Project Overview
In 2020 the City of Sydney and outdoor advertiser QMS entered a partnership whereby QMS paid for the design, production, and installation of new street furniture (bus shelters, kiosks, public toilets, seats, and bins) in exchange for the rights to all outdoor advertising screens within the City of Sydney network. As part of the partnership, the City of Sydney has up to 50% of screen time across 160 screens. See image 1 for a picture of the screens.
The community was not happy with the installation of these new screens with many protesting online for the removal of them. See image 2 for the social media commentary around the screens.
The Design and Digital Innovation Team saw this as an opportunity to design content for the screens that was useful for the community, helping to change the attitude towards the screens. The teams entered into a design thinking process to identify problems that could be solved with the screens, design solutions and deliver something useful for the community. See image 3 for an overview of the design process.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
David Skelton Web Developer
Donna Elkins Digital Content Manager
Jay Lee Digital Designer
Karl Herger Chief Marketing and Communications Officer
Michaela Upton Digital Innovation Program Manager
Tom Gao Chief Technology and Digital Services Officer
Project Brief
After a design discovery process that identified that community sentiment around the screens was largely negative. A brief was defined by the design and innovation teams – how might we be able to change the community’s perception of these advertising screens from useless to useful?
The brief was approached using a combination of design thinking, double diamond, and lean start-up methodologies. The process involved four stages – discovery, problem definition, solution design, and delivery. Outlined below:
Discovery: Gathering a deeper understanding of the problem space. Activities included: best-in-class desktop research, the creation of customer personas, customer journey mapping, stakeholder interviews, and observational research.
Definition: Define the problem that we are trying to solve. Activities included: an ideation workshop, concept testing, co-design workshop with subject matter experts.
Design: Design potential solutions to help the problem. Activities included: prototyping of ideas on the screens, usability testing, and feature sorting.
Delivery: Deliver the chosen solution(s) and iterate to get to maximum impact. Activities include: development, roll out, and iterative design/engineering.
See image 3 for a visual reference of the design process.
Project Innovation/Need
The business need was to shift the negative sentiment around the advertising screens. Hence the brief landed on was: “How might we be able to change the community’s perception of these advertising screens from useless to useful?”
The project team was asked to consider the use of touchscreen interactivity (a feature available on the screens, but not yet used across the network) as a way to provide community engagement.
Design Challenge
Design challenges included:
- Encouraging the community to interact with the screens: After years of COVID, it was counterintuitive for the community to touch and interact with the screens. Therefore we introduced a design principle which was that the pylons should be useful even if they are not being touched.
- Designing for an a-typical device type: The pylons are large format screens, not commonly interacted with by users. We couldn't draw inspiration or design patterns from laptops, iPhones and other common devices. We relied on multiple rounds of user testing on these screens to ensure we were creating something easily usable.
- Quick iterations: When we first launched, the uptake was slower than we anticipated. We quickly iterated our approach from a 'design thinking approach' to a 'lean start-up' approach to ensure we could quickly harvest learnings and iterate designs to ensure maximum impact.
Future Impact
We have launched the creative concepts via a pilot approach – with an initial rollout to one screen, then 8 screens, and following that a selection of screens across the network. Iteration is being undertaken as we learn more about how the community interacts with the screens. A dashboard has been set up to track data related to the usage.
At this point in time we are still in the scale-up phase and have launched the What’s On creative to 8 pylons around the City of Sydney. Over 4 weeks of the pylons being live we have seen:
_ 426 engaged sessions (i.e. sessions that last at least 20 seconds)
_ 579 clicks across 49 events we have broadcast
We are continuing to monitor these interactions and tweak the creative as we see fit as we continue rolling out.
Service - Government
This award celebrates creative and innovative solution design for the successful delivery and provision of services. Consideration given to system integration, user experience, product design
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