The Driving Standards Agency management conferences are aimed at senior DSA managers to promote strategic thinking and define a vision for the future. In the past, these conferences lacked interactivity and engagement. To spice things up me and the team from HMC came up with the concept of ‘Diary Wheels’; A classic Mini Cooper, painted in the DSA’s colours. The car was gutted and pimped out with a plasma screen TV and custom built video diary software. Think of Kit from Knightrider but with a twist!

“The Diary Wheels concept was not only innovative and topical, but provided us with a new approach to gaining feedback from our staff in a humorous and engaging way” Diane Wragg, Internal Communications Manager, DSA

Once a user climbed inside the Diary Wheels the well known voice of Big Brother interrogated the delegates for a bit of Q&A fun. With all answers automatically recorded and edited overnight to be shown as vox-pops the next day (which received a huge round of applause), it proved to be the most successful way of finding out what really matters to DSA staff. At one point five DSA employees climbed into the Mini at once! For each conference over an hour of high quality feedback footage was filmed, edited and delivered to the DSA.

The Diary Wheels has since been around the country on tour. It has been particularly successful in engaging with the 18-24 demographic, an age range which the DSA traditionally had trouble receiving adequate feedback from.

Role
Software project management, UX, Install

Length
4 weeks. Completed in 2008

Team size
Creative Director, Project manager, Designer, UX, Developer, 2xInstall crew

Deliverable
Interactive Mini

Design process
Interaction audit, concepting, UX and visual design, user testing, design refinements

I programmed 32 touch reactive screens and turned them into the perfect live Q&A system for the Driving Standards Agency’s annual management conference.

The screens were developed to cope with multiple uses; voting, anonymous feedback, quizzes with scoring and submission of questions. This interactive was hugely successful and effective as it offered the DSA a non-intrusive feedback system which was great fun to use, over 90% of the delegates agreed that the interactive screens were useful.

Additionally this interactive included a live Q&A system which was displayed on a mammoth 20ft projection screen. DSA employees were able to anonymously ask questions to the Board of Directors about the company and these were answered in situ. Over 500 questions asked and 186 surveys about the event were completed; a massive increase on the previous year’s results.

Role
Project management, UX, Design, Development, Install

Length
8 weeks. Completed in 2008

Team size
Creative Director, Project manager, 2xDesigners, UX, 2xDevelopers, 4xInstall crew

Deliverable
20ft Q&A interface, 32xKiosks

Design process
Interaction audit, concepting, UX and visual design, user testing, design refinements