Design Thinking for the Railways
This – an example for why it is crucial to identify your core target customers and talk to them before launching any Product –
A simple Design Thinking exercise would have revealed what issues users may worry about. For example:
1. Issues in reaching the railway station
2. Ease of Buying tickets
3. Finding the platform and train
4. Their trust level on Railway time management ; will they end up missing their flight
5. Their worries about losing more time waiting for the last-mile shuttle
Minimum Viable Product:
With inputs from design thinking, an MVP “may” have looked like this:
1. just two trains with maybe just two bogies,
2. from the city station only-
3. one in the morning and one in the evening
4. marked as Highest priority traffic on the railway network with time accuracy of + or minus 5 mins tolerance (to start with)
5. messaging with emphasis on on-time arrival and ease of using shuttle
Instead we now have some 5 pairs of long trains from both city and Yashvantpur – all running empty.
They seem to be running 20 mins late – and there are no assurances to passengers on keeping time. The availability of shuttle to airport is also an “unknown” factor causing passenger anxiety.
Originally published in LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6758241518693294080/
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