This project was done in collaboration with Love Loughborough (Business Improvement District Loughborough)

The challenge

To improve students' experience of Loughborough town centre.

Loughborough town centre has struggled to make itself an appealing place for students to spend their spare time. Instead, students would choose to either stay on university campus or go to nearby cities (e.g. Leicester, Nottingham, or Derby) to spend some of their spare time and consequently their money. So, the problems were...

Not enough footfall
Independent shops struggle
Relationship between town and students at Loughborough isn't great

The process

Research

It started off with desk-based research focused on topics such as the customer experience of town centres or Mary Portas Review of England's high streets' struggles.

I also went to Loughborough Town Centre to look at different areas and businesses to explore why they exist and what they offer.

For primary research, I planned to recruit participants and using 2 research methods understand their attitude, recent behaviours, and their expectations around how they'd spend their spare time in town/city centre:

Semi-structured in-depth interview (60 mins)

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Read more on the interview's structure and questions

Ice Breaker

Name/age/ home location ?
Year of study (fresher / returner/ final year/ masters / PhD)?
Living On campus/ off campus?

Current Experience

Before coming to uni what was your perception of Loughborough as a town?
What are your hobbies?
How do you find l’boro for these hobbies?
How would you compare your hometown to Loughborough?
What’s good? What’s bad? (include what do you think of l’boro town centre? / how has your experience been so far?)
Is your lifestyle different now that you’re in l’boro? How?
How do you meet your needs in l’boro ? (e.g. shopping, entertainment, socialising, studying)
If you go to town centre, what are the reasons you go and interact with it?
If you travel to nearby cities, what are the reasons? (Leicester, Notts, Derby)
How do you hear about any interesting events that might happen in l’boro (on/off campus)? (markets, vintage fair, fun fair, etc)

Expectations

What’s the best experience you’ve had in Loughborough? (including everything)
What does a town/city need to be a lively one? To be vibrant? To provide awesome experience?

Digital Experiences

What are your fav website, top 5?

Mixture of card sorting + a co-creating method; a mash-up method I came up with as I wanted to understand target audience's expectations and mental model on a good social experience. Card sorting wasn't enough as I also wanted to understand what this experience might look like based on their recent past experiences of similar social spaces. So, by using some 'context cards', I prompted them about activities and contexts, and ask participants to draw the layout of their ideal town centre social space, what they'd see there, hear there, or do there.

One of the participants drawing a map.

To do more primary research, I also went to visit Soho in London and The Lanes in Brighton on an explorative trip. The aim was to see what makes these independent spaces desirable and attractive.

Analysis

I listened to all the interviews, reviewed the maps created by users, deconstructed the observations and insights into small chunks of information using affinity diagramming as a method. Then, I tried to make sense of all the information and find patterns.

Key findings

Awareness of what's going on in town centre and being able to plan is the most frustrating part of students' experience of Loughborough town centre
As students grow older, they interact with town more. Students living off-campus is a catalyst for this.
There’s more going on in Loughborough than what’s perceived by students. The main reason is lack of communication between town centre and students.
There isn’t a singular right answer for all students (obviously). The solution has to be focused on a certain group of students. The level of interest in alcohol-involved activities was a good differentiator in what people felt the town centre had to offer.
Experiences of places like Westfield in London, The Corner House in Nottingham, and Highcross in Leicester have really led students to desire for an area which not only provides convenience, but also opportunity to be spontaneous.
Demand for cultural / social activities is way higher than supply. Student would like to have more options for different types of outings; for example, dating, live music, fun evening activities, food related events.
Community spirit is very strong amongst students. This spirit starts on campus in first and possibly second year which means there’s a will to be a part of something great in town too.
Students like to have different and separate areas for different activities; studying only on campus and at home. There’s a preference for having a place for socialising or relaxing.
There’s a strong connection between quality of socialising and level of enjoyment; Majority of great experiences involve friends. Many activities which are more than basic needs are done with friends
Town centre needs a hub, a heart, a central place; Queen’s park, Town hall (good perception, gonna be profitable soon), market square (social strip),
Alternative vibe is attractive; Church Gate area which is more arty and has more independent businesses is quite attractive to some students
Visual appearance of the high street needs improvements; the town centre needs more urban decoration, greenery and flowers

Personas

Based on my research, I identified 2 prominent personas.

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Jack became the persona for whom the solution was meant to provide a solution. The reason is that he's less interested in alcohol-oriented activities which are less catered for in Loughborough.

Identifying pain points

Ideation & concepts

I came up with some ideas...

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Expand to see the list of these opportunities / ideas

•Using Mobile Technology for Information - possibly a responsive website having mobile as the top priority.

