Designing Tools for NYC Zoning Impact Analysis
Last August I started as Interaction Designer on the Planning Labs team, an energetic powerhouse transforming digital services across the NYC Department of City Planning.
After many years of working as a design consultant on transit tech and advocacy projects, I was ready to find out what innovating public services looked like from the inside. I was brought on to design for CEQR App, a rapidly evolving toolkit to support the City’s Environmental Quality Review process (CEQR).
The bulk of our work at City Planning centers around managing neighborhood planning initiatives and private land use applications, often proposing zoning changes, and preparing them for public review. Prior to sending projects off for public review, our planners define and assess a proposed development’s RWCDS (Reasonable Worst Case Development Scenario), review and check the CEQR analysis, and much more.
Let’s say for example that a developer wants to ‘upzone’ an industrial lot to make room for more residential opportunities.
The developer submits their project idea to City Planning, and from there is required to submit a Land Use Application.
As part of the application, the developer needs to perform an Environmental Quality Review analysis and disclose all potential environmental impacts of their proposed project. City Planning closely reviews the CEQR analysis to ensure accuracy and completeness before it is in the public’s hands to review.
CEQR analysis is used to identify any potential adverse environmental impacts of the proposed actions, assess their significance, and propose measures to eliminate or mitigate significant impacts. There are 19 chapters in the CEQR Technical Manual covering impacts on Shadows, Public Schools, Transportation, Community Facilities, etc. Calling the overall process complicated is an understatement. As is saying that planners enjoy acronyms.
CEQR App was built to help City Planning modernize and save time
With Labs available as an in-house engineering team to build modern web tools, we could design a custom product that precisely fit our needs for CEQR.
The tool pulls in data to help with CEQR analysis into one place — including Census data, City geo data, Open data and much more. Using available data to automate aspects of the analysis dramatically decreases the number of hours and costs involved in reviewing zoning change applications.
CEQR App’s success is viewed through the three lenses of technological intervention, policy change and process development, all aiming to meet the goals below:
- Reduce person hours and costs involved
- Make CEQR understandable and transparent
- Create faster reviews and greater certainty in project timelines
When I joined Labs, CEQR App was already successful in automating the end-to-end process of the Public Schools analysis (1 out of 19 chapters in the CEQR Technical Manual). This was a huge win, with ~300 users able to save 8 hours/project — a time savings of about 53%! Our next challenge was to tackle a much more complicated chapter, Transportation.
CEQR Transportation: The Design Process
Being new to the team gave me the freedom to ask basic questions and build up a picture of the