usage, and target user experience (UX) goals that could enhance the personas’ travel experience. We also discuss how the personas can be used as a communicative design tool that supports EDD of novel services in the bus context.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Uncovering factors influencing railway passenger experiences through love and breakup declarations

While existing approaches for assessing passenger experience are often limited to surveys of customer satisfaction, societal and technological challenges push the railway industry to adopt a user-centric approach to the design of their service. We used the love and breakup method in a study involving N = 53 passengers making a declaration to their railway company to collect qualitative feedback on the passenger experience. The method allowed to gather personal, emotional, and contextual insights into passengers’ experiences that can inform the transportation service design process. We describe 21 factors and 8 needs influencing the passenger experience, thereby consolidating and deepening prior work in the railway context. Using the lens of user experience theories, we argue that the service should be assessed against fulfilling these needs, which can act as guiding principles regarding service improvement. The study also presents valuable insights into the love and breakup method to explore service experiences

Telling stories with personas

Even though the persona method is a well-known tool in the Human-Technology Interaction field for knowing users and their goals, tasks and environments, there are varying opinions about how personas should be developed and used. Many agree that combining personas with scenarios and user stories is useful, but scenarios and user stories can also be defined and used in various ways. The purpose of my master's thesis is to examine with a literature review different ways to develop and use personas together with scenarios and user stories. My thesis aims to gain a broad picture of the topic rather than confirm one, single perspective. I will search for sources in multiple places since quantitative research alone cannot provide complete enough answers to my research questions. I have divided personas into four types based on my literature review. Manual, semi-automatic and automatic personas are based on mostly user research, but they vary on how many steps in their development are done manually. Expert personas are based on knowledge gathered from stakeholders, literature and other experts. Designers should decide the type of persona based on the purpose of the project and available data and resources. The most important elements in persona description are a photo, name, background information, goals, pain points and story. All personas in the project should be comparable by using the same elements in persona descriptions and same layout in persona documents. Deciding what sources are included in a literature review and how extensively new sources are searched for are always subjective decisions. Another limitation of my thesis is that it does not cover visual design methods, such as storyboards or user journeys. There is some academic research about personas, scenarios and user stories, but knowledge about this topic could be broadened and deepened by conducting more research on the effectiveness, popularity and usage of these methods. Comparisons of practices between countries and companies would also be interesting

Triggering Service Employees' Empathy through Design Methods

Empathy is key in user-centered design. It drives designers to take users’ perspectives to understand their experiences. Moreover, empathy is vital for service companies as it ensures quality, fosters customer loyalty and forgiveness, and ultimately improves customer satisfaction. Empathy supports the service employees’ awareness of their role in users’ experience (even those without design background). At the organizational level, empathy is the ground for breaking silos between teams and increasing overall user experience maturity. However, the methods and processes for triggering service employees’ empathy are still under-researched. Design research needs more studies on empathic methods to train service employees’ empathy. The field also needs more research on measuring empathy in a design context to deepen knowledge of empathy mechanisms. This knowledge will help designers shape their empathic design approach and observe the empathy tendencies evolution of the other service employees after participating in empathic design interventions. Our research investigates the use of empathic design methods to promote the understanding of customer experiences inside an organization and deliver high-quality experience services. How do empathic design methods influence service employees’ empathy towards users? We studied three empathic methods to trigger employees’ empathy inside the Luxembourgish railway service company (CFL): the physical journey map, the love and breakup method, and the co-creation method. In parallel, we developed and validated a self-reported measurement instrument, the Empathy in Design scale (EMPA-D), measuring three dimensions of service employees’ empathy: emotional interest and perspective-taking, personal experience, and self-awareness. Researching methods triggering and measuring service employees’ empathy is primordial for supporting the design of services through user-centric approaches. This thesis brings reflections and guidelines to consolidate empathic methods and research on empathy in design