SERVICE DESIGN

City of Sydney – Visitor information services

Context

With the rise of technology and increasingly sophisticated travellers arriving in Sydney, visitor expectations and behaviours for seeking information are rapidly evolving. This represents an opportunity for the City of Sydney to reimagine visitor information services to better meet visitor needs, both now and into the future. Meld was engaged for 10 weeks to reimagine the end-to-end service experience by understanding visitor needs and expectations.

Approach

It was critical for this project to understand not only aspirations for the future but also the gaps between today, the future of visitor engagement with and use of information, and what needs to be considered as a part of the transformation.

In order to meet the objectives of this project, we engaged a total of 141 people in a 7-week research program. We used a variety of engagement methods, such as street intercepts with 93 visitors, 18 one-on-one interviews and concept tests, and maturity assessment. We also conducted five workshops with frontline staff and stakeholders to understand those gaps.

This work resulted in:

• A macro view of the partnership ecosystem, with each partner’s role and how they can influence visitor information experiences.
• A high-level 12-month roadmap of actions for the City to take.
• A set of strategic recommendations for the City to action today towards the future information service models
• Six final prioritised initiatives with instructions on how to pilot them, and measure desirability and viability.

Value and outcomes of this work

This work:

• Broadened the City’s view of the problem.
• Raised awareness of the human-centred design process and its application to the City’s ways of working.
• Provided evidence—in the form of behavioural insights—to change the City’s current visitor service model.
• Provided prompts for our client to generate conversations and form a partnership steering team with external partners.
• Helped our client to gain recognition of the importance of the visitor economy in Sydney so that more resources and funding are invested.

We were conscious of the fear frontline staff might have around being replaced by technology and automation. We addressed this by working collaboratively with frontline staff, exploring ways their roles might evolve with technology.