Image Credit : N.A.
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.
Organisation
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, rollout, and iterative design/engineering.
See image 3 for a visual reference of the design process.
Project 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 were asked to consider the use of touch screen interactivity (a feature available on the screens, but not yet used across the network) as a way to provide community engagement.
User Experience
The two concepts that were created during the design process are:
_ What’s On A dynamic feed of events happening now (or shortly) around the local area. Designed to raise awareness and attendance of the City of Sydney and partner events. See image 4 for reference.
_ Welcome to Sydney: An interactive map providing locational information on key areas of interest for visitors to the City. Designed to give visitors a great tourist experience and to inspire them to try different areas within the City. See image 5 for reference.
Both screens were able to be interacted with via touch and the scanning of QR codes. See images 4 and 5 for the creative concepts.
Multiple rounds of user testing were undertaken to ensure that the creative was useful and easy to use. We initially conducted 8x concept testing interviews, followed by 8x usability testing rounds.
Project Marketing
With the screens being advertising themselves, we saw no need to undertake further project marketing. Instead we launched the creative concepts via a pilot approach – with an initial roll out 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 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.
Project Privacy
No personally identifiable information is being captured as part of this project.
The only data that is being captured is usage data –the number of sessions, number of taps, length of time someone interacted with the creative for, the time of day the screens are being used, click throughs and the location of the pylon that’s being interacted with.
Expanded Service or Application
This can be any expanded existing service or application from a new initiative or internal startup to an established department. We're not just after bells and whistles, but true innovation that exceeds expectations and fills a previously unmet need. in all categories with updates and developments that truly enhance the user experience and take your app or service to another level.
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