Designing the world's best digital transport experience, with TfL's Hanna Kops

Tubes, trains, boats, trams, bikes, busses and even a cable car combine to make Transport for London (TfL), a system that helps 9 million Londoners and a few tourists navigate the world's greatest city.

Designing the digital tools that help people to turn complex logistics into practical travel plans is no mean feat, but that's exactly what Hanna Kops and her team did with the TfL Go app.    In this episode Hanna tells us the story of how the  TfL Digital Experience team collaborated with a complex matrix of stakeholders and launched an app that's now on every Londoner's phone. 

We also talk about:

• The formative role that playing games with her family had on Hanna's development as a designer and reflect on how the shift to screen-based play will shape tomorrows designers.
• How the singleminded pursuit of "scale" often strips the value out of designed experiences.  

If you're curious about the vintage "Mind The Gap" sound bite in this episode and are in the mood for a romantic story, then click here. 

About Hanna 

Hanna Kops is Head of Experience at TfL Digital.Over the last few years, she co-built TfL Digital, the team behind the TfL Go app and other future digital experiences. TfL Go includes an innovative new approach to digital maps, was shortlisted for a D&AD Award and won multiple industry awards, including BIMA, The Drum and Design Week.Hanna is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art.Before joining Transport for London, Hanna led design teams, innovation projects and culture change for a wide range of organisations in the UK and USA. She also co-founded a design studio.

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

Chapters

• 0:00 The Quick Fire Round
• 23:07 Design in TFL

Transcript

 Hello, and welcome to another edition of Service Design Yap.  I'm Stephen Wood, and in this episode I'm joined by Hanna Kops, Transport for London's Head of Digital Experience. TfL has always championed design, I can't think of another transport system that decorates its stations with type specimen.  In this episode, Hannah shares how her team and the wider TFL design community collaborate on projects ranging from app development through to the renaming of the overground lines that recently caused such a stir on social media, as if we didn't have any other news to focus on. 

We also talk about games. It seems as if board games are really popular with designers. They're social. Designers tend to be social creatures and they involve challenges and constraints and they can be extended in scope and features. It all feels like really excellent design training.  It sounds like we're about to set off. 

Welcome to another edition of Service Design Yap. And today I'm joined by Hannah Copps, the head of TFL Digital Experience. How are you doing, Hannah? Hi, Stephen. I'm good. Yes. Thanks for having me. Where do we find you today? I'm at Pier Walk in North Greenwich, which is one of our offices hosting the technology department mainly.

Fantastic. Does it have a Thames side view? It does. Yes. It's where the Thames becomes really broad and lovely, where you can see the sky and it's very close to the sort of barrier and It's a very different atmosphere here than in central London. Often you find that developers call things Pearside Walk or Riverview when they haven't either.

But maybe I'm just a little bit cynical. We typically start our podcast off with a quick fire round that helps the people listening get to know our guests a little bit better. Are you ready for the quick fire round, Hannah? Okay. Yeah, let's get started. Fantastic. Okay. So thinking about your career path, did that start with design school or was it mainly on the job learning?

It started out with cultural studies, which was a broad spectrum of things. So everything from anthropology to history, to sociology, to technology, to philosophy.  So very broad, uh, very interesting. A lot of sort of cross pollination between the disciplines. And I come from a family of designers. My family is made of architects, uh, designers and, uh, concept strategists.

And so that's always been there and I've, I've always had design work, I've always did design work on the side and combined it in the end in a strategic design career. And did you do your, your cultural studies in Germany? I did. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And, and thinking about sort of people in the UK now, uh, who are in education, did the, the German state help you pay for your study? 

Yes, it did. Yeah. Well, it didn't help me pay, but it was, it was very affordable. It was free, nearly free. Yes.  And do you think you would have chosen a more vocational degree if you'd have had to pay for it yourself? Um, yes, possibly. Yeah. I think This broad grounding in liberal arts, I think, is you tend to find is missing in the newer designers or next generation designers coming in.

Often the narrowness means you tend to get quite predictable outputs or quite predictable answers to more interesting questions. Interesting. Yes. Interesting that you say that. So more recently, I've had. Apprentices coming from technology teams into my team and essentially becoming designers through a technology apprenticeship pathway. 

