The BreakFast Sessions: Keep Moving – Creating a culture of innovation within a heritage brand
Transport for London (TfL) are not only custodians of one of the world’s most recognisable and iconic brands, but they also provide products and services that are relied upon by millions of people, every day of the year, to live their lives.
So we were thrilled to spend an hour recently in the company of Hanna Kops, Head of Experience at TfL. Hanna is also a visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art.
Hanna and her team of 35 Product Managers and Designers (in the broadest sense of the word) are responsible for all of TfL’s digital channels, including the website, apps, digital displays in stations and the recently launched live map TfL Go.
The conversation was packed with Hanna’s insights and experiences in the creative process, building high-performing, collaborative teams, and designing and delivering customer-centric products.
You can watch the full interview here (and be treated to the nail biting moment when Jessica’s laptop battery almost died), or read on - we’ve summarised some of the topics that we covered in the discussion.
1. Think products, not projects
If your goal is to deliver true, sustained innovation, you need to think long-term. For TfL that meant shifting from a project- to a product-mindset.
This allowed everyone to understand “where the need for this originated. Where it is now, where it is heading, and why we are doing this. Everyone needs to be involved and understand that”.
Hanna added “this doesn't mean you can’t have projects on your roadmap, to work on something specific and timeboxed”.
Allowing the team to think and plan long-term allowed them to ‘think deeper, and get beyond the obvious innovations” into developing features with real, lasting benefit.
This long term, product-led approach also has an impact on how you hire and build your team.
Hanna believes in hiring ‘individuals, not roles’:
“Give them trust, freedom, time and influence over their own work. Demonstrate that their contributions are valued. Encourage them to know each other, to understand their strengths and how to support each other, so that they can build on each other's work. This breaks down these unnecessary, circular, unhelpful territorial fights between roles".
TfL’s design team is a healthy mix of obsessives, specialists and generalists - the 'glue that holds everything together'. It works because everyone understands the product, has a collaborative mindset at heart, and, crucially, never loses sight of who they are designing for.
2. Involve the user
TfL are not short of insight. They have in-house research teams and third-party and partner research to help inform their strategic decision making.
But ultimately, their products and services serve one person: the traveller. For TfL this means designing for a huge range of needs, from the first-time overseas tourist, to the daily commuter (by bike, bus, train or boat), and those with disability and accessibility challenges.
So TfL’s secondary research is always augmented by talking to, listening to and involving the customer, often through co-design, the practice of bringing the user into the design process to help contribute to research, ideation and feedback.
“Don’t neglect social” was Hanna’s first tip. “Listen in to what communities are saying to each other, that is where they share how they’re feeling, what they are struggling with”.
It’s also OK to get involved and engage in those communities - you don’t have to be an impartial fly on the wall. Hanna shared the story of one of their Social Media Managers role in making a particularly dangerous junction safer for cyclists, after listening to and acting on the concerns of the online community he was involved in.
Hanna also shared advice on co-designing effectively - do it over three days.
“On day one they are just getting up to speed. On day two they’ve had the opportunity to sleep on the information, but by day three you are working as one team - you get to the jams. You no longer see them as subjects - you see them as partners”.
3. Principles over patterns
Given the overwhelming number of channels and applications for TfL’s design work, you’d expect there to be reams of documentation and design guidelines. Not so. In fact, they favour the opposite approach, of setting clear and simple principles to help guide behaviour.
For example:
"All the designers know that everything we design needs to be 'glanceable' - when you look at it for the first time, the user needs to be 100% clear what the point of that thing is. All the designers have applied this in different ways, but because the principle is shared, there's coherence in it.”
This approach means less documentation is needed: 'if something is glaceable, then there can't be any clutter. If it's glance-able then the language needs to be crisp and on point. If you make something glance-able, then the primary call to action needs to be super clear". That's three design rules reduced down to one simple principle.
Simple, understandable principles allow the designers to evolve the brand in a consistent and coherent way:
“Brand is not the guidelines. It's the people who design and deliver the experience. It's every interaction. It's a way of working and a way of enabling people to take part in your products and services”
One source of inspiration for the team is their own past. When designing the TfL Go map the team explored the network, visited the depots and toured the Transport Museum. It was there that inspiration for a new interactive, step-free station map was found. Even small details, like selector states, were inspired by tine details found in old signage.
Through our BreakFast sessions, we talk to leaders in the Design and Innovation industry. The talks are filmed live. We talk about their industry and business, we learn from their experience and create an open forum for questions and new ideas. Visit createfuture.com to sign up for the next session and to watch recordings of the previous talks.