Sydney Metro Western Sydney Airport: Redefining next generation transport.
Client
BMC Consortium – Sydney Metro Western Sydney Airport Line
Services
Design Research, Strategic Design, Service Design, Customer Experience
Industry
Built Environment & Transport
Year
2022
Impact
Sydney Metro’s strategic vision is to deliver a world-class connected metro, which will provide more choices to customers and opportunities for our communities now and in the future.
Sydney Metro places the customer first. The BMC consortium engaged Symplicit as the CCD expert to deliver welcoming and intuitive stations with simple, uncluttered spaces that ensure a comfortable and safe experience for diverse customers.
To define what this meant for a future-state experience on the Sydney Metro Western Sydney Airport Line (SMWSA), Symplicit was engaged to research, understand, inform, and design to ensure customer needs were foundational to precinct station design decisions, with the intent to create stations that people want to use; are entwined with growing communities; support active, multimodal transport; and respect the Traditional Custodians of Country.
Value
The customer experience was conceptualised where airport passengers, metro commuters and community members are efficiently and meaningfully connected to their communities. The six station designs will each have a unique identity that reflects the land’s contemporary character and Traditional Culture. It is hoped that anxieties related to airport travel would be alleviated as passengers are provided with frictionless multi-modal transport opportunities. This would be enhanced with multi-lingual access and assistive navigation, providing for comfortable and safe travel.
Process
Symplicit embedded human-centred design principles, solutions and tools into the project’s foundation, ensuring a future-focused and customer-led design process and close collaboration cross-discipline.
Designing a world-class customer-centric experience requires those making design decisions to have a deep understanding of and empathy for their needs.
For Sydney Metro Western Sydney Airport Line precinct design, this was done through:
- Uncovering insights unique to the context of the SMWSA line to build a holistic understanding of the requirements for an ‘easy’ experience.
- Creating a common understanding of the end-to-end customer journey via experience maps that identify key behaviours, thinking, touchpoints and challenges and act as a stimulus for opportunity creation.
- Building empathy across disciplines and embedding design thinking through customisation and use of personas with close collaboration across multiple domains.
- Prioritised customer-led design opportunities and co-created cross-discipline activities to ensure feasibility and viability.
- Driving a future focus for decision-making with scalable solutions that can adapt to future needs.
- Design a Customer Experience (CX) Satisfaction Metric to assess success.
We considered the importance of staff engagement in a customer experience and took a human-centred design approach towards the experiences of all individuals passing through SMWSA line. The CX metric further backed these up to measure satisfaction utilising the drivers established by Sydney Metro.
All our concepts were underpinned by the principles of designing for Country, Community and Climate. In conjunction with the CX metric, this helped us score the overarching experience by satisfaction score and allowed us to gauge a CCC rating (Country, Community and Climate) to ensure all designs exceeded the standards set and adhered to the principles of the project.
Mindset
Our holistic design mindset ensured the project would positively impact local communities by acknowledging its connection to their human, ecological and Traditional heritage; and to all commuters, residents, and visitors by providing an easy, meaningful, and memorable commute. The customer-centred design approach resulted in a cohesive experience narrative that enveloped all aspects of the Sydney Metro’s customer experience vision across all disciplines.
