Deutsche Bahn is using Design Thinking: new infopoint as a human-centered hub in the train station

To help travelers get the information they need as stress-free as possible at train stations, a Deutsche Bahn project team worked on the Design Thinking challenge to make the DB Infopoints more people-centered.

A central information hub is being redesigned.

You are probably familiar with the situation: You are standing at the station, urgently needing information, and may even have missed your train. When you arrive at the service point, you look at the long queue and your watch – a stressful situation for everyone. This is precisely where a project team headed by Andreas Bürgler, Head of Operations at DB Station & Service AG, came in. The aim was to redesign the DB Infopoint. The team drew on the innovation approach of Design Thinking.

The project started with a workshop at the HPI d-school with 200 participants, a new size for the HPI d-school team. Lead Coach Flavia Bleuel explains: “With the support of the managers, we wanted to involve the DB managers as coaches. We prepared them in special workshops and train-the-trainer sessions and then familiarized 200 DB employees with Design Thinking."

Six different tasks were worked on in 33 teams and with 30 coaches – half focused on travelers' service experience, the other half on internal challenges. One of the central projects was the development of DB Infopoint 4.0.

The project team is developing Infopoint 4.0 in a co-creation process.

Direct contact with users was an unfamiliar challenge for the team at first. However, they quickly made valuable observations during the field research: many customers kept asking the same simple questions. The long queues at the information points often occurred because many bureaucratic processes were still analog and took time. These insights were later incorporated directly into the design of the new information point.

Andreas Bürgler emphasizes the strength of Design Thinking: “You work on topics that are relevant to the users and quickly build prototypes to immediately see what works and what doesn't.” After the first paper prototypes were developed, the usual office space was no longer sufficient to build and test a realistic 1:1 prototype of an info point. The team, therefore, moved into a disused station building in Berlin-Wannsee.

There they held workshops with various user groups to better understand their needs and continuously improve the prototypes. They worked with families, frequent travelers, DB service employees, and representatives of associations for wheelchair users and the deaf.

The team also realized that detailed prototypes required professional support. Andreas Bürgler hired a set designer from the Deutsche Oper to adapt the prototypes after each test run and implement the feedback directly into improvements.

Finally, the team presented the prototype at the annual DB Product Conference, where Deutsche Bahn presented new product developments to the press and the public.

Bürgler remembers an unexpected experience: During the user tests, the DB Infopoint was closed between tests, which was met with a lack of understanding within the company. “I realized that I had failed to take the company and the board of directors with me along the way and explain what it means to work with prototypes or to carry out live prototyping.” Many thought it was a finished product that had to be accessible at all times.