What are the Differences and Similarities Between Urban Development and Internet Product Development?
I would start recording my critical thinkings through Medium about my career transition from Urban Planning to UX Design. Today’s topic is about the differences and similarities between Urban Development and Internet Product Development.
As a previous Urban Planner, I took part in several sociologic research projects before, which involves massive data analysis endeavor. For example, to better understand the housing situation in low-income families and help them with policy solutions, we need to find out the relationships between the geographic distribution of those low-income families and their demographic characteristics thus to estimate the assistantship cost in fundings and direction of where and how to distribute those fundings to groups with real need.
The similarity is about the scope of need.
Similar to the Urban Planning thinking which is also human-centered and heavily sociologic and determined by human behaviors, we make product strategy decisions based on a thorough understanding of behavioral phenomena as well, and they both lead to funding decisions.
Among all kinds of the design process, the common standard in term of judging whether the design solutions are good or not is mostly revealed by the scope on human’s need from fact basis research. Problems and demands always came from a comprehensive understanding of facts. Good designs should reveal empathy of the active users or local citizens who live their lives in the neighborhood. The form to present the solution is flexible, it can be architectural construction, real-life products, people-protecting policies or simply an application. The point is about a passion and empathy to care about people and their problem, and whether you think critically enough with insightful perspectives and logic.
The difference is about cost and risk.
The biggest difference for me is that Urban Planning decisions are more about reputation and politics rather than profit, while internet services/products are eventually for-profit and reputation follows naturally with the profit gain.
Definitely, the real impact on the differences during the iteration process is much more obvious than what I stated above. You can never, or have to cost huge, iterate your urban development as fast as you iterate your web product through user feedbacks.
The cost to put iteration decision into actions in Urban Planning is much higher than a commercial decision to iterate a product, especially a web product. Not even simply with the money cost, but for sure it’s time-consuming, hard to gain support or satisfaction for all groups, some of those developments can also have a huge environmental impact, which can be irreversible.
When you are preparing for an Urban Planning decision on whether Urban Design perspective or policy-making perspective, even if you gained abundantly about what’s the current demand and how to describe the characteristics of current local citizens, it’s always hard to make the forecast on a next-generation behavior or demand that would only get exposure within at least 20 years. Cities are growing to shape a complex culture, like say, for those communities that lack solid city infrastructure, the cost to iterate their exiting living environment and make them happy about the decision to iterate is so hard. Citizens may not really happy about your decision, even if decision makers know well about the positive impact of those actions.
The environmental cost in Urban Development can be irreversible, making it risky for a superficial development decision without sufficient time and efforts on a dedicated environmental study, thus a well sound development decision has to be a smart judgment that making the best use of existing resources and avoiding non-necessary waste. The decision makers take full credit when determining a good planning decision.
Comparing to Urban Planning, the decision-making process is more related to revenue or popularity among users. The type of risk in term of a decision failure can be targetable and largely measurable. Once you have done the math when determining the goal of product growth and features to focus, it’s much easier to concentrate the effort to improve the product with consumer first objectives.
