Cross-channel UX

Overview
• UX is concerned with developing high-quality interactive systems,
products and services that fit with people and their ways of living.
• Increasingly, UX designers are concerned not just with the details of the
user interface, or how a website works, but they are concerned with
providing a service.
• Services are provided for users by stringing together a number of
interaction moments, so the design of these momentary
‘microinteractions’ is important.
• But the whole service may include many different devices and many
different communication channels, including the web, mobile apps,
social media and interactions in the physical environment.
• Quite quickly what appeared to be a simple app or web service can
evolve into a complex web of cross-channel interactions, sometimes
called omnichannel.
Objectives
• After studying this chapter, you should be
able to:
• Understand service design
• Understand the multi-layered elements of UX
• Understand the user, or customer journey
• Understand cross-channel UX
• Understand the importance of information
architecture to UX.
Contents
• Introduction
• The elements of UX
• User journeys
• Cross-channel UX
• Information architecture
 Introduction
• Gillian Crampton-Smith (2004) has argued that ‘The job of the designer is
now not just to design the device, the software and the way you interact with
it, but to design the whole experience of the service so it is coherent and
satisfying’ (p. 3).
• Over the last few years, UX has moved from designing a website or an app
to do a single thing to designing a service.
• In the context of UX, a service is a sequence of interactions that constitute a
whole, more abstract achievement.
• For example, a smartphone might provide a service that lets users find out
how many steps they have walked.
• This service allows the users to find this information in a particular time
period, over a day or over a week.
• The service provides graphs and other forms of visualization to display the
data.
• The service can be provided because the smartphone has a pedometer
which itself consists of a motion sensor and some software to interpret the
movement.
 Services
• The key thing about services is that there are multiple
‘touch points’ where people encounter a service and that
interactions with services happen over time.
• To be well designed, these touch points need to
demonstrate some consistency whether through look
and feel, brand or consistent values.
• However, sometimes this is out of the designer’s control.
• For example, if a user is buying car insurance, they may
use a comparison website that is outside the control of
any car insurance company.
• Most products, websites and apps provide a number of
services that together constitute some larger system.
 Services example
• A great example of service design comes from Apple.
• Their web image is carefully constructed and is tied into its physical
stores with slick styling and beautiful products on display.
• Unlike many other companies that have to deliver a web presence
and an in-store experience, Apple use the same information
architecture to structure the web and store.
• All are currently organized in terms of mac, ipad, iphone, watch, TV
and music.
• Getting the information architecture right is essential for providing a
good UX.
• Renting storage space on iCloud using an AppleID maintains a user’s
relationship with the company.
• iCloud ensures that all the apple devices that a person owns and the
content that they have (photos, music, videos, contact information
and so on) are synchronized.
 Channels and services
• Interactions with services may happen intermittently and take place
from different locations and devices.
• Thus, designers need to consider these different media channels of
interaction.
• Exactly what constitutes a media channel will depend on how the
users think about their needs and desires in a domain and how the
UX designer interprets this.
• For example, people could consider the phone to be a channel.
• However, smartphones have many apps on them each of which can
be considered as a media channel.
• Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are examples of channels.
• Comparison websites such as Comparethemarket.com are channels.
eBay is a channel, texting is a channel and WhatsApp is a different
texting channel from iMessage, Snapchat or Messenger.
 Time and services
• The time dimension is also important for service design.
• For example, you may stay with the same organization that provides
your banking service for years and years.
• You will stay with the same dentist or doctor for years.
• Other services such as the purchase of a new washing machine will
require extensive research, selection of a suitable supplier, weighing
up the different packages on offer, the purchase itself, the delivery
and installation and the use of the machine over many years.
• Although services may be distinguished from products in that
services are intangible, people still have to interact with the service
and this takes place through a physical interface at a touchpoint (or
service moment).
• Designers need to consider the whole UX across devices, across
media, throughout the whole user journey (see Section 4.3) and over
time.
 The elements of UX overview
• In 2003, Jesse James Garrett
(Garrett, 2003) conceptualized the
development of websites in terms of
five elements: strategy, scope,
structure, skeleton and surface.
• This led to a famous figure that was
widely adopted as a guide to good
web design.
