Urban Planning for Digital Services
Digital services are becoming more and more social, connected and transform into public spaces we actually live in — similar to urban spaces. This article explores concepts and techniques from urban planning, that might be useful for strategy and design in digital spaces.
Service Ecology
Prior to any attempt to solve a problem we should understand its context. In urban planning quite some effort is made to understand flora and fauna of the region. Tenants’ opinions are captured and data about infrastructure, public transport or landmarks is collected in order to define the problem and find a solution that really improves the situation.
Likewise User Experience (UX) builds on the idea to really understand and empathise with the user. However it seems equally important to understand the wider service ecology in terms of surrounding (digital) services culture and competitors, availability and interdependencies of data and technologies.
All this reduces the risk of re-inventing the wheel. It helps to define concepts for services that do not conflict with existing behaviours and really do fit into their environment.
“Mobile apps aren’t products, they are service avatars that link users into business ecosystems” (Peter Moorville in Intertwingled)
Expert Opinions
Urban planning strongly builds on collaboration with experts from all kinds of relevant fields, e.g. environment, politics, economics or population.
In UX relevant domains are much harder to pinpoint. Running stakeholder workshops is good practice. Good UX researchers and designers should be well equipped with a solid understanding of the human mind already. However it might still be useful to consult relevant (external) experts, such as psychologists, learning specialist, or any other domain expert throughout a project in order to map out the cognitive and emotional environment of a future service.
Constraints maps
In urban planning so-called constraint maps are used to visualise limitations on any design activity.
This is a fairly straightforward process for environmental constraints, noise or areas with the danger of flooding. Yet we are still in process of defining good ways to display the abstract constraints on digital services — such as conflicting attitudes, cultures, preference of particular devices, digital channels, times of usage or even aspects of perception and memory.
Mapping and visualising constraints provides a tangible artefact, a boundary object, for discussion of each of the different aspects and layers of the problem.
“In short, using external representations (like a customer journey, blueprint or other visualisation technique) make us smarter and better communicators … ” (Fabian Segelström in Understanding Visualisation Practices)
Visual constraints maps also allow us to design, or annotate implications of the design on top of the data. Maybe it is a useful idea to design deliverables from user research with the idea in mind to enable stakeholders and designers to discuss findings and build ideation and solutions on top of these constraints.
Infrastructure
Understanding public transport, streets and technical infrastructure is naturally part of any research of urban areas.
Likewise mapping out the journey towards and away from a (digital) service can yield insight about potential shortcuts or duplicates. This means digital routes, e.g. through Google, shared links on social media or bookmarks — as well as physical touchpoints, e.g. across different kinds of devices or locations.
Resources
Undertakings in urban planning are defined with their effect on population and environment in mind. Concerning digital tools, it might be useful to also steer design of a solution by available resources.
Attention is certainly one of the most valuable resources on the web. Why don’t we consider the amount of attention available first — before sketching out even a conceptual design? Depending on user group and use case we might be able to estimate how much time and motivation is available. Such an estimate could be used to map out amount and detail of content on user flows and sitemaps.
Engagement is another example of a limited resource for customer facing services. While so-called seamless onboarding experiences are based on the idea of very limited customer engagement, it might be useful to be much more explicit about it. Being clear about assumptions of levels of engagement at different stages of the journey, different designs can better be discussed and evaluated.
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This article is a loose collection of thoughts on methods and aspects in urban planning, that could benefit strategy and design for digital services.
The need for research on the ecology of a service, its surrounding infrastructure and involvement of external experts was mentioned. Constraints maps were introduced as a metaphor to visually communicate limitations, as well as resources, such as attention or engagement. It builds on observations gained during contextual interviews with urban planners during a research project.
Sources of images:
(1) Ecosystem, from the paper: Keystone Interactions: Salmon and Bear in Riparian Forests of Alaska. Authors: James M. Helfield and Robert J. Naiman. Published 2006 in the journal Ecosystems (volume 9, pp 167–180).
(2) Urban Planing, (3) Attention, licensed under the Creative Commons
