In Switzerland, public institutions are held to a high standard: things should simply work. The Université de Neuchâtel serves students, staff, residents and visiting citizens across a wide range of counter-based services, each with its own paperwork, its own rhythm and its own queue.
That standard held everywhere except in the wait itself. Visitors arrived unsure which service they needed, took a ticket without knowing what it represented, and sat down with no sense of how long they would be there. Behind the counter, employees coordinated flow manually across departments that each worked differently, with no shared view of who was waiting, for what, or for how long.
Mindflares partnered with the University and its associated Swiss departments to design a customisable queue management ecosystem: one platform, many touchpoints, built to be configured by each department rather than rebuilt for each one.
The mandate was clear:
Give every visitor certainty about where they stand and how long it will take
Give every counter employee one coherent way to manage flow
Give every department a system it can shape to its own services without leaving the platform
Challenges
Discovery surfaced four fault lines. Each one compounded the next.
Methodology
We approached this as a service design problem, not a screen design problem. A queue is not one interface, it is a chain of moments that has to hold together from the door to the counter.
That meant designing for two users at once: the visitor, who wants certainty, and the counter employee, who wants control. Every decision was tested against both.
Our process moved through six phases:
Empathize
Define
Ideate the Solution
Prototype
Experience Validation
Design
Empathize with users
Waiting is rarely frustrating because of its length. It is frustrating because of its uncertainty. Ten known minutes feel shorter than five unknown ones, and almost everything that makes a public service queue unpleasant lives in that gap between how long people wait and how long the wait feels.
So we started before the screens. We studied how people actually behave in a service hall: what they look for on arrival, what they assume a ticket means, when they check the display, when they give up checking, and when they approach staff to ask the question the system should have answered.
We did the same on the other side of the counter because a queue that works for visitors but fights its employees is not a solved queue.
Waiting is rarely frustrating because of its length. It is frustrating because of its uncertainty.
About the Research
Our research focused on the full arc of the waiting experience:
Behaviours, expectations and pain points across every stage of the wait
End-to-end journey mapping: from arrival and service selection, through ticket collection and waiting, to service completion
Friction mapping: isolating where unclear instructions, missing updates and uncertainty created anxiety and unnecessary staff interruptions
Two-sided needs analysis: visitors and service-counter employees studied as distinct user groups with distinct success criteria
Opportunity framing: translating findings into concrete, prioritised opportunities to improve flow and reduce perceived waiting time
The visitor arc
Friction appeared wherever the service stopped communicating.
Define
The research converged on a single insight: the system was operationally sound but communicatively silent. Visitors were not underserved, they were uninformed. Reframing the brief from managing queues to communicating progress changed what we needed to build.
From evidence to one reframed brief
Research findings clustered into four themes around a single systemic insight.
Personas
We built personas for both sides of the counter: visitors arriving with different levels of familiarity, language and urgency, and counter employees managing concurrent queues under time pressure. Each persona carried its own definition of a good experience, and the system had to satisfy all of them at once.
Two sides of the same queue
Different pressures. One shared definition of a good experience.
Ideate the Solution
User Flows
We mapped the ecosystem as a set of interlocking flows rather than isolated apps: how a visitor selects a service and receives a ticket; how that ticket travels through the queue; how a counter employee calls, serves, redirects or reassigns it; and how every one of those actions surfaces in real time on the public display.
Getting these flows right early is what allowed one system to serve departments with genuinely different processes: the logic flexes, the experience stays consistent.
A ticket moving through one system
The logic flexes by department; the experience stays consistent.
Wireframes
Wireframes were produced for every surface in the ecosystem — kiosk, public display, counter web app, admin console and tablet — and reviewed with University stakeholders and counter staff. Working across all five in parallel, rather than sequentially, kept the information architecture coherent: the same ticket, described the same way, wherever it appeared.
Prototype
Wireframes were elevated into high-fidelity, interactive prototypes covering the complete visitor and employee journeys. The goal was to make the system behave convincingly enough to be judged on experience rather than imagination — before a single line of production code was written.
Experience Validation
Prototype testing simulated the key journeys end to end, for both user groups:
Service selection and ticket issuance at the kiosk
Queue progression and real-time status updates on the public display
Counter-side operations: calling, serving, redirecting and reassigning visitors
Administrative configuration of services, queues, users and settings
Testing surfaced usability issues while they were still inexpensive to fix, refined the interaction model around how staff genuinely work, and gave stakeholders a shared, tangible reference point. By the time development began, the experience was settled, the build was an implementation exercise, not a discovery one.
Validated end-to-end before build
Four critical journeys tested with visitors, counter staff, and stakeholders.
Design Brought to Life
The delivered ecosystem spans an Admin Console, a Counter Web App, a Display App and TV & Tablet Apps: administration, service delivery and public communication unified in one scalable platform.
Six principles shaped every screen:
Certainty over speed. Show position, progress and estimated wait. Perceived time is the metric that matters.
One system, many configurations. Departments configure their own services, queues, users and workflows without a separate build.
Multilingual by default. French, German and English are equal citizens of the interface, not afterthoughts, a necessity in a multilingual canton.
Two sides, one language. Visitor-facing and staff-facing interfaces share vocabulary, states and structure, so nothing is lost in translation across the counter.
Legible at three metres. Public displays were designed for the distance they are actually read from: typography, contrast and hierarchy set for the room, not the desktop.
Calm by design. Restrained colour, generous space and quiet motion. A waiting room is not the place for a busy interface.
One ecosystem, five connected surfaces
The same ticket, state, and language stay coherent wherever they appear.
Takeaway
The Université de Neuchâtel project reframed queue management as a communication problem. By designing for certainty rather than throughput alone, and for employees as seriously as for visitors, we turned a fragmented, silent wait into a guided, predictable experience, delivered as one connected ecosystem that any department can make its own.
Director, Digital Business Channels at Mobily, Saudi Arabia
''A highly professional and reliable team. Through their strong understanding of our business and user needs, Mindflares delivered a high-quality bilingual UI/UX revamp and scalable Design Language System. Their expertise and close collaboration improved usability, consistency, accessibility, and development efficiency across Mobily Business.''
Kassem Baalbaki
Chief Information Officer at SMC Healthcare, Saudi Arabia
''Working with Mindflares has been a professional and collaborative experience. Their team demonstrated a good understanding of our objectives and provided valuable insights to support the continued enhancement of our digital patient experience. Overall, it was a smooth project and timeline was fully respected”
Carole Alsharabati
Founding Partner of Siren Analytics and Siren Associates
"Mindflares is one of those companies that makes magic happen for your products. It starts with a three-word request and ends up with a solidly grounded UX/UI design that conquers and charms the users. Their agility, commitment, and creativity are impressive. They are the kind of partner you need to ace your objectives and succeed in your business."
Wissam Youssef
Co-Founder and General Manager of CME Offshore
"Partnering with Mindflares has been an inspiring and fruitful journey and still is. Mindflares’ approach to business combines high ethics, transparency, and communication skills which were keys to our success."