• In 2011, he produced the second
edition of his book arguing that these
elements were useful more generally
in interaction design and could be
applied to the design of products,
apps and services whether being
delivered on the web or not.
 The elements of UX (1of 3)
• The elements describe UX going from the abstract
ideas of objectives and user needs to the concrete
instantiation in visual designs in much the same way as
we discussed conceptual (abstract) scenarios and
concrete scenarios in Chapter 3.
• The bottom layer is the most abstract (furthest from
implementation). This is the ‘strategy’ plane concerned
with understanding the overall objective of the
interactive system or service, the nature of the people
who will be using it and what their needs and desires
are. Strategy is also concerned with business goals, the
organization’s brand and a market analysis.
• The next layer is the ‘scope’ plane where the emphasis
is on functionality (what the system will enable people
to do) and on content (the information) that the system
will hold.
• The result of scoping the UX is a clear plan for the
development process (which may involve much
iteration and the development of different releases of a
service over a period of time).
 Service ecologies
• A service ecology describes all the stakeholders (actors) and the services
that they access and contribute to.
• In much the same way as we discussed device ecologies in Chapter 1, so
we can use the concept of an ecology to look at services.
• For example, the service ecology of a city is a very complex mix of
physical services such as rubbish collection, road maintenance and the
provision of parks and open spaces to the council services for collecting
local taxes, licensing shops and running local government to information
services about where to find things and how to travel around the city.
• The ecology will look very different for a local resident and a tourist
visiting the city for a few days.

• The design company Live Wire develops service maps to try to capture
different features of services such as the map of in-car services.
• These maps bear some similarity to the rich picture that we introduced in
Chapter 3.
Service ecology map
 The elements of UX (2 of 3)
• The third layer of the elements of user
experience is called the ‘structure’ plane.
• It covers information architecture (Section
4.5) but also includes specifying the
interaction design, the data flows and
allocation of function between user and
system.
• The ‘skeleton’ plane is concerned with
information design, navigation design and
interface design.
• Information design is concerned with how to
lay out information content and present data
in a useful and meaningful way.
• Navigation design is concerned with the
design of menus, links, task bars and all the
other ways that users can get from one part
of the system or service to another.
Wireframes
• A key technique for bringing all these
elements together is the ‘wireframe’.
Wireframes aim to capture a skeleton of
a general page layout whether for an app
or a web service.
• They are on the border between
information architecture and information
design as the various components of a
page are assembled into the standard
structures described by wireframes.
• Interface design concerns how all the
elements of information layout,
navigation and interaction design are
brought together into a coherent whole.
 The elements of UX (3 of 3)
• The final element of Garrett’s scheme is the ‘surface’ plane,
which he calls visual design but in fact may consist of many
modalities including sound and touch.

• We called this representational design in Chapter 3.

• This element of design is concerned with the aesthetics of the

design and with ensuring that good design guidelines are
followed.

• Consistency and appropriateness of the presentation are

critical here.

• An effective way of achieving this consistency is through the

use of a design language.

• A design language specifies not just the elements of a

particular design (such as font style, size and colour) but also
the rules for combining different elements of a design and
what happens when interactions occur.
 User journeys
• The design of moments of interaction is one aspect of providing a good UX
but it is also important to consider how the moments link together into
meaningful strings of interactions (services) that will allow users to achieve
their goals.
• This ‘bigger picture’ of interaction design is concerned with the whole user
journey, or customer journey.
• The idea of a user journey is to map out all the various ways in which users
will access a service, taking time to design these service ‘touchpoints’ in
order to provide a coherent and consistent UX.
• For example, someone wishing to rent a car will somehow become aware
that there is a car hire service available (perhaps through TV advertising or
googling ‘car hire’), go on-line using their laptop computer to browse the
options available, make a reservation through their phone, pick up the car
from the depot and use a tablet device to provide feedback once the car
hire is completed.
 Touchpoints
• The design of the touchpoints – both the digital ones and the physical ones
(such as the visit to the depot) – and how they come together into a consistent
and engaging UX is a real challenge for UX designers.
• The design of touchpoints can be critical for UX.