How have you found their approach? Is it really different to those who come from a design background?  Um,  there's definitely a difference, but I think it's entirely possible. I think a lot of the design work that we do relies on that sort of hands on experimentation and learning by doing and so forth. So I think what the universities, if they're good, bring, of course, is the sort of history and the freedom maybe to meet other people and to To have the environment and the space to experiment, which is the luxury of, of studying,  I suppose.

Um, so what I try to do in my team, I think, and in my environment here is to create that for everyone who, who joins the team. Yeah, that's a great answer. I think this, this idea of diversity is fantastic. As long as you can create some sort of synthesis rather than just having different parallel strands of best practice.

If you have people who believe the answer is in the back of the book and there was only one answer.  That doesn't tend to give you the results that are in the Vita. You've talked about having apprentices, are these people who've come from high school? So from the age of 18 into TFL or are they at a different stage?

So we have a really broad range of apprentices and actually the one or two apprentices that I had in my team, half of my team, I think came from high school, yeah, initially, but then went through an apprenticeship in the technology teams or more on the development side. And then found their way into design,  um, but TFL white, there is a real mix of apprentices and a lot of apprentices actually take it as a second or third career, uh, move.

Wow. Okay. Yeah, I have worked in other fields, might've even studied before and then decided to go and try an apprenticeship as a second or third career. Really interesting. It's definitely a good option. Yeah, I know we were talking to one of the heads of design at BT that also run a design apprenticeship scheme, I think, with university fees being 10, 000 a year in the UK. 

Like more people are trying to look at actually, I'd like to get a qualification, but I also don't want to get vast amounts of debt at an early stage, or maybe it's not financially viable for, for their family,  um, then apprenticeship is fantastic. And you still got that ideal of education leading to social mobility,  which tends to be evaporating when people were getting more U.

S. type debts at the end of their degree. You mentioned that you come from a family of designers.  How does that impact on you as a family when you get together for the holidays? Is it a specifically designed for that? Lots of drawing games. Lots of drawing. Yeah. And how do you feel about board games?  Yes, of course.

Board games were always a huge theme. Yes. Making board games and inventing board games. Do you remember anything you invented?  Um,  yeah, it's, it's still going on too. My son and my sister just recently designed a new board game that I can't talk about cause it's. It's secret because they actually want to launch it as a product.

Oh, fantastic. Yeah. So it's, you're actually used. So you're using your family of beta testers as well as designers. I like the fact. Lots of playing.  Yeah, yeah. It's serious play, but that's fantastic. When you were growing up, did you have a favorite game?  I really like to play on the street a lot, so a lot of the games that I loved were sort of just meeting up with random kids on the street and coming up with games on the way, really, um, building things, making things, climbing onto dangerous trees and yeah, things like that. 

And if you think about the. Childhood experience of the 21st century, there seems to be less going outside. There seems to be less collaboration and playing without boundaries. We talked to Chris Kelly Frer about the role of unstructured play in childhood and how that helps people to become more creative and innovative in their thinking.

As a whole, how do you feel that the approach to childhood  that is more traditional today is going to impact on the creative workforce of tomorrow? I don't know. I think it's so diverse again. It's so different depending on the family, but I do think it's really important.  To have  just time to yourself and to your random  mulling about, because I think that to me is really important, has always been really important.

And I think a lot of my creativity for sure has developed by just literally having nothing to do other than coming up with things to do.  And so I've definitely taken that as a guide for my family. So my kids have no program whatsoever. They don't go to any classes.  They don't really have anything structured in any way that they have to do or need to do or go to or so.

And so they spent lots of time just thinking about what they could do today. And they come up with lots of interesting. Different things along the way. So I've, I've taken that as, as a very important principle, but it's interesting that you mentioned structure. Cause I think, uh, one of the things that's really relevant to service design, just, just on a side note to me is I think a lot of service designers nowadays get very into the tools that have been developed over the last 10, 20 years, uh, without necessarily continuously innovating and reinventing those tools.

And I think that's actually really important. And I think when I joined the service design scene, if you will, that was  Uh, at the beginning, it was very much about inventing tools, trying to find ways to map experiences, to understand the sort of broader strategic environment in which we design and so on.

