AMTRAK by Roger Martin

“Travelers didn’t favor the airlines over Amtrak because they disliked Amtrak’s cars. Travelers avoided Amtrak because they disliked the entire Amtrak experience. They didn’t like booking tickets on Amtrak, they didn’t like waiting in Amtrak stations, they didn’t like the boarding procedures. Once they’d run that gauntlet, Amtrak’s cars could have been furnished in silk and gold, and it wouldn’t have made a difference.

[IDEO CEO Tim] Brown persuaded Amtrak to rethink the design challenge and put IDEO’s designers to work analyzing the typical train trip. They determined it involved ten distinct steps: learning, planning, starting, entering, ticketing, waiting, boarding, riding, arriving, and continuing (their subsequent journey). The interior of the railcar was relevant to only one of ten steps in the customer experience: riding.

. . . In Amtrak’s case, ‘the whole thing’ involved an end-to-end rethink of the entire Acela customer experience—the very definition of holistic architecture. Not only were Acela railcars redesigned, so were train stations, interactive information kiosks, employee workstations, and indeed the Acela brand, which was positioned as an experience that was superior in every respect to air travel.”