Siegel+Gale is turning it up to 11 for the 2011 Forrester Customer Experience Forum on June 21-22. We’re not just exhibiting, we’re launching an Experience Throwdown, where we take on simplification and customer experience challenges from Forum participants and give back immediate results.

Usually we’d have a few weeks for these kinds of projects, but for the Throwdown each team had only 2 hours to come up with a better customer experience. We crammed the entire project process into this timeframe: analysis, identification of the problem, brainstorming solutions and creating deliverables. What can we say, we like a challenge!

My team tackled the Hampton Jitney bus schedule, a printed tangle of times, places and notes. As it currently exists, the schedule doesn’t mesh with the service that the company provides: comfortable, luxurious transportation to vacation destinations. Our goal was to make the trip planning process as pleasant as the trip.

Keeping the customer in mind

We first thought about the customers who ride the Jitney – everybody from upper income customers riding the Ambassador line to their summer homes, to young professionals looking for a quick, easy way to get to the beach. One thing these customers have in common is that they’re likely to have smart phones and be comfortable using mobile services, so we decided to create a mobile website they could use to plan their schedules.

A mobile site eliminates the primary difficulty with a print schedule – having to show all possible itineraries at once. With the mobile site, we could show users only the schedules that are relevant to them. Once users create their schedule, we let them print it, email it to themselves or their friends or share it on social networks.

We created a paper prototype of the site to show how users would select their schedule and what the schedule would look like when they’re done. To see what we came up with, go to our Facebook photo album.

Wouldn’t it be cool if…

Having worked through the basics, we then considered what the site could do to “surprise and delight” the customer. We thought of how the screens on JetBlue flights show you your plane as it flies across the map, orienting you to where you are and providing a sense of progress. Similarly, our site would access your location (after asking for permission, of course) so it could show you where you were on your trip and give you updated arrival times.

Customers on the Ambassador lines could use the site to reserve seats or order snacks. And users who plan to repeat the same trip another time could create an account that allows them to save their schedule and earn points and rewards for multiple trips.

Never enough time

Of course, the bus schedule is only one part of the Hampton Jitney customer experience. We were brimming with ideas for improving the signs at the bus stops, training bus stop attendants and making the ride a special experience. However, our two hours were up, and we had to get back to our other projects (the ones we actually get paid for).

We’re all looking forward to next year, and we hope you will come up with some more great challenges for us to tackle!

Sarah Negugogor is a senior information architect for the Siegel+Gale New York office.