In defence of a long pause: Designing better through lived experience

Good audio.

So I'm Barton.

Hi. I'm Chanel. We're designers and we love to solve problems as many of you do. We're both driven by a desire to make a positive social impact. We're the type of people that get frustrated at all things around us that don't work as well as they should, knowing there's always a better solution out there and that everything is possible if you just put a little bit of attention, care, time and effort into it. In our everyday lives we can't help but observe people, how they behave and how they interact with the objects and the spaces around them, which leads us down many rabbit holes.

So one thing in particular that frustrates us is the level of access in the built environment. We believe that good design should be accessible for everyone. The desire for better and social impact is what brought us to Transform New South Wales. And we're both from the field of industrial design and now service design. We spend a lot of our time advocating for change representing the voice of the people who use a public transport system particularly those that are most vulnerable.

And we have a long way to go but things are getting better. Within Australia, one in five people have a disability and this will increase as our population ages. Whether permanent, temporary, or situational, disability is a reality of life that we all need to embrace and design for. As designers, we need better understanding of our users to design for better outcomes.

So why did we need to defend the long pause? As service designers at Transport, our purpose is to improve the customer experience on major infrastructure projects such as new metros, trains, ferries, light rail and buses. And there's pressure to meet project milestones. Projects tend to be in a hurry and time is money.

Transport projects are really complex and we need to manage risk every day and processes take time. But things can go wrong. It was only a few years ago when Queensland Rail got into trouble from the Human Rights Commission for non compliance on disability access to toilets and access paths through the train. When it comes to designing for accessibility, you can't rush things or overlook equitable outcomes.

It takes time to conduct high quality qualitative customer research and our approach was to travel alongside people, with a range of permanent disabilities, on two train types that operate on our live network. We would facilitate interviews ourselves. We'd pay participants an incentive for their time and gain operator approvals. Now to achieve this, we needed depth and breadth of planning.

We needed to in source participants and build their trust and we needed the right context to get the best outcomes. That includes allowing time, space and opportunity for response. Making time for reflection. Giving people the space that they need to gather their thoughts to surface memories both good and bad.

Allowing for silence which we call the long pause. To us, it seemed like a reasonable request. It sounds really simple. However, we were really struck by the reaction of our stakeholders who expressed concerns like, it's too complex.

It's a lot of work. The interviews are too long. It's too risky to take people on live trains. And, after the sessions, it's too slow. We needed the insights yesterday. But the value of gathering, our data was in their translation to insights and usable design recommendations. This was stage was really vital and we couldn't rush it.

But in response to our concern, into the concerns that were expressed, we spent a lot of time reviewing our approach, reevaluating our options and concluding that we had the evidence to defend our position. What we found that in sticking to our instincts, we created the right conditions that resulted in great levels of trust by the people that we interviewed with lived experience of disability.

And this method of conducting customer research can challenge our understanding, bring to light barriers and that lead to better design outcomes.

Our research was conducted as part of the future fleet program. That's a new South New South Wales government initiative to replace Sydney's aging suburban fleet. Typically, train organizat sorry, organizations around the world buy trains off the shelf. So the train manufacturers will have an overall design ready to go and there'll be some chance to make some relatively minor changes and adjustments to the structure and the fittings.

But the overall main structure is set in place. So there's rather strict parameters to work within like efficiencies in safety, manufacturing, and assembly and operations. Customer experience is squeezed in afterwards and there's not much room for innovation or change. This is where the FutureFleet program is different. It's about finding opportunities to improve the train from the ground up.

The core objectives are still there but there's an also an understanding that there's a need to enhance service quality, reliability and accessibility and meet customer experience expectations. Our population is growing, we're aging and there'll be an ever increasing number of people living with disabilities over the next fifteen years. These facts help us support these help these facts help support the idea and and the idea of driving having customer needs drive decision making from the very beginning of the project which gives room for much needed innovation. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity that we have. So our role is to understand customer needs, attitudes, values, and expectations and use these findings to to make evidence based decisions to write customer experience requirements.

These go into a contract for designers and engineers to who help develop, build, and build a train, But achieving these outcomes for customers isn't straightforward. There's always gonna be some tension between design a design customer outcomes and project needs. So for us, we need to look at everybody's needs and it's gonna be a challenge for the designers and engineers and with that we're gonna have to create a compelling case to justify every single requirement. With such an exciting opportunity for us to influence change at a large scale and for the long term on a once in a lifetime project, if we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it right. We want to look at every single point of interaction a person has when they're taking the train.

