Station Ticket Office Design
Heathrow Express
BACKGROUND
Heathrow Express delivers a fast transit service between London Paddington and Heathrow Airport. The service is designed to facilitate plane passenger movement with luggage check-in at Paddington and low level trains to ease moving luggage on/off the trains. Operated by BAA, Heathrow Express carries an average of 15,000 passengers every day and over 50 million people have travelled on the service since its launch in 1998
PROJECT
We were commissioned to review the ticket desks at Heathrow and at Paddington Station and provide an ergonomic re-design. The aims of the audit were to:
- Assess the existing desks against ergonomics good practice
- Identify health & safety requirements
- Identify user/staff needs
- Provide recommendations for a new design
IMPLEMENTATION
Our team visited the ticket desks and spent a day discussing the work with the staff and observing them in action. The audit included developing a task analysis of the operational activities and video analysis of the staff. Ten ticket desk staff were consulted. From the data captured this was able to feed our design team to make recommendations for improvements.
OUTCOMES
The project identified a number of positives where the workstations met ergonomics and H&S good practice. It also highlighted a number of other issues such as seating, operator posture when providing passengers with information and the location of equipment. Our intervention gave HEX a clear perspective on the risks in the current environment and a design approach for their resolution.