I think blue and butterflies means no

Let’s have more “think-out-loud” user testing for urban design.

The first phase of Move Culver City officially launched on November 20th. The project is “reimagining of our streets as public spaces and prioritizes moving people over cars in the design of the street.” Essentially, it reduced Washington Blvd down to one lane for cars, created dedicated bus & bike lanes, and checks off a lot of the tactical urbanism boxes¹.

On launch weekend we rode our bikes along the new corridor to check it out and really enjoyed it. Other than filling out a survey at one point I wasn’t involved in this project at all. But as a planner and local resident of Culver City, I think it’s really interesting.

Conceptual renders by Street Plans

Of course, the Unofficial Culver City Facebook group is full of drivers who are really mad about the whole thing. Not surprising, so it would be easy to scroll past these and just dismiss it as a bunch of NIMBYs ranting on Facebook.

But I actually find it really interesting reading all the comments to understand why people are so resistant. I’m really curious how future projects could make drivers more amenable to sharing the road.

The main complaints have been about increased traffic, confusing lanes, confusing signals, poor visibility of the wheel stops, and not seeing busses and bikes use these new lanes, etc. But it wasn’t until someone posted this video that I really understood their perspective.

Ok, the left lane to right lane to left lane switch and multiple signals is legitimately confusing.

I actually kind of love this video

One, you do actually see some pedestrians and bicyclists milling about in the background, so that’s nice. And even though it’s clear these drivers are not in favor of the changes, I appreciate that the took the time to share their opinion about the project. But mostly I just love the fact that you can see these people trying different things and talking through how they’re experiencing it.

One of my favorite things is watching people try to figure out how to use something for the first time and hearing their thought processes as they go along.

Watching this video just reminded me how much I enjoyed user testing² when I was doing more product & UX work. We would often give people a task and ask people to just “think out loud” while they tried to figure out how they would go about doing it (kind of like this example, but typically sober) and then compensate them for their time.

The video also just made me wonder why I haven’t seen more of this type of compensated “think out loud” testing within urban planning in general.

Inputs

There are lots of other ways people gather community input during planning processes like surveys, meetings with stakeholders, pop ups at community events, walk audits, etc. And during these pilot studies lots of data gets collected through online feedback forms and various data sources.

Left: an example in-person outreach event in the Culver City Bicycle & Pedestrian Action Plan (2020), Right: a slide from a presentation at the mobility subcommittee meeting in September

All of those are fine and good, but I still think there’s an opportunity to do something that captures more of the real thought process in context. Videos are great because it’s also easy to share with others and empathize with the users more than reading survey results or just looking at a few data points and bar graphs.

I don’t think it would have to be that complicated:

1. Recruit a representative sample of people of people across a diverse demographic
2. Give them some tasks, navigating some aspect of the streetscape.
3. Have them record video while thinking out loud
4. Compensate them for their time

Maybe this is already happening in some places and I just haven’t come across it. If so, I’d love to see other examples of these “think out loud” tests for planning, please send them my way!

Future

I’m really looking forward to seeing how Culver City evolves over the next few years. They have a pretty ambitious plan for the bike network and I really hope these new bike lanes proposed for the southern half of the city (near our place) actually get installed soon, and I hope the City collects lots of good data and videos of everyone’s experience throughout the process so people can see how things are actually being used in the real world.

Culver City bike network recommendations from the Bicycle & Pedestrian Action Plan (2020)

Notes:

1. This makes a lot of sense since Street Plans, the folks who worked on it, literally wrote several guides about tactical urbanism strategies.
2. Even helped write an e-book about it.