From trip planning to when they went on platform, how they get on board, when they move through the carriage to sit, stand or place themselves, all the way through their experience on board and till they get off and and from this very early stage of the project we wanted to focus our attention on accessibility and putting the needs of the most vulnerable first.

If we want to improve the usability of of our suburban trains, we need to understand the experience of the people who live with disability and impairment. It sounds straightforward but in practice, it's far from it. The designer transport works within a very complex system and this is like a snippet of that complex system. Each of these are important and together they make it difficult to understand how to make changes for people who actually experience the train in the real world.

The challenge isn't simply whether people with disability are consulted, it's whether we engage with the right people at the right time in the right setting and using methods that reveal more than just preference, broad preferences or whether a design meets a standard. There can be tension between breadth and depth and between controlled research and real world experience and between gathering feedback and having enough time to act on it.

In a compliance driven environment, research is often valued for the numbers it produces rather than the depth of the understanding it provides. So as a result, surveys and focus groups are typically favored because they demonstrate scale but they rarely explain why why problems occur or how severe they are for users. Call it of methods like usability testing or contextual research provide these deeper insights, but their findings can be overlooked as they involve fewer participants. This focus on breadth over depth can leave important usability issues undiscovered and potentially misunderstood.

So with compliance, it gives us the necessary baseline but it doesn't tell us whether something is genuinely usable or ultimately dignified. So the question for us was how could we work within these constraints while using the while creating conditions for people that shows what matters in the everyday experience.

Design public transport spaces has made significant progress over the past decade in how people with disability and impairments are involved in fleet design and so and with increased advocacy, greater awareness and strong engagement, this has helped move the conversation beyond compliance alone. But there are still gaps and there's still room for improved when people with lived experience informs design decisions.

And at the same time, fleet projects work operate to a fixed schedule. Customer requirements need to be developed, decisions need to be made, and opportunities to influence the design can narrow very quickly. Our task was to find an approach that could provide meaningful evidence within these realities and create enough trust for the participants to be able to share the details of their experience.

Our research had to include the following ingredients, our trains, our train systems, our customers and how our customers interact with our train and everything in between. So this includes screens on apps, on custom information, on on all sorts of media, the built environment and all the workarounds they do as they're traveling. So there's what we know we know about our customers.

So this is from existing data, so passenger observations that we've done on live services, customer feedback and complaint data, DI identified CCD footage showing patterns of behavior for people boarding, getting off trains and getting to their seats along with lessons learned from previous fleet projects. And from all this, gaps in our knowledge and themes emerge.

This is where there are things we realize that we know we don't know about our customers. This can be assumptions, what we think we know or something where we know that needs further research or evidence to better understand. But then there are the things we don't know that we don't know, the unknown unknowns. These are these come from situations that are so unexpected.

They couldn't be considered or anticipated. This is where we need to we need to decide what research method is most suitable to fill in the gaps and potentially discover something new.

This led us to contextual inquiries as a way of gaining an in-depth understanding. It meant having conversations with people with lived experience. It's not simply a personal story. It is knowledge developed through ongoing learning that emerges from engagement with systems, institutions and the realities of everyday life. It's travelling on active train services, observing how people plan their trip, how they moved on and off the train, manoeuvring into place, what they held on to, what was in their way, revealing what does and doesn't work, how severe their challenges and what opportunities there are for improvement. We needed to immerse ourselves to understand how customers use the system in context in everyday practice.

And this would help reveal important design decisions that are grounded in understanding their motivations, their values, their emotions and strategies and their workarounds. It would help us observe real time interruptions and interactions with others and the constraints imposed by real world conditions. So if our aim is to make our trains better, this is the best starting point for us to gain rich data that would help to which would lead to deep insights into the current design problems. It sounds simple.

You sit on a train. You talk to participants. But to create an experience for the participants to feel comfortable, to open up, to share and reveal intricate, personal, and intimate details about their struggles is a world of complexity that we had to work out well before the activity started. It was going to take weeks of planning and navigating risk, especially aligning with operators and frontline staff, recruiting participants and designing tailored support for each participant and then synthesising the data and report writing.

Now this research was design initiated and an evidence base that we're incredibly passionate about and we knew that we needed. We also needed to develop a compelling business case for it and convince others of its value. We'll cut to the chase on this one. It took a lot more defence than we expected or anticipated but we got there in the end.