And a lot of it was about thinking about how we do that, how do we map that, how do we understand that, how do we comprehend that and that's a little bit missing at the moment. So I'm always encouraging people to just. Keep doing that. Yeah. I, I think if you see methodologies and frameworks as the train tracks that you must follow.

Yeah. You're not going to find, I'm sorry, that's a snarky analogy to bring on to a call where we're going to TFL, but yeah, just to think there are train tracks, you must follow it. This is best practice.  Frameworks are great for helping us to probe ambiguity at the beginning, but they shouldn't be. This is the engagement.

This is what we must do. You must do this if it's proper. I'm not sure how much formal education helps you to think beyond templates and frameworks now. I think there's very much a canon, whereas when service design started, as you say, there was no real canon. Everything was permitted.  Often you got more radical outcomes.

I agree. Yeah. That's fantastic. So the second question we've got, Hannah, is what was your first job and what was your favorite job? And you're not allowed to say the job you have now.  Yeah. My first job was cleaning a little tiny organic shop. Nice. Yeah. It was the only organic shop at the time. Um, they sold milk primarily  three bottles of them.

Um,  it was a start of something and I had a very good job of cleaning that shop once a week or so. It was really nice. Yes. What was my favorite job? I started a little design studio when I was in my twenties and I really enjoyed that. I thought that was a really good decision. And I still think it was one of my favorite jobs to just have my own studio, to have my collaborators and to do work that I really loved for clients who I loved.

Um, very bespoke projects, a lot of thinking and a lot of strategy combined with making. Which is still very important to me and, um, was foundational for the rest of my career as well to be able to do both. Do you think you were successful at running your own studio?  I was. Yeah, I was. I wasn't successful in the sense of it being a very large studio or very, uh, important studio, but it was within its limitations.

It was a very happy place and we did great work, I think. And. It was very well spent time. Yeah, I think you predicted my next question is like the definition of success. The way you've described it is very different to the way that most linked in profiles define success. She always talks about driving growth and acquisition and quantifying  value.

I think that's very true and I think that's really interesting as well. So I've been more recently I've been really interested in business models again just because I think the industry in general has changed so much across sectors. Partly because of the pandemic, of course, so I'm very interested in the fashion industry.

I'm very interested in other industries always because of course, I also, aside from my TFL job, I have a consultancy background as well. So  on that note, what I think is really fascinating to see at the moment is that there's so much happening and. In the industry that has to do with coming up a smaller businesses and smaller sort of labels that are not about just growth and investment and so on, but it's really about sort of longevity,  staying small,  building a solid product of quality.

I mean, in slow fashion, of course, you have quite a bit of that, so it's really interesting to see that shift at the moment. And I'm really curious and really excited and really interested in those, those kinds of new ways.  Of making business work, people have talked about purpose for a long time, but this idea of authenticity, so why are you doing it?

Well, actually, this is the type of work that gets me into a flow state that actually, it's the place where I create the greatest impact if you then have to answer. But how are you going to scale this? Actually, you don't need to. How do I scale my happiness? Well, just continuing is probably the best you can do. 

Without thinking about, well, actually, if I try and scale this and I try and make this universal, it's going to take away the thing of beauty, you know, scaling erodes that the impact rather than. Yeah, there are really there are efficiencies of scale, but there are also real inefficiencies of scale and you know, it's the meetings, it's the communication that you have to have.

If you have hundreds of people working on something, you know, it's the, I think the pain that a lot of people experience working in very complex, large organizations,  but you don't feel as productive as you probably could be.  And it's really interesting because I think this, the same thinking applies to in house teams.

When we talk about TFL and the team that I have helped build here, it was very important to us for a long time to stay small, to stay nimble, to stay close knit, to talk a lot to each other, to work a lot with each other, um, to create the products that we wanted and make sure that they work for customers and make sure that they get shipped  and that we don't go too big and too complex too quickly. 

And that's scaling up now. So we've had to scale the team up, obviously, over the last couple of years, just simply because when you launch a flagship product like TfL Go, what happens is  because we, we started with the customer experience, we, we now have to look at the  underpinning platform, if you will. 

Because we need to work through the data, we need to work through the backend systems. There's a lot of legacy as in any complex organization and so forth. And so you do need to scale up at one point, but carefully. And that's still one of those challenges that I think is very interesting at the moment.

