For over 10 years, Point has been measuring satisfaction with the state roads among private individuals and professional traffic for the Swedish Transport Administration. In 2018, the Swedish Transport Administration made a request to develop both the work method and the output from the measurement. Point then, together with the Swedish Transport Administration, started a service design project to investigate the needs of relevant recipients internally at the Swedish Transport Administration, as well as investigate the road users' experience of traveling on state roads linked to answering questions about the experience. Based on the mapping, a digital and technical development process was decided upon, where Point, together with the digital strategy and development agency Varvet, developed an implementation of a clickable map inside the survey tool used for the project. In 2021 the project entered a third round of development, where an app based digital solution for passive data collection was tested.
The project used a service design approach, where the goal was to capture the needs of both the team at the Swedish Transport Administration as well as the users of the national highway network.
The process was iterative; the first step was to interview employees at the Swedish Transport Administration about how they currently used the results of the yearly survey and how the value of the data and insights could be increased. In the next step, Point packaged the insights from the interviews and led a workshop together with a group consisting of central stakeholders for the project and it’s output. The workshop also included a future forecasting process, where the goal was to future-proof the new, emerging version of the measurement and ensure that the setup stood up over time. In the third step, based on the results of the workshop, to Point produced some different sketches of concepts for a new version of the measurement. The concepts were discussed with key representatives of the Swedish Transport Administration based on needs and feasibility and a decision was made on a direction for the work moving forward.
In the fourth step, Point designed a prototype for a new layout and look for the survey, including a mock-up for an interactive map feature where respondents could visually input their route. The prototype was tested and feedback was collected from road users. In the fifth step, a digital development process was initiated where Point and Varvet worked in close collaboration. A Google Maps implementation was developed within the digital survey tool intended to be used for the survey. In addition, in close communication with competence for managing the database NVDB (National Road Data Base) at the Swedish Transport Administration, an implementation was developed to use API calls to match coordinates from the respondents’ answers in the map in the survey against data about road type from the database. In the sixth step, the new version of the survey and associated digital infrastructure was quantitatively tested with 250 respondents. Based on the results and some adjustments, larger, follow-up tests could then be carried out.
The project resulted in a new type of index calculation, better adapted to how road users experience and interpret the traffic environment, an interactive map to register road users’ route and a matching of data against the NVDB to be able to relate road experience and problems to the road types that the Swedish Transport Administration uses of. The new design of the index ensures results that are closer to the road user’s experience, which is the very focus of the measurement. At the same time, the functionality of being able to link experience and problems to road type gives the Swedish Transport Agency the opportunity to better weigh experience into the maintenance work.
Based on this initial development process, the work to develop the measurement has since been taken further, and there is now ongoing tests of an app-based solution to passively collect position data from road users.