So designing for the most extreme set of users needs to better outcomes for everyone. People with disabilities make up twenty one point four percent of Sydney's population by 2041 as in the earlier slide. That's around one point five billion people or one in five. So transport works with advocacy groups like the Accessible Transport Advisory Committee or ATAC. And this is a great starting point for to get an overall understanding of the challenges that are faced by those living with disability. As an essential service, the need for retaining independent, travel and dignity is important to ATAC but also to transport.

Outside of advocacy groups, expectations for what can be done to improve things are pretty low. This stems from the social model of disability where a person is disabled by barriers in society, bad design and inaccessible places rather than the actual impairment. So we needed to talk with people who live with disability that may not always have had the opportunity to talk or share their story.

We needed to understand the why and how of people's experiences and understand their meetings and their motivations. And we needed a broad range of people, enough to cover all bases, such with those with physical disabilities or impairments, the use of a mobility aid, blind or low vision and the list goes on.

So we set up an expression of interest, a campaign and ran this past our stakeholder engagement groups with just enough information to provide them, the community and promoted it through the ATAC social network. In two weeks, we were surprised that it resulted in over 80 potential participants. We had to decide on how many people, would suit our purposes and decided actually on 12 in the first phase.

As well as participants identify with a primary disability, more than often they identify with more than one disability. We completed a screening process and categorised disabilities and impairments as we would facilitate those interviews in house. It was at this point that we brought on a research agency to help us manage the scheduling, the booking, the incentive payment for our participants. And we moved from being service planners and researchers to event planners. Our plan for executing the interviews needed to be robust.

We were the co leads of the project. Initially, we set up daily meetings to keep across everything and split our tasks between us but we realised we needed support. Then we moved to twice a week, then weekly or as needs, with Bhavan as the CX lead on the FutureLit Fleet project who took the role of aligning the overall approach with the project need, what the project needed for requirements against the focus areas with participants in the interviews. And I managed the engagement risks, procurement, collaboration with stakeholders to ensure all potential barriers were cleared.

We had another team member analyse the train network, the system, including train scheduling configuration, station facilities and accessibility. Critically, we wanted our participants to feel safe. We needed to gain our participants' trust so that they did not feel overwhelmed or in the spotlight and allow for them to be vulnerable and open up.

We weren't going to achieve this in a group setting as it would be hard to build rapport or to give each person a fair chance to speak and we wanted to create a psychologically safe environment. There was a lot to figure out.

So we decided so what we needed was some level of control on active live train service. We decided we'll conduct interviews in a setting that'll be as intimate as we could make it. Two participants per session each with their own interviewer. With 12 participants we aim to split a contextual inquiry across six sessions over to two weeks.

We had a long list of elements that we wanted feedback on and we decided to do this in the on the latest suburban and intercity fleet that would give us a baseline for future improvement. We reviewed train timetables and fleet schedules to figure out what journey would be long enough to cover the long list of elements but relevant to each individual participants needs both for the journey out and back in. This is a snapshot of our planning And yeah. So in the end, our best option was a service from Central Station Hornsby on a Waratah train and then to Central back to Central on a Marion train.

That was gonna be fifteen minute fifteen minutes there, thirty four minutes back. We also have to allow time to meet up, introduce ourselves in the project, do a safety induction, time to get to the platform and wait for the service, have a lunch break and a toilet break at Hornsby, return and debrief, and also consider any backup services should we miss a train.

It was important we didn't rush this experience. The last thing we wanted was for our participants to feel stress, pressure or unsafe. By the time we calculated the full session it was getting close to three hours. This was our next challenge, the big one. There was initial resistance. We were asked to change the plans and shorten the sessions but once again after looking at the many options and scenarios, we came to the same conclusion and we're confident we stick to the plan.

We even had like importantly, we had the backing from our ATAC advisor as well. With all the many things we want to assess and the importance of creating the right conditions for participants feel comfortable, three hours felt perfect. This would permit us to ask open questions and use a long pause, giving them a chance to think, allow time and space for their for their response, moments to reflect, gather thoughts and service memories.

That would lead us to the deep insights that we needed. We then gained the approvals to carry on. The bulk of the planning was complete with 12 participants confirmed. We then staggered our communications so as not to overwhelm the participants with too much information but enough to make them feel prepared and confident in the lead up to the sessions and we developed a communications pack containing the messages and the sequence from when they'll be sent out. So as oh, this is the our our easy read.