How do you do that in a way that retains that  focus on quality and being small and staying small at the same time? Um, and we have different ways of doing that at the moment. We kind of built like little sub teams, if you will, within the team that can focus on, yeah, exactly. Well, that can work on particular problems long term and strategically as well as by making features, um, around cost around experiences that we've defined.

So  often when you find you have lots of people, you have less humanity and definitely less culture. Yeah. You need to develop a culture. That gives a group identity and, and that supports productivity. And as you say, quality work, it's much easy to do with smaller teams. And as soon as you scale it, you uh, you need to let go a little bit.

Um, with letting go. People then have the autonomy to do redefine culture and it might not be in the way that you expect. Could be positive though.  I, I, I think what's really interesting is what happens.  When you have a small team focused on the actual work,  because when you actually focus on making something,  a lot of the sort of questions that we have around process around how to make things, whether this is the right approach or that is about just fall sideways,  that's a nice sort of side effect, I think, of working that way that you just really get very excited about.

The actual feature or the actual product, and you forget a lot of people start to forget their job roles, for example, and forget sort of their careers and forget maybe even what they've done in the past and just focus on, on building something together and that can be really beautiful. I think, and creative flow or collective creative flow.

Yeah, exactly. That's a good thing. Some, sometimes, and it's very rare, the org chart disappears and everyone just focuses on the question.  That's a fantastic thing. We talked about culture. How would you define the culture of your group? And are there any rituals that help you to maintain that culture?  So I think the culture that we've tried to build out is one of collaboration, and that's a pretty broad term.

But if I explain what that means, maybe. It's a lot of conversation and making it's focused on coming up with ideas and building on each other's ideas and coming up with lots of versions of that. And literally sitting together and tinkering.  And in the detail while also tapping into the wider organization's knowledge around complex questions around policy, for example, and what we know about London and travel patterns and so forth.

So it's that sort of combination of understanding the environment and understanding the problems that we're designing for. While sitting together literally and moving things around on the screen or on paper or in other ways. So it's that really hands on approach of, of thinking by making,  um, and that is a culture that is very important to me and that I keep sort of nurturing.

So I, I very proactively, um.  Encourage that and try to create an environment where that's possible and also possible for others to join into. So that also includes, say, again, engineers or data scientists or. Other stakeholders across the business to come and work with us in the same way. Yeah, I think that's been a part of a number of people's culture.

This idea that, Oh, my door is always open. But in certain studios, the physical door is open at a certain point in time where you invite people in and it's a really good indicator of how successfully you're engaging and delivering value for the organization. If people always turn up, what  do we need to change?

We do have people hanging out in our studio, which is very sweet. Yeah, that's good. It's like if you need more chairs, because people want to attend those meetings and want to come and tinker with you, that should be the KPI for success in a studio. From my very humble opinion,  the next quick fire question, Hannah is, uh, what.

Book or inspirational source do you most recommend to people and that could be design related or it could be other.  There's a really good book. It's my favorite book and it's really old and it's probably not scientifically as accurate anymore but it's called what is life by Lynn Margulis who's one of the most important biologists are microbiologists.

She wrote a lot about bacteria, for example, and this book is written with her son.  Um, and it's about the definition of life on earth, and it's incredibly interesting. I highly recommend it. And it's very inspiring and very interesting for design, I would say, because it kind of looks into questions around.

What, what the definition of life is in the first place. It's really interesting. Awesome. There we go. The next quick fire question, and you have to pick one or the other, you can't sit on the fence.  Do you believe that AI is a friend or foe to the designer?  I can't sit on the fence. No, cause everyone sits on the fence. 

Well, yeah, there are pros and there are cons. If you had to place a bet, where would it go?  I think it should be a friend. It's been a friend to me. And how do you feel about organizations seeing AI as a way to maybe automate design? Do you think that's a little bit optimistic? I don't think that's possible. 

Oh, tell me more. Yeah, I don't think it's possible to automate design. I think design is too broad of a spectrum to automate. I mean, obviously there are endless amounts of images that could be generated with AI. Whether they are good images, whether they are the images that we want, that's another question.

The creative, um, thinking and the creative making is, is completely separate to me. Like, uh, how can I say, I mean, there are other technologies like pens, for example.  And a simple pen drawing can be absolutely mind blowing still. I think AI is an incredibly interesting technology for lots of reasons. Um, I think it opens up endless amounts of opportunity.