• For example, one large on-line retailer found that many customers were
dropping out of the on-line shopping journey when they reached the delivery
request process. When they investigated, they found that the ‘proceed with
order’ button would not work if the value of the order was less than £10. An
error message was displayed but it was in a small type face near the bottom of
the screen.
• To the users it appeared as if nothing was happening so they would give up (it
was a ‘walk away’ microinteraction).
• By introducing a wobble to the ‘proceed with order’ button when it was clicked
and the value of the order was less than £10, users understood that something
was wrong and many more orders were converted into sales.
 Services
• Advice for how to design these services comes from a variety of
perspectives including operations management, innovation
management, service ‘science’, marketing, business studies and
interaction design. Blomberg and Darrah (2015) provide an in-depth
analysis.
• These different perspectives on service design produce interesting
tensions in the subject.
• From an interaction design perspective, the focus of design is on
providing a good experience as measured in terms such as enjoyment,
engagement and satisfaction.
• Dubberley and Evenson distinguish the sales cycle from the
experience cycle. Whereas the sales cycle is intended to push people
towards a purchase, the experience cycle considers products in the
wider context and aims to deliver experiences that are ‘compelling’ and
‘reverberating’.
 Service blueprint
• The advice for designers developing
a customer journey is to draw up a list
of the touchpoints and then lay them
out as a service blueprint.
• This shows the user interactions,
touchpoints for the service and how
they are supported by ‘backstage’
activities.
• Think about the performance of a
rock band on tour.
• The audience see a great
performance but there is a lot of work
going on backstage to provide that
experience.
Frontstage and backstage
• The distinction between ‘frontstage’ and
‘backstage’ aspects of the touchpoint is
important.
• The support processes are vital if the cross-
channel experience is to be delivered
effectively.
• From the user’s point of view, the technologies
supporting the service are often irrelevant.
They just want to get on with their activities.
• But from the perspective of the delivery of the
service, maintaining relevant data about the
interactions is critical.
UX and services
• These touchpoints or service moments need to be
designed to encourage and engage users.
• UX designers should consider how the user
encounters a touchpoint and the channel they are
using.
• They need to consider the elements of the UX and the
multilayered nature of the whole UX.
• They need to consider how to hold on to the users and
keep them engaged so they do not ‘walk away’ during
the execution of the touchpoint.
• UX designers need to think about how to finish the
service, what users will take away from the service and
how to complete the transaction.
UX, services and abstraction
• As with other artifacts of design, touchpoints,
services and user journeys can all be
described at different levels of abstraction.
• One of the skills UX designers learn is how to
find an appropriate level of description that
suits the users and their needs but also suits
the people developing the ‘backstage’ of the
interaction design.
• Being human-centred in the design approach
will help the designer to master this.
 UX, before, during and after
• Service moments come together into user journeys, and just like a
touchpoint, a user journey will often consist of ‘before’, ‘during’ and
‘after’ experiences.
• Before you go on holiday, you check out different options for where to
go. Before you buy a TV, you look at adverts and read review
magazines. After your holiday, you look at photos and remember your
trip.
• Before the user gets to engage with the actual system or service, they
need to know it exists. Hence, the design of the before stage should
consider the anticipation of the user, advertising and how the service
appears on search engines or comparison websites.
• The before section also includes the design of social media and how
information is shared about the services that exist.
UX, before, during and after
• During the experience, the focus of the UX design is
on enabling the user to complete whatever it is they
want to do as smoothly and enjoyably as possible.
• Even if the service is a physical activity such as
having a meal in a restaurant, there will still often be
technological infrastructure running behind the scenes
that enables the experience to happen.
• Other services might be entirely on-line such as
watching a video or engaging with social media.
• In these circumstances, users may not just consume
content but they may also generate content through
their own posts or photo uploads.
UX, before, during and after
• After the user has achieved their primary goal,
they will reflect back over the experience.
• They may want to take away a memento of the
experience, particularly if it was a touristic
experience or a special event such as visiting a
theme park.
• They may want to provide feedback to the
experience provider and share the experience
with others.
• By sharing with others, whether through word of
mouth or through social media, they become part
of the ‘before’ experience for others.
Back to user journeys
• There are any number of different ways of representing user
journeys and there is no standard, so designers need to
choose one that is appropriate for what they are looking at and
that captures the things about the journey that they want to
stand out.