As facilitators, we arrived early to meet the participants at the set location and after a bit of small chat, we slowly took them down to meet the rest of the team. We had a support member who'd act as our our like lookout and our safety warden and carrying goods and supplies. We had a photographer that would be there to capture some of the moments of interactions that the participants have with their surroundings and we had one or two observers who'd be there to ask any questions and provide any backup support.

Each of these people had their own clear roles even down to how they position themselves on the train so as not to part overwhelm the participants or overcrowd them. We were entering an environment we're gonna be competing with thousands of people moving in all sorts of directions. There's gonna be chimes and voice recordings from public service announcements, whistles being blown from guards and train horns from trains.

The safety and well-being of our participants was our number one priority and so we need to ensure every do everything possible to provide reassurance and a sense of calm amongst the chaos. This included making sure that we were relaxed so we wouldn't make the participants feel hurried. And with that, it was time to slow things down and begin the sessions.

It took time and effort to make this happen. To create the right conditions and set us up for those moments of discovery. We had to come in with a view that the people that we're engaging with had experienced challenges in the past. And we would genuinely show them respect for taking part for us to gain their trust.

And trust isn't built quickly. For context, we were sensitive to the nature of our research, asking participants to share about the struggles that they face when taking public transport and to open up and share their most vulnerable moments. They've faced potential discrimination. They've dealt with anxieties and felt anger. We are hoping to make them feel comfortable to trust us for the information that they share.

Trust that we are there for the right reasons, to listen and to learn and to ensure that we can use their lived experience and advocate for change. So we took our time getting to know them, asking about their lives, how they typically plan a journey, what impacts decision making, and we just let them talk.

We asked them to think aloud in the moment, telling us what was going on in their mind as they boarded the train and looked for a place to sit or settle. We asked what their experience has been like in specific situations, like crowded environments, and started open conversations with let's let's talk about information for example. Or getting in and out of a chair.

What works well? What would you like to improve? Or ask them why they did something in a certain way. We asked them to tell us about their best travel experience and their worst. We actively listened and observed. We allowed them to think about their response. And we'd sit in silence. Let time pass. Told them that we could come back to a topic if they needed.

This gave them the space that they needed to open up, surface tensions, bring up emotions and at times allow trauma to resurface. And it wasn't always instant. Some participants were visibly uncomfortable at first. They physically kept their distance. Their answers were short. Their nerves certainly came into it. But when we shared our own nerves feeling and our feeling about the situation because this is the first time doing this.

They started to relax. And by the time we got to Hornsby, they were sitting right by our side. Sharing everything unfiltered. And others were reserved but when they listened to what when we listened to what they said and compared that to how they actually interacted in the space around them.

We could see effort or strain. And so we started a conversation with you know, you were doing this. And when we did this, it turns out that there was a lot they had to complain about. It took patience on our end and the time that we allowed for the session meant that there was no need to force or overtly prompt a response.

And there was a natural flow to those conversations. It was part of setting the right conditions for the participants to feel comfortable which led to the in-depth results that we were after. In the end, we interviewed 16 participants and collected evidence through photography, audio videos, verbatims and witnessed firsthand participant behaviours to compare what they said against what they did in the real world.

And not everything happened as planned. We actually appreciated when things went wrong as these are the experiences we have to face in reality. And moments like this uncovered issues we could never expect to fully understand until they actually happened. There were key things which came up early on. For example, challenges getting on and off the train and the platform, conflicts around shared zones and priority seating and availability and consistency of information on screens and the public announcements.

We spent a number of weeks analysing the observations and synthesising those findings. It And was clear to us that there are challenges to independent and dignified train travel for all. We would use these insights to craft design recommendations and write requirements to support improved customer experience outcomes on the Future Fleet Program. And all of these elements, with additional research and prototyping that we would conduct, contribute to designing better trains.

Based on the evidence that we've gathered, we successfully advocated to make changes to existing requirements such as adding armrests to seats and including requirements that left room for innovations and how customers gain help and support along their journey. This is because we were able to build empathy within the organisation as we shared the lived experience of our customers.

The participants said themselves that the experience felt quick and the process left them feeling valued and heard. And the approach has become the gold standard going forward with great support and enthusiasm coming from ATAC. Transport's goal has been equitable access on our trains. And from the outcomes of this research, we feel we're making the right progress to achieve it.