And if it's used in the simplistic way of just copying and replacing and automating, I think that's a pretty sad use of its capabilities, really.  Absolutely. I think the word that you've used most often in this podcast is quality.  If you focus on quality,  actually you're using AI as a tool to help you to get to a certain point more quickly.

If you just see it as a way to do something at a much lower price point and quality isn't really the objective, then yeah, okay. It's going to replace. any process where actually we're not really focused on the quality of the output or the quality of the thinking. We just need something to tick a box.

And we know there will be some businesses that go, yep, that's enough. That's fine. But yeah, they're not the ones that are going to be doing interesting and innovative work. That's exactly it. Exactly. Yeah. Cool. 

Well, that brings us to the end of the quick fire round. Thanks for going through that with devilish pace. We're now moving on to sort of the next section. We're talking about the work that you're doing at the moment. Could you tell me a little bit about how design sits within TFL? Yeah, so we obviously have a long design history and legacy and that does play a role, I would say, and in that it's very important and it attracts a lot of designers to TFL.

So the teams are spread out across TFL. So there are various design teams. There is a design team that looks after the brand. The brand's iconic, uh, pieces, so the tube map, the  typeface, um, the signage, et cetera, there are obviously lots of people involved still in architecture and the design of environments to design of, um, the experience overall, you know, whether that's just walking through a station or going to a bus stop or being in a bus or being on a bicycle.

You have designers who design uniforms for staff. You have designers who, uh, help define and also sometimes design industrial elements of the experience. We have a range of design companies who work with us on various things, elements of the brand that includes moquettes, for example.  And the train, so the moquettes, that's the fabric that you sit on, essentially.

Okay, cool. Yeah. So there's a lot going on in general. So there are lots of elements that have to be designed. And does the design community ever come together? They do. Yes, they do. Yes. We, we, we do come together. We do respect each other. We, we like each other. We, we work with each other when we can. There's also a lot of internal design, as you can imagine.

There's a lot of marketing. Um. My team in particular, um, and this is sort of what we've built from scratch really is a digital design team. Um, but what's very important about it.  Digital always sat slightly outside of the design community because it is so technical  and it is so new in terms of design that it was not really considered in the context of design. 

So you have the sort of traditional graphic design, again, architecture, industrial design disciplines, and they weren't very digital.  And then you had the developers and the engineers and the, and the companies that sort of built. You know, the website, for example, or build applications for the screens and stations or build various apps, but they were considered technology led engineering that teams. 

And so what was very important to me when I joined TfL was to combine those two and to bring the sort of long heritage of design thinking and design in TfL together.  With a real interest in technology and innovation and data and developing really interesting, new, unique services. Fantastic. And do you have a remit for innovation?

Yeah, that's so my remit is, um, the experience, the digital experience strategy and how it integrates into the wider experience. So if you imagine the digital services across various touch points from screens to apps to websites. And customers experience those touchpoints along their daily life and their journeys.

Then how that works in the context of our wayfinding system, how that works in the context of the wider experience is what my team does strategically. So the strategy sits with us and the products that we develop based on that strategy and the features that we then develop for those products all sits with me. 

And the wider digital team and the design of that sits entirely with me. And so does also the innovation in that space. So what was very important again, was that innovation is not something that's being done in isolation outside of that sort of. Service, but that it's part and parcel of what we do every day.

So we continuously look to innovate. We continuously look at emerging technology. We continuously look at emerging sort of trends and things that we observe  when we do customer research. And, uh, when we look at sort of how our products are used, et cetera, so it's part of our daily work.  How do you spot those signals of emerging new needs or opportunities? 

A lot of it is slightly sort of ambient, if you will, to be continuously follow what people are saying on social channels  and obviously what people say to us as well in various forms, whether they send us emails, whether they feedback and sessions, whether they, um, come to us in other ways.  We also get a lot of feedback from people working in stations, talking to customers, for example.

Mm-hmm . And so forth. So, and usually it's sort of broader themes. So for example, the theme of being able to really tailor something to you in the moment, you know, getting the right bit of information when you need it. Exactly. In that moment, in that particular location. That is a theme that has been.

