Keeping London moving with mobile

Every single day, people make more than 24 million journeys across London. A staggering 1.34 billion rely on the city’s iconic trains, buses, black cabs and even its to get to their destinations.

Every single day, people make more than 24 million journeys across London. A staggering 1.34 billion rely on the city’s iconic trains, buses, black cabs and even bikeshares to get to their destinations. 

This enormously complex network is looked after by a 30,000-strong team, spread over hundreds of locations across the city. The demand for enterprise mobility at Transport for London is being driven by the very teams working every day to keep London moving.

This is driven by anything from straightforward productivity gains and better communications to the availability of real-time information on the move and remote control of physical assets.

In 2014, we joined forces with TfL to begin the process of bringing smart mobile services and leaner ways of working to the organization in one of the largest mobile transformation programs in the UK.

Kicking off with a period of in-depth field research and extensive usability testing of existing tools with TfL staff across every level of the organization, we first created a series of detailed user experience maps. These, combined with multiple user personas, highlighted the daily pain points encountered by staff and helped identify and prioritize clear opportunities for mobile.

Armed with this insight, our first project was to apply rapid prototyping techniques to develop a comprehensive user standards framework. This incorporates established industry practices, from human interface guidelines (HIG) and iOS and Google Materials design standards to bespoke requirements that reflect the unique needs of TfL staff.

The result is a collaborative set of standards and reusable components that dramatically accelerate design decisions. It is the mobile program’s essential toolkit for all development — past, present and future. The toolkit has cut program-level design overheads by an estimated 20%.

Both of our teams worked side-by-side from the very beginning, co-locating and working in partnership across a range of lightweight discovery phases and full product deliveries.

This has enabled us to rapidly pilot mobile experiences, gathering insights with short feedback loops and regular weekly workshops, so we can continually optimize both products and processes.

Collectively, this has led not only to faster, leaner progress, but it has also proactively empowered TfL’s in-house teams with direct, hands-on experience of agile in action.

An example of this continuous improvement can be seen in the creation of a pipeline evaluation framework. This enables teams to rapidly assess the ROI of any potential services and solutions. A highly effective approach, it minimizes waste by requiring teams to thoroughly interrogate the potential value and feasibility of any proposed products — saving hundreds of thousands of pounds on wasteful construction phases that would ultimately have generated only a low ROI.

In an organization as complex as TfL, mobile integration with legacy systems is both inevitable and mission critical. Consequently, in conjunction with the user standards framework, another fundamental keystone project has been the design and development of a mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) platform, which serves all current and future mobile tools at TfL.

This platform consists of a set of reusable patterns and services that dramatically streamline access to existing data and systems, providing the foundation for accelerated and mobile-optimized delivery.

In turn, this facilitates a fast, seamless experience for TfL staff. Without it, enterprise mobility would prove slow, fragmented and in some instances impossible.

For TfL, every journey matters. Built on the strong foundations of the UX framework and the MBaaS platform, the mobile program continues to go from strength-to-strength, with 19 discoveries and nine construction phases completed.

To learn more about individual projects, take a look at Decelerator, a highly innovative solution to brake testing on London Underground trains, and a global first for iPad.