Designing an anxiety-free travel framework to inform the future HS2 passenger experience
Explored passenger behaviours and emotional drivers to guide long-term experience design decisions for the UK's largest infrastructure project — generating actionable insight early enough to influence future design.
HS2 is one of the UK's largest infrastructure projects, involving multiple stakeholders, long delivery timelines, and highly diverse passenger needs. The challenge was to generate actionable insight early enough to influence future design — while working within significant uncertainty and continuously evolving system definitions. The risk of acting too late was real: experience decisions baked into infrastructure are expensive to reverse. The work needed to surface what passengers actually felt and needed, translate that into a shared language across all design and supply chain partners, and do so in a way that remained useful long after the initial research was complete.
Passenger stress was not evenly distributed — it concentrated around specific decision points and transitions where information or control disappeared.
Passengers needed to feel safe and informed, not just move quickly. Reassurance — through communication, wayfinding, and visible cues — was as operationally important as speed.
Not knowing what to expect next was consistently more distressing than delays, crowds, or physical discomfort — pointing to information design as a critical lever.
Research designed to surface behavioural and emotional drivers at scale — in real environments, not controlled settings.
Conducted with passengers mid-journey and in stations to capture live emotional state, decision-making, and real-time experience of anxiety triggers.
Observed passenger behaviour across eight major UK train stations to map naturally occurring patterns, bottlenecks, and moments of confusion or distress.
Extended conversations with passengers with accessibility needs to surface experience gaps invisible to standard observation — ensuring the framework served all passengers.
Project Manager & Research Lead
Tools built to remain useful across the entire HS2 supply chain — long after the research phase was complete.
Defined by cause, anxiety, and aspirational outcome — providing a shared language for passenger-centred decision-making across all HS2 design partners.
Summarised research findings and interview excerpts to humanise the insight — delivered to the client, stakeholders, and future HS2 suppliers.
Journey maps, intercept interview guides, and micro-moments documentation — tools the HS2 team could continue using independently throughout the project's lifecycle.
"The detailed journey maps, framework and anxiety-free travel tagline is now the foundation for our ongoing design and development work. We are constantly referring to and using the tools."
Martin Philips
Customer Experience Manager, HS2
From passenger research to national infrastructure design standard
The Anxiety-Free Travel Framework became a foundational reference across HS2's internal design and procurement processes.
Research directly shaped the HS2 connected travel experience vision — influencing decisions that will affect millions of future passengers.
Provided a common framework for passenger-centred decision-making across every design and engineering partner working on HS2.