Coming through for many years now and context based personalization very context based personalization. It sounds kind of obvious. But it's really coming through as something that people want and people need. And it is still the core principle of everything that we try to achieve at the moment, to get to that point, to be able to do that. 

And you were also at a point where systems are now interconnected and it's easier to actually do things that take context from multiple systems to do something that's really complex. It's like, well, actually, logically, this could be your best route. However, we know that there's been an external change.

Yeah. Unpredicted accidents or roadworks now that that's changed it. So there's going to be an illogical but more optimal route for you to take. Yeah. And that takes a lot of complexity and grunt even though you're going to get the same route map coming out.  That's right. The other thing that I want to talk about though, and I think that's really important is that we don't.

Just respond to customer needs and problems. And I think that is great difference to maybe how other design teams work. I think it's really important for design to come up with new things and to not just respond to problems and try to solve problems because we're essentially creating culture and we're creating completely unseen new opportunities.

And so it's very important to me to experiment with that. I do really think  that in order to create truly innovative things, you need to just play and experiment and bring new features out that have not been used before  so that you can see whether they work. And we've done that from the beginning.

Nobody has asked us to launch a life map,  but we did that.  Suddenly people wanted it and loved it and found a way in. We launched a feature recently where we experimented with the idea of curated content within the app, which is again, something that nobody else has done in the travel industry,  and it's not targeted personalized content that's related to marketing it instead, it's highly curated, manually created, thoughtful content.

Um, that encourages you to discover things that you can't find in your normal travel and finding things that are really interesting for Londoners as well as for people who come to the city as tourists and visitors. So finding that in between space, and it's been really interesting to see how that's worked and it's been very successful in many ways and unique.

And again, I don't think we would have come to that conclusion if we would have just  looked at inside.  As you move around London, many people are heads down, plugged in, looking at screens, and are probably unaware of, like, the, some things around them, it may be some sort of Architectural detail or some weird street name, and actually, as soon as you look up and look around all of these different stories, which an unfold in front of you, I love walking around old street where there's.

A road called Helmholtz Road.  And it's like, that's incredible. So there we go. So armorers were there in the 1300s, 1400s. And you just get this sense of the city that's been around and has evolved, but you still get those points.  You tend not to find those little historical references when you maybe go to the U.

S. because it's a lot younger, but often on a commute to work, who has time to look up from Instagram or Facebook.  Actually, it's really rewarding to do that. Maybe you could do some sort of Skinner esque stick and carrot to try and get people looking up a bit more. And it would probably help for traffic safety as well, if you're looking at the world around you rather than looking at your screen as you cross the road, which many people do.

Yeah. It's going to be much better for your longevity. Cool.  I know the TFL app, but not in 2020. I was very late to it. It's got universally good ratings and reviews.  Is there anything that you want to add to it that you think is going to fundamentally improve the value that it delivers? Yes. So we've just added the ability to sign in and also to top up the Oyster card and to track your journeys that you make with your contactless card.

And what that enables us to do, of course, is to tap into your travel patterns. So now when you log into the app, know where you've been and what you've done. Over time, um, we can display that same information in different ways in the app to you, and we're starting to think about that, how to do that, what could be, you know, be useful and interesting, further sort of thinking about how to make.

The app more responsive to you and more adaptive to the moment within which you are is still for me, a core ambition.  Um, the AI might one day play a role in that or not. I think, again, one thing that's really important to me and,  uh, and that I would like to talk about a little bit in this podcast as well is because service designers tend to think about systems and start thinking about the bigger picture.

But I think actually. Um, the fact that we had a completely new product where we really focused on the UI made a real difference. And I think that is unique and rare nowadays.  But I think UI is very important.  I think the way that we interact with our technology is still really, really relevant  and we don't spend enough effort on that.

A lot of designers nowadays work with existing components, thought patterns, and, you know, based their thinking on those frameworks that you mentioned and the sort of toolkits that you have out there and just. Literally plug and play with those rather than thinking about what those interfaces still could do differently.

Yeah. It's the efficiency and effectiveness debate, isn't it? That will actually, what I want to do is I want to create a design system that has all the components so that we can Lego an app in zero time and launch it, knowing that it's going to work. It's going to be safe that it works within a predefined mental model.

