Helsinki City Transport HKL wished to explore how to provide better services and facilities for families in the context of their metro stations. The proposal suggests a vision, three- year user driven design programme, to incorporate into the undergoing organisational renovation. The solution focuses on creating knowledge about the target group and supports HKL to build the capacity of its customer experience team and partner with external service design consultants rather than providing service design solutions.

The brief provided by HKL was to provide a user-driven approach to create services or facilities for families with children to make it easier to access in the urban space and move in the metro stations. However, after conducting field studies and interviewing HKL and HSL representatives, the team realised that the initial task was hard to achieve as such, mainly due to the overall lack of insight regarding families. To give answer to these questions, the team focused on a strategy that helps HKL to better understand families with children and improve their experiences in the metro, thus broadening the value proposition of the offer.

To gather information on the Helsinki Metro and understand the current situation, the team started the research with reviewing HKL reports and articles and benchmarking other comparable city transit services. Observations in several metro stations gave the understanding of the passenger flow and the physical condition of the stations and services. The meetings with HKL representatives proved a lack of information about the target group, their travel patterns, preferences and pains that are crucial for service development. Furthermore, the team conducted semi- structured interviews with a group of parents with young children to explore under which conditions families would be willing to participate in a co-design programme promoted by the organisation. However, because HKL lacks the skills and knowledge that enable this need to be built, we propose a service design approach that provides new knowledge about the target group and supports HKL to build the capacity of its team with external designers. Visionary scenarios of the best metro and storyboards have been created to ensure the managers acceptance and raise awareness of the issues identified across the entire organisation. The team delivered the final design of the strategy in a variety of formats that formed a complete implementation guide, containing all the building blocks for the on-going renovation.

The team proposed a three-year programme called ‘Meidän Metro’ that set the ambitious vision of creating the world’s best family metro. The programme will consist of three projects. Each of the projects include three phases: Understanding, Dreaming and Experimenting. The result is a proof of experience concept. Each of the projects will generate excess knowledge, themes and ideas that are left out of scope during the process. These will feed into the next project, and generate a supply of customer understanding that will help HKL to grow more and more considerate of families as Metro users.

This strategy has been used from the spring 2016, with the first phase implemented in the on-going renovation plan of Hakaniemi and Herttoniemi metro stations.

Sampsa Hyysalo, Associate Professor, Aalto University