So we learnt a lot. There were challenging moments when we questioned ourselves and it felt really hard. This research was a big undertaking within a regulatory environment. But we believe we had a successful outcome built on the foundation of communication. This is mentioned in one of the earlier talks. You know, we need we realised we needed to prioritise communication and stakeholder engagement. Communication may feel as though it sits outside the realm of a design research project, but a lack of communication can let down the project if there's a gap between expectation and reality.

And a plan will be let down if it's not being executed in ways that others will understand, find meaning and to address their concerns. So as we said before, we actually became event planners. Completely unexpected. We brought in an advisor with lived experience of disability who helped us shape the tone of the message, test the messages, look at language, raise risks and addressing any concerns.

So a strong communication is vital. Respect. We're to show respect for our customers, our team, our employees and our organisation. It's actually a two way street. We had to remind ourselves that the barriers that were raised by our stakeholders are often valid and need to be respectfully addressed. Respect was part of our need to plan meticulously.

We had to treat it like we were hosting our own wedding. Not our own. Address risks and concerns. There is genuinely no bad question. If it's raised, we try and address it. Also, respect is care for the individual. As we developed a system to support the many design elements that we wanted to check, prioritize treating everyone, as an individual and personalize our discussion.

Safety. This was paramount. It was a principle that we used to buy and we prioritize again. We were inviting people who had encountered challenging experiences to share intimate and potentially painful details of their lives. We work in a government context, so safety down to the down to informate the management of information was very important to us. We address physical, psychological, and emotional safety, not just of the participants, but also the researchers themselves.

During sessions, we relinquish the power to the participants in the environment, giving them control, allowing them for the pause to check and to reflect. And patience. We had planned so meticulously. So we had to give ourselves permission to let things flow naturally. We learned in unexpected moments, but also in surprise moments where things were unexpected and when things went wrong.

The results far outweighed the challenges we faced. Oh, Oh, there we go. Yeah. We felt some a strong central privilege to have held our participants stories. There's tension the tension was surfaced between and and trauma was shared. We even had one participant who had experienced discrimination, some form of discrimination twenty odd years ago, twenty five years ago and when this was surfaced, his response he felt that there's a sense of healing from the fact that he was being listened to, and that was very important to us.

This truly wouldn't have happened without our, conviction to the cause, to pause, and to give people the time they needed to process and walk us through their perspectives.

As we wrap up the long pause discussion, we reflected on the things that we learned that will help us with future design research projects. Scope. We had to work out what was achievable and what is not. For us, the larger tasks surrounding our usability study was confined to how people use the train and the elements within. But the train itself was part of a much larger network.

And we had to limit our study to the train but we let the participant decide what was important to their experience even though there were many elements that we wanted to cover off. We had to recognise our own bias and be open to new ways of doing things. As practitioners we may lean on tried and tested ways of working.

However we had to be open to new ways of working. We had to get feedback and be open to making adjustments. For us we recognised our shortcomings about lived experience of disability and we brought in an advisor to help us shape our approach. We had to prioritise stakeholder management. It helps if you've been in an organisation long enough to have made broad connections. But if you haven't, make time to grow those relationships. With that foundation we found that our research project really benefited from developing a strong communications plan to help it run smoothly.

For us, we even made sure our media team were across our plans well ahead of the interview session so that we're zero surprises. And time. Time can be intimidating to realise an opportunity like ours at Transport. We knew we needed to research and understand these deeply resulting in us putting in the time for planning and research.

And I'm sure the same applies for your design research project. Trust your instinct about how much time you're going to need to plan and secure for your duration of your interviews. Be prepared to defend your position with evidence and on the big and the small questions. We're investing the time now to make lasting change and equitable design outcomes for the people of New South Wales on our suburban trains.

The investment in the long pause was worth it.

So now we have over three thirty design recommendations and 28 customer insights shaping our approach to suburban train design. For us, the hard work begins now. We have a lot to do. We're bringing these insights to life through ongoing conversations, prototyping, additional research, project meetings and surfacing the tension, we're experienced, we've experienced into design, into design decisions being made.

We feel a great responsibility, who for the participants who share their personal stories of challenge, trauma and disadvantage and we're now translating these learnings into the design of our new trains. Whilst it's a big responsibility, we're very grateful for the opportunity and perhaps in time when the new trains out, we hope you notice changes. Thank you. You.