But what that doesn't do is open the doors to something slightly more radical. And in some situations, actually you need to consider the what if. You need to just imagine harder and that gets you to a different point. But again, I think in many businesses, you have to get the agreement of the sponsors and the stakeholders that either you will be doing this or that this will be done as a parallel so that we can look at some alternative. 

What would happen if we had an alternative to just using the Lego components? Would it be materially better and is it justified for us to take an alternative route? You've got to really think about business case, cost of running,  viability, feasibility, responsibility, desirability, all of those things. I think that's where designers add the most value.

How can we think beyond just assembling components? And if we think about what's happening with TFL at the moment, I know in the news, we've had a rebranding of London overground lines. Did your team have anything to do with that? Yes, very much so. Um, so what's very interesting about that rebrand is that for the first time, I would say, um, the digital experience really shaped the approach overall that we had to how we color the lines and how we treat the lines in the context of that quite complex.

And again, the wayfinding system, usually if you look at the map, it's a very, very complex diagram.  And there are only so many colors and the difference between the modes is quite important. So, you know, the tube is a very frequent transport mode and the overground as well in many ways, but the way that customers experience that it's, it's still a very different environment.

So, you know, the people who travel on the overgrounds have a very different experience than the people who travel on the tube and combining those and finding the overground station. For example, if you're in a tube station, as versus on those, those interchanges between  It's complex. So making sure that there is a difference so that it's not just all the tube that doesn't become the tube.

So having a really subtle way to distinguish between the underground to a network. And this is a different network of some kind. Which is why we kept the dual lines, um, if you look at the map, but still having a boldness to it so that you can distinguish between the modes, but you can also distinguish between the lines in a really simple way across many different small instances.

So, for example, imagine you have a widget on your phone or you look at a very small TfL Go where you just see the disruptions.  Across London and we have a miniature design system that just shows that in various little shapes from like little dots all the way to make little pills and so on to make that work, we had to retain a boldness and that meant we had to decide on a really simple way of doing that, which in this case is just simply six different colors. 

Which then had to be handpicked and so on.  It seems so simple as a solution, but it actually took us quite a while to get there because there was a real worry  that it would confuse people and that people wouldn't adopt it as quickly as I think they have actually in the end. And that somehow the overground brand had to be retained. 

So the big challenge was how do we make sure people still understand that there's a difference?  Does that make sense? Yeah. Basically cascading that through all the different variations in which you could come across it and making it useful in the context of wayfinding. So you know, one of the main challenges is always, I'm in a tube stage, now do I get to where I need to get to and where am I actually going and what is it actually that I'm on?

Um, all the way through to status and understanding what's happening at the moment. And the big difference between looking at how you control the experience in the tube  Looking at linking up the tube and the overground is, as soon as you leave that tube station, sometimes there are links between a tube and an overground station, you then enter the real world and in the real world, you've got so many competing visual stimuli to try and cut through.

How do you make sure that people just don't go, well, actually, you know, I can't find my way from.  Hackney downs to,  I don't know, there's, there is a, yeah, there's no tube and how can you say. And exactly. And you can't understand that if you just look at a map.  So if you, you know, if you did the very early versions of the rebrand were focused on the map, of course, for obvious reasons, cause it's easier.

So we had our head of design who looks after the brand coming up with various proposals. For showing the lines, the six lines of the, of the overground and many different colors, many different treatments, many different versions and so forth. But only when we started to look at it in the context of signage and the digital experience, that's when we were able to make the decision because it then became clear that really only one of the options was, was feasible and was possible and would retain the boldness of our design language overall, you know, in the signage as well as in digital.

Uh, so it required my team to get involved and to work that through in detail across the sort of. Experience in digital  to make it possible for us as an organization to make that final decision. Digital is definitely the way that people do their wayfinding for public transport in London. I remember we used to have a paper map that you would then fold out to try and find your way around.

But for many years, we then had third party apps, which were absolutely appalling. But now we've got something that's a lot easier to use and it is really holistic. On the subject of branding, the names of the overground lines have changed, haven't they?  And how were the names decided?  That sort of initiative that was involving many different teams within TFL, there was a lot of work being done by a company called DNCO to  To understand and unpick the options.