• For example, Fig. 4.8 includes a representation of the UX on a
particular journey and Fig. 4.9 shows some other aspects such
as emotion.
• Our preferred style is used in Fig. 4.10 showing the device and
channel down the left hand side and the touchpoints across the
top.
• Thus the representation is essentially a blueprint for the entire
domain with key customer journeys picked out in green.
Figure 4.8
User journey mapping
Figure 4.9
User journey mapping
Further thoughts: Business
Models (1 of 2)
• Although in this book we do not talk much about business
models (as our focus on services is the UX), getting the
business model right is essential for new services and
products to be successful.
• For example, should a service provided charge a monthly
fee, or should they lock their customers into longer term
contracts?
• Netflix and other broadcasters charge a monthly fee whereas
Sky TV requires people to sign up for two years.
• Many phone providers also like to sign customers up to long
term plans. If customers agree, they get bonus features such
as free data usage and free text messages not available to
those who use a ‘pay as you go’ business model.
Further thoughts: Business
Models (2 of 2)
• Some smartphone apps have to be purchased up front.
• Others are free but then charge for additional features.
• Others might be free for six months and then charge customers
to continue using the service.
• Some apps charge for extras when the user needs them (called
in-app purchases).
• Besides the model adopted, service providers have to decide
on what a suitable charge is.
• Getting the balance right amongst the functions of the service,
the amount charged for the service and the additional revenues
from extra functions or longer term usage is critical to the
success of the service.
Cross-channel UX (1 of 2)
• One of the problems with mapping out user journeys is that in
reality, few users will follow the ideal journey carefully crafted
by designers.
• In the multi-device, many-channel world that we now have
designers face a new challenge of designing to support users
who come and go to a service, switch their plans, come back
to it later, pick up some other device (expecting to be at the
same touchpoint that they were in the service) and look to
continue where they left off.
• Moreover, users will frequently not be doing this alone but will
want to share their experiences with others at various points
in the journey and get input from others into their journey
through collaborative activities.
Cross-channel UX (2 of 2)
• It is against this background that a number of interaction
design and user experience professionals and academics
are calling for a radical change in approach.
• Resmini and Rosati argue that we are now moving from
multichannel services to cross channel when ‘a single
service is spread across multiple channels in such a way
that it can be experienced as a whole (if ever) only by
polling a number of different environments and media’
(p. 10).
• Interaction design is now much more like architecture and
city planning in that new developments need to fit in with
the existing infrastructures and make use of existing
services and the different devices different users have.
Cross-channel services
• Of course, there are many examples of successful
cross-channel services:
– Take a photo and post on Facebook to get comments.
– Send a map of your location to a group of friends.
– Transfer the music you are listening to on your iPhone to the
speakers in your living room.
– Watch a film on a tablet on the bus and pick it up later on your
TV.
– Work on a shared spreadsheet or document.
• The problem arises when the service crosses several
of these specific activities.
Channels and (information) content
• Resmini and Rosati (2011) describe how a channel identifies a
pervasive layer for the transmission of information in the context
of a service or product ecosystem.
• For example, signage on the streets of a city constitutes a
channel and the individual signs placed at different locations
throughout the city define touchpoints.
• Resmini and Rosati (2011) discuss how users become more like
intermediaries contributing content and as well as consuming it.
• Experiences are hybrid, crossing digital and physical, and
information architectures need to accommodate existing
systems and services in an ever changing environment.
• This is the cross-channel UX.
Cross-channel design
• Resmini and Rosati (2011) provide five
heuristics to guide designers of cross-
channel ecosystems:
– Help users develop a sense of place
and legibility.
– Be consistent across media channels.
– Be resilient and design to
accommodate different users.
– Get away from complexity and clutter.
– Help users see connections between
services.
 Navigation design
• The idea of a user journey leads naturally to consider how
the user gets from one touchpoint to the next, navigation.
• Navigation involves three types of activity.
• Wayfinding is concerned with navigating towards a
known destination.
• Exploration is concerned with finding out about an
environment and how it relates to other environments.
• Object identification concerns understanding and
classifying the objects in an environment, with finding
categories, clusters and configurations of objects and
what content they contain.
