Overview
Ran a structured ideation workshop for the agency behind California's Pacific Surfliner route, mapping digital ideas for the first-and-last-mile, booking, and on-board passenger experience by impact versus effort.
Who This Is For
Regional or national rail networks, public transport authorities, or mobility operators with 500-20,000 employees managing digital customer communications across web, app, and service channels. Typically operating a content landscape that has grown without strategy creating inconsistent information architecture and a content production process that cannot keep pace with service changes.
The Challenge
The LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency, which runs the Pacific Surfliner route along the California coast, wanted concrete digital ideas for improving the passenger experience, not just at the point of booking, but before a passenger ever reaches the station and while they're on board.
Our Approach
Ran a "How Might We" workshop in July 2018 structured around three passenger moments: the first-and-last-mile journey to and from stations, the booking experience, and the on-board experience. Each stream generated concrete ideas plotted on an impact-versus-effort grid, shuttle schedule information and location-aware departure alerts, an interactive station and destination map, pre-boarding video content, a simplified one-click booking flow, an on-board wayfinding map showing amenities and conductor location, geolocated points-of-interest alerts, and faster onboard wifi. The session followed a value-proposition-canvas exercise mapping passenger needs against what the agency's digital channels currently offered.
Impact
A structured way to turn a broad ambition, "improve the passenger experience", into a prioritised list of concrete, buildable ideas, sorted by what would actually move the needle against what it would take to build.
Delivered while employed at Making Waves (later NoA Ignite), as part of a content and UX team. Any public information referenced here is used for identification and does not imply endorsement.
Topics
Delivered Norwegian-to-English translation and QA review of SpareBank 1 Markets' website content, covering their research, corporate finance and capital markets service lines.
Built a data-driven content and channel strategy for Econa, Norway's professional association for economists and business graduates, building on an already-delivered website redesign to reduce member churn.
Built a CRM-connected advertising sales platform for a leading Nordic digital marketplace. Connected audience data, targeting options, advertising formats, pricing and sales contacts into a single self-service portal for advertisers and media agencies, replacing a fragmented sales experience with a repeatable path from research to qualified inquiry.
CMS Architecture for AI-Driven Enterprises
Choosing and Configuring the Right Content Platform for Intelligent Operations
Dries Buytaert: The cost of running multiple CMS platforms
Dries Buytaert argues that running multiple CMS platforms creates hidden operational costs through duplicated integrations, security policies, expertise, and governance. He proposes standardizing on Drupal while using different operating models—SaaS (Acquia Source) for speed and PaaS (Acquia Cloud) for control—to preserve flexibility while reducing fragmentation.