They also then helped us to bring various different teams together across TF. And went through due diligence to understand what could work.  I think there were some really interesting principles, for example, one principle, which I think was really brilliant was that names could be unique in themselves, so that didn't have to be an overarching narrative. 

Yeah. Common denominator. No, it's not a set. So it was really important that each name could just stand on its own and wouldn't have to have anything to do with the other names. Yeah. You have the Windrush generation and, you know, the story of the Windrush generations, which is kind of a very broad term, of course, and then you have something very specific like the mild may hospital.

Um, and I think that, you know, that that can sit next to each other as special. I think, yeah, I think if I was part of the design team, I might've tried to change one of the names to maybe the Harry Beck line or the Johnston line, maybe not the Gill line, but just to have some reflection of the centrality of design to  beloved brand that is the London Underground.

But, uh, yeah, that's why I probably wouldn't have had a job for a long time, but there we go.  So what's next for your team? Are you looking at things like, uh, augmented reality?  Um, not really,  but we've looked at it many times before and it does keep coming up, but it's not up in front and center, partly because  I think it's a complex one.

It's one of those things where people go, Oh yeah, well, if I just could look at the train coming in and then I could see where it's busy or something with augmented reality, these proposals have been coming up for many years  and innovation competitions, et cetera, et cetera.  And every time we actually dug a little bit deeper into those ideas, we found that it's very complex in the actual physical moment  of being at a space, in a space.

And the incremental value that you generate is probably not huge compared with what people are using today. And also the, the number of people that would want to be holding their mobile phone up in London at arm's length. That's right. It's, it's, that's a brave thing. I think that kind of ties into another important principle by which we work, which is that in order to be able to innovate and really create something unique, it was really important to simplify a lot of the work and establish the app in the market really, really quickly.

And the growth has verified that. So we did grow significantly over the last years. We have now a million monthly users, which is huge. So we're as big as CityMapper. Um, and that in a very short time frame, so I think  when people start using it and they hear about it from others, um, they start realizing just how different it is to anything else that's out there. 

We have relied on that actual use and experience with the app a lot because it's quite difficult to communicate that. I think it's a thing of quality and things of quality tend to  be promoted virally. They tend to spread like wildfire.  Thank you. I think that's really sweet. I have to, I have to admit what is really sweet and it's really sweet really that people respond that way.

And it's really nice to see that people who visit London, um, send us emails and saying that they haven't de installed the app.  Oh, bless. Yeah. Well, yeah, I do have a San Francisco apps. It's a thing of nostalgia as well. And when you're away from home, often there are things that just keep you tapped into the pulse of the city, uh, that reminds you that London's the best city in the world.

Which I can probably say very quietly. Are there any other cities in the world that, uh, you look to as inspiration for the experience you deliver through TfL  Go? 

Um, we, I try to be humble about,  I mean, in many ways.  We are leading in this space. So we are often consulted by other cities. There are cities who have great apps, so don't get me wrong. And I do think a lot of, um, transport authorities are doing a really great job with their apps and also with their sort of general digital experience.

And there are many, many examples of that. And we definitely look at all those cities. We often look at Paris, we look at New York, obviously, who are comparable cities in terms of size and complexity. But we also look at smaller cities and in general, we're quite well connected with the world of transit.

And.  Public transport across the world, and we often speak to our peers and colleagues and other transport authorities just simply because they have similar challenges to us and so on. And it's a very good community, I would say, of people trying to encourage sustainable travel and work on those transport systems.

And also not only for cities, also for rural areas and for smaller towns and so on, because, you know, most people who work in this field are really quite passionate and quite interested in sharing knowledge and really learning from each other and so forth. So,  We're very interested in hearing from others and we share a lot and we are in a lucky position that London, of course, as a major global city as well in terms of innovation and that we are a very well respected transport authority worldwide, and we are known for innovation, having had the chance to build a completely unique app for a city like London, of course, puts us in a place that's quite unprecedented.

Absolutely. And I think that's a great place to end the podcast. Hannah, I'd really like to thank you for all of your time, for sharing your stories at TfL, and also, uh, we can't wait to buy the COPS game when it's  Thanks for having me. Yeah, no problem. Cheers. 

Service Design Yap is a production from the Service Design Network UK chapter. It's hosted by me, Stephen Wood, with production assistance from Jean Wattania. Music is by Ducker Stance.