 UX and user journeys
• In terms of the UX of user journeys in cross-channel ecosystems, designers
should pay attention to providing content that helps with navigation.
• Maps show an overview of an environment, signposts show direction and
distance, information signs and ‘you are here’ signs help orientate users and
paths, and routes and landmarks are all needed to support wayfinding.
• Different types of support are need as users transition between adopting different
roles, for example, of consumer, producer, explorer, browser or buyer.
• Different designs will enable transitions across digital and physical spaces, at
different times, and through the layers of the ecologies.
• The transitions between touchpoints of interaction are an important part of the
overall UX.
• People need to be attracted to the transition point, engaged in the interaction that
follows and allowed to gracefully exit to move onto the next moment in the
service.
• People will move in and out of the physical spaces and digital spaces, across
channels and across devices.
UX and cross-channel user
journeys
• Designers ideally need to present a common design identity across
different channels of interaction.
• They often need to enable users to interrupt an experience on one
channel and seamlessly pick it up on another.
• The cross channel nature of interaction design and UX will continue
to be a significant feature of UX design over the next few years.
• Already, designers have to design for wearable devices that link with
a smartphone and a website, for example.
• The thermostat can be controlled using the device’s interface directly,
using a web interface or using an app on my smartphone.
• This little device ecology will continue to grow as I add more devices
for controlling lighting, cameras and sensors onto my home
automation service.
 Information architects
• Information architecture is concerned with the design of
information spaces.
• Just as real world architects have to understand client needs
and design appropriate structures to enable those needs to
be realized, so information architects have to design the
structures that will enable information needs to be met.
• These structures are realized in the digital space as apps and
websites and in the physical space as objects such as maps,
signs or physical structures.
• These structures also include people who both consume
information content and generate content that becomes part
of the information space.
Information content
• Information architecture concerns understanding and designing the
information, that is, the content, that is going to be useful for people
undertaking some activity or that will otherwise contribute to the user
experience.
• For example, if I want to visit a historical site, what information is
going to provide me with a good experience? Should the information
architect provide information on the dates of events that happened
there, or information about famous people who visited there or
information about the geography and geology?
• Should the information architect provide video of past events, links to
websites for further information or an audio guide to provide a tour
around the site?
• Should the information architect allow visitors to take photos or leave
audio messages and tag them with a geo-location so that other
visitors can see them? (This is often called user generated content,
UGC.)
Information architecture: Ontology
• The information architect is going to provide the structure
within which the user experience will grow.
• This structure will be described in a conceptual model, a
representation of the concepts that are used to describe
the domain of interest.
• This process is often called developing an ontology, ‘a
designed conceptualization of some activity’ .
• An information architect goes through the understanding
process and analyses some domain (a sphere of activity)
and, after much discussion, iteration and evaluation,
decides on the objects of interest (the ontology) and the
relationships between those objects (the taxonomy).
• But finding an appropriate ontology is critical and will
affect all the other characteristics of the information
space and subsequent UX.
The impact of ontology
• Information architecture is concerned with the structure and
organization of objects in an interactive system.
• The first thing designers must do, then, is to decide how to
conceptualize the domain; they need to define an ontology.
• The ontology – the chosen conceptualization of a domain – is critical
and will affect all the other characteristics of the information space.
• Deciding on an ontology for some domain of activity is deciding on the
conceptual entities, or objects, and relationships that will be used to
represent the activity.
• Choosing an appropriate level of abstraction for this is vital as it
influences the number of entity types, the number of instances of each
type and the complexity of each object.
 Coarse- or fine-grained ontology
• A coarse-grained ontology will have only a few types of object, each of
which will be ‘weakly typed’ – i.e. will have a fairly vague description –
and hence the objects will be quite complex and there will be a lot of
instances of these types.
• Choosing a fine-grained ontology results in a structure which has many
strongly typed simple objects with a relatively few instances of each. In
a fine-grained ontology, the object types differ from each other only in
some small way; in a coarse-grained ontology, they differ in large ways.
• For example, consider the ontology that you (acting as an information
architect) choose to help with the activity of organizing the files in your
office.
• Some people have a fine-grained structure with many types (such as
‘Faculty Research Papers’, ‘Faculty Accommodation’, ‘Faculty Strategy’
and so on) whilst others have a coarser structure with only a few types
(such as ‘Faculty Papers’).
