This change to the info desk presented an excellent opportunity to gather data and test out additional approaches to serving visitors. Over a  four week design sprint, we worked together to research, prototype and test service interventions. The prototyping streams included improvements to directions and wayfinding, language support and metrics/data gathering to understand visitor needs and behaviour. 

In particular, we were interested in ways of serving visitors who needed support in other languages, and understanding more about the types of requests that were most common when visiting City Hall. Working with management and frontline staff, we built, tested, and rebuilt 17 prototype iterations including custom mapping, language support via digital translation tools, and data tracking.

We learned that simple interventions like custom maps of the most common service locations people needed directions to (rather than tourist maps) and using out of the box translation tools such as google translate could go a long way to improving the visitor experience. We also built a custom approach to tracking and categorising the daily interactions at the desk in a way that was not too burdensome for the staff, while also providing detailed information that can be used to further improve service delivery.