Reimagining Sydney visitor Information experiences

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Client: City of Sydney
Engagement length: 10 weeks
Sector: Tourism + Local Government
Team: Senior Designer + Designer
Object of design: Strategy and vision

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With the rise of technology and increasingly sophisticated travellers arriving in Sydney, visitor expectations and behaviours for seeking information are rapidly evolving. The City of Sydney wanted to reimagine visitor information services to better meet visitor needs, both now and into the future.

There were two sides of this project our research needed to tackle:

Firstly, who are Sydney’s visitors, how they behave when looking for information and what are their core needs?

Secondly, we wanted to understand the gap between the Councils’ current organisation capabilities and future aspirations to deliver a new service model.

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Approach

It was important to understand how visitors currently engage and use information, the gap between their current and future aspirations to know what considerations are critical for future transformation. We conducted a seven-week research program to understand what are the needs of future visitors and what capabilities the City of Sydney needs to have to meet those needs.

To understand the present and future needs of visitors who step foot into Sydney, we conducted:

  • Street intercepts with 93 visitors

  • 18 one-on-one interviews

  • In-context prototyping and testing

We also worked with the City of Sydney to help them understand the capability of their organisation to fulfil these needs: 

  • Assessments of the maturity of the organisation

  • 5 workshops with frontline staff and stakeholders to understand these gaps of the present and future

Concept cards

In depth interview and concept testing session, participants choosing content they would use and want to see

Building a one-to-one size prototype

We placed one of our prototypes in front of Circular Quay, one of the busiest gateway to the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge

Low-fi staff uniform prototypes

Front life staff co-design workshop

Stakeholder walkthrough

Internal prioritisation workshop

This work resulted in:

  • A set of strategic recommendations that the City could action today towards the future information service models.

  • A macro view of the partnership ecosystem with each partner’s role and their level of influence.

  • A high-level 12-month roadmap for the City of Sydney to action.

  • Six final prioritised initiatives including instructions for how the City of Sydney can pilot these initiatives.

Snapshot of visitor behavioural archetypes

Snapshot of opportunity areas

Snapshot of future partnership ecosystem for the City of Sydney and other players in the field

Value and outcome of this work:

  • Broadened the City’s view of the problem.

  • Raised awareness of the human-centred design process and its application to the City’s ways of working.

  • Provided evidence—in the form of behavioural insights—to change the City’s current visitor service model.

  • Provided prompts for our client to generate conversations and form a partnership steering team with external partners.

  • Helped our client to gain recognition of the importance of the visitor economy in Sydney so that more resources and funding are invested.