• These different structures facilitate or hinder different activities.
• The person with the fine-grained ontology will not know where to put a
paper on ‘Faculty Research Accommodation’ but will have less
searching to do to find ‘Minutes of April Research Committee’.
Coarse- or fine-grained ontology and tasks
• In my office, I have a large pile of papers.
• This makes filing a new paper very easy
– I just put it on the top.
• But it makes retrieval of specific papers
much more time-consuming.
• My colleague carefully files each paper
she receives, so storage takes longer but
retrieval is quicker.
 Information spaces
• The size of an information space is governed by the number of objects
which in turn is related to the ontology.
• A fine-grained ontology results in many object types with fewer
instances of each type and a coarse-grained ontology results in fewer
types but more instances.
• A larger space will result from a finer-grained ontology but the individual
objects will be simpler.
• Hence, the architecture should support locating specific objects through
the use of indexes, clustering, categorization, table of contents and so
on.
• With the smaller space of a coarse-gained ontology, the emphasis is on
finding where in the object a particular piece of information resides.
• A fine-grained ontology will require moving amongst objects; a coarse-
grained ontology requires moving within the object.
 Information spaces example
• For example, if an information architect is designing a clothes
shopping website, the ontology would include objects such as
‘women’s tops’, ‘men’s tops’, ‘women’s trousers’, ‘women’s jackets’
and so on.
• This is the ontology, the way that the physical space and the physical
objects are conceptualized.
• Quite often, the information architects of websites come up with quite
strange ontologies, which is why you may find it difficult to find
certain objects on websites.
• For example, in one well-known clothes shopping site, the term
‘Levi’s’ is not recognized by the search engine nor does it appear
under any other category such as ‘Jeans’.
• The designers of this site have not included ‘Levi’s’ in their ontology,
so no one can find them!
Information architecture and physical
interaction
• Information architecture also effects the physical aspects of the
interaction.
• For example, if the information architect puts all the objects into a single
page on a website, users will need to scroll down through the page to find
the information that they are interested in.
• Information architecture is central to delivering a top quality UX.
• It can be used to focus on the structural knowledge that underlies users’
mental models.
• It can be used to organize the physical spaces of some domain.
• For example, in the retail domain, it is vital that physical goods are
described in the store in the same way that they are described on the
store’s website.
• Information architecture will also be used to design websites and apps. It
also underlies the design of blended spaces.
Information architecture and
blended spaces
• Blended spaces are spaces where a physical and a digital space
are closely intertwined to deliver a new UX.
• The information architect exploits the correspondences between
physical and digital spaces in terms of their ontology.
• Additionally, information architects will look at the
correspondences amongst the spaces’ topology, volatility and
agency.
• Topology concerns the relationships between objects such as the
distance between objects and on the direction relations between
object types and instances.
• Volatility concerns the speed of change in a domain and agency
concerns both the human and artificial agents and what they are
able to do.
Ontology and topology
• For example, the ontology affects the
topological relationships such as next and
previous relations between instances.
• Is the next item next in chronological order,
alphabetical order or is there some other
relationship?
• How close is a particular instance to the
current location, or how close, and in which
direction do I need to go to get to a different
type of object in the space?
Volatility
• Volatility is concerned with how often the types and
instances of the objects change.
• In general, it is best to choose an ontology that keeps
the types of object stable.
• Given a small, stable space, it is easy to invent maps
or guided tours to present the content in a clear way.
• But if the space is very large and keeps changing,
then very little can be known of how different parts of
the space are and will be related to one another.
• In such cases, interfaces will have to look quite
different and the UX will be different.
Agency (1 of 2)
• Agency is about the different types of people and their roles in the
information space and the existence of any artificial agents.
• Agency also concerns the activities that can be undertaken in the
space.
• In some spaces, users are on their own and there are no other
people about – or they may be about but users do know about
them.
• In other spaces, users can easily communicate with other people
(or artificial agents), and in other spaces, there may not be any
people now but there are traces of what they have done.
• The availability of agents (sometimes represented as virtual
assistants) in a blended space is another key feature affecting its
usability and the UX.