•Business Ideas - introducing some business ideas which are needed in the town centre of Loughborough.

•One-off Events - Having joint events between different businesses to provide more convenience and offer something new and different which is supported elements like live music.

•Pop-up Stores - Inspired by Boxpark in Shoreditch in London and this article from Financial Times here.

•Reverse Showrooming (e.g. Pinterest case study) - People find their fav online and maybe add them to their boards and then try to find them in real life. Source of article is from Harvard Business Review accessible here.

•Web app – Mobile first

•Designated spaces (spatial design) – socialising, relaxing, studying, quirky area for cool stuff, scapism

•Outdoor events - events at parks or outdoor festivals/parades

•Projection mapping - utilising the town hall building and turning it into a hub for cool events.

•Art Exhibitions or Installations - using open spaces and the town hall for promote local artists and also make the town more lively and culturally richer.

Selection of ideas

I invited Marketing Team of BID Loughborough (Love Loughborough) to Loughborough Design School and I presented what I’d done to them and asked them for their views and to help me with evaluation of opportunities/ideas.

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They took the ideas away and shared them with their board members. Then, they got back to me: “The feedback we have had from our Board members was good – they were very impressed with your ideas. It was felt that the most interesting – and practical – was ‘Designated spaces for socialisation and relaxing. This is very inkeeping with our Portas pilot project and looking at ways to make town centres a more pleasurable experience for visitors.

Off the back of the steer from BID Loughborough, I further developed the following 3 concepts.

Concept 3 (the chosen one)

Loughborough Social Quarter

This concept became the one I decided to take forward and develop further. The aim of the proposed service is to define a social quarter for Loughborough town centre, starting from the town hall and ends where the blacksmith pub is located, to create a new social experience that enhances the town for students.

To create a social space that meets a wide range of social needs for students particularly those who don't want alcohol to be the main focus.
To facilitate collaborations and better communication between businesses to enable them to organise events together and communicate them to students
To provide a sense of belonging and togetherness within this area so that students feel that this area is designed for them and based on their needs.
To provide more of music, art, dance, and performances at the town centre through affordable events and to appreciate students' visits by providing deals and offers.

Service specifications

Defining a physical area called Loughborough Social Quarter; dedicated to social interactions – from Loughborough town hall to Blacksmiths pub

Businesses in this area are focusing on social interactions and providing opportunities for gatherings without excessive consumption of alcohol (e.g. live gigs, hosting magic shows, mini fashion shows, food festivals, themed activities)
Having collaboration between businesses to hold events together. This provides extra convenience for people and mimics the convenience of retails and food spaces such as the Cornet House, High Cross in Leicester, or Westfield in London.
Businesses which shut at 5 pm should keep running until 7 pm. This can be piloted on Fridays and over the weekends for a period.

An app or web app for smartphones to show what's on, tailor the experience to the user and their location, enable mobile payment and budgeting, offer discounts, and invite users to take part in challenge-like games.

Visually improving the appearance of the area by installing Social Quarter's branding elements and using more of plants and flowers.

Providing businesses with guidelines on how their stores could look better (e.g. areas to paint, colour combinations, detailing)

Testing end-to-end experience (low-fidelity)

For the 1st round of testing the whole service, I tried to put the participants in the right context by using boards explaining the steps of the scenario with details.

I would ask questions and would get feedback on the offline and online experiences as we were going through the scenario.

Instead of the user going to physical spaces, card representing different contexts were used during the testing sessions.

Designing and test the app

I had 3 rounds of iterations to get the app's paper prototype ready for the test mentioned above.

Then, I increased the fidelity to have a more polished, interactive prototype. I tested the app mock-up in the context of the whole service prototype.

Interactive prototype for the app

... and the app sits in a wide context of offline and online experiences. Here's the story of the persona interacting with the proposed service – Loughborough Social Quarter.

Scroll the content to go through the story...

Output

I presented the findings and proposals to Love Loughborough
I also had the opportunity to present the idea of Loughborough Social Quarter to some business managers in the town centre who had a partnership with Business in the Community. There were business reps from Boots and Santander
I turned the output of this project into a business plan, received support from Loughborough enterprise office (after writing a business plan) to start a business off the back of it.
I ended up creating a very lite version of this service by creating an Instagram & Facebook pages, called Indie Lboro, to promote independent businesses in Loughborough. This was to raise awareness of what these businesses were up to.

Reflection

Ideally, it'd have liked to do more rounds of testing and iterating for the whole end-to-end journey. Also, there was no solid prioritisation of different elements of the service. It'd have been good if I could defined a feasible first iteration of the whole end-to-end service.

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Improving experience of Loughborough town centre for young adults