SEPTA: Let’s get there faster together.
A call for crowd-sourced Service Design and Tactical Urbanism
My wife and I moved back to Philadelphia at the beginning of the summer.
After spending the last two years in the San Francisco bay area (that’s SF or San Francisco not “San Fran” for those of us who haven’t lived on the west coast before 😜) taking BART, MUNI and living car-free, we were excited to hear that the SEPTA had been undergoing a few upgrades.
No more tokens? Eureka. I was ecstatic.
...Until I had to buy my first keycard.
Apparently I wasn’t the first person experience major struggles while trying to buy my first card. In fact these folks were so upset they created a 27 page proposal for improving the user interface of the Septa Keycard Kiosks.
So I’m glad somebody has done something about the kiosks, but I still have a few problems:
...I’m terrible with directions.
...I don’t know which platform I’m standing on.
...I don’t know where different exits will take me.
Basically...I still get lost while trying to ride the SEPTA Subway Network. It’s especially terrible when it’s raining outside, and it’s Friday rush hour, and all I’m trying to do is get home for dinner.
But my hunch is that I’m not the only one. According to Septa’s 2017 Route Statistics:
That’s hundreds of thousands of people! If you’ve experienced the same pain I have over the last couple of months, tweet me at @SeptaUX.
So here’s my question:
Philly--what if we could leverage service design and tactical urbanism to provide daily SEPTA riders a better service experience of taking the SEPTA Subway Network?
Wait. Stop. What’s Service Design? What the heck is Tactical Urbanism? I don’t have time to access the nitty gritty, merriam-webster's definitions of each of these ideas, but go ahead click on the links and check out the websites if you have time.
For the purposes of this project, Service Design and Tactical Urbanism are both problem solving methods that borrow elements from many formal types of work combining them together in order to deliver simple, effective and creative results.
According to the Service Design experts Marc Stickdorn & Jakob Schneider, there are 5 basic principles in practicing service design:
#1 is going to be easy. As someone who already takes the SEPTA and qualifies as a rider, I’ll be scratching my own itch and hopefully helping others out too at the same time.
#2 is going to require someone to join me. If you’re interested in joining me, follow me on twitter or tweet me at https://twitter.com/SeptaUX. What about #3 through #5? Well...let’s figure that out as we go.
How might we improve the signage of the SEPTA subway stations so that riders spend less time walking in the wrong directions, have less trouble finding out where they need to go, and feel less like 🤬and more like 😁or even 🤩?
Starting with the most highly trafficked subway routes (BSL and MFL) we’ll use empathy, observation, graphic design and create posters in order to improve signage, direct riders to where they need to go and affect the greatest volume of riders.
Join me on this project via www.twitter.com/SeptaUX
https://septa.org/strategic-plan/reports/route-statistics.pdf
https://septa.org/strategic-plan/reports/revenue-ride.pdf
http://www.septa.org/rebuilding/station/city-15th.html
http://www.septa.org/rebuilding/pdf/2016-05-Rebuilding_City-Hall-goals.pdf
http://www.septa.org/rebuilding/pdf/2015-03-15th-phase.pdf
http://www.isseptafucked.com/faq
https://airtable.com/tblx9SWlc6u7WUyTC/viww8aWimdZjecQxh
I'm interested in Service Design so I started a side-project called SEPTA UX. It's a call for crowd-sourced service design and tactical urbanism. Aka better signage that is low-cost, quick AND effective.