 Interaction and devices
• People interact with information content using different technologies;
the device ecology.
• The device ecology includes all the characteristics of digital
technologies and non-digital information artefacts relevant to the
domain.
• The technologies for content creation, consumption and manipulation
have a huge impact on the UX of the information space.
• For example, displays may be large or small, color or monochrome,
touch-enabled or not and high-resolution or not. There may be speech
as part of the ecology as input or output.
• And there will be different applications, software for the production,
consumption, manipulation and transmission of content.
• Different devices providing different services will be part of the
ecology depending on the different people who are engaged with it at
different times.
 Case study: Commuting to work
• Commuting to work by bus is an activity that many people
engage in.
• In a case study of the public transportation company in
Sweden (Lang and Schlegel, 2015), the main elements taken
into consideration for the conceptualization of the cross-
channel ecosystem that supports this activity included the bus
company’s web presence, its mobile app, its printed customer
information, and its staff and the city environment, including
signage, distances and city layout.
• Analysing the situation identifies six primary channels: mobile,
web, printed media, service points, bus system and people.
• These consist of a variable number of touchpoints in both
digital and physical space.
• Printed media, for example, includes paper tickets, booklets,
the bus timetables and the bus lines maps.
Some physical devices in
commuting to work
Example: IA
• The ontology of the bus system includes buses, bus stops, lines, routes, journeys
and destinations amongst other things.
• The topology determines which bus stops have distance and directional relations
with each other and with routes and destinations.
• This basic information architecture is distributed across devices, channels and
touchpoints.
• The part of the information space concerned with routes, lines and bus stops is
fairly static.
• It does change but fairly infrequently. Accordingly, touchpoints such as maps can
be produced on paper.
• However, the movement of the buses and the timing of journeys are where the
volatility of the space is a key characteristic.
• In the case study, real-time bus information is provided by a smartphone app and
at displays at bus stops.
• The digital space of these bus tracker systems deals with the volatile part of the
information space and allows for the real-time recalculation of routes and
destination times.
Example: Agency
• Note the additional agency that this provides.
• The original domain of commuting to work by bus needs people to
stand at a bus stop, consult the paper timetable and wait.
• With the real-time bus tracker in the digital information space, new
functions emerge such as ‘get me home from here’ and ‘calculate my
arrival time’.
• Agency also includes the people who are in the information space
such as the bus driver.
• This agent can be consulted on a variety of issues and provides
real-time, personalised information.
• The analysis of this case study results in the service blueprint shown
in Figure 4.17.
Example: Service blueprint for
commuting to work domain
• The devices are listed down the left hand side of the figure
along with different interaction channels.
• The main activities are listed along the top of the figure and
this allows the different touchpoints to be identified.
• Notice that this service blueprint does not include the
backstage activities. Another diagram would be necessary
for that. What the blueprint does enable, however, is to
represent typical user journeys.
• Over 15 different journeys were identified through the
ecology and were mapped out against the blueprint. One
such journey is shown in Figure 4.17.
Figure 4.17
Service blueprint for commuting to work
domain
User journey mapping
• The analysis of this case study takes Resmini and Rosata’s
heuristics in order to look at issues of design and how the system
could be improved to encourage more people to travel by bus.
• One of their key design recommendations was that the design
should attend to the concept of place-making.
• People would make better use of the ecosystem for traveling if
they could conceptualize the bus system and how it related to the
city as a whole.
• The designers looked at the UX of the different places in the
ecosystem.
• Before the journey, the sense of place included the ontology and
topology of the city and the bus systems as a whole.
• In other words people need to know – easily, enjoyably and
effectively, that is, as a good UX – which bus to get to go where.
• Other places in the ecosystem included the bus stop design, the
ticket machine place, the buses themselves and the departure and
destination places.
Summary
• UX occurs in the context of sometimes complex ecosystems of
devices, services and physical spaces.
• Designers need to consider the design of the overall system in
addition to considering the details of specific interfaces.
• Designers need to consider how the system is conceptualized
from the users’ perspective.
• They need to design for navigation and movement through the
system – the ‘hybrid trajectories’ – of people as they access
different digital spaces and move through physical spaces.
• UX here is difficult as different users will take different routes
through the information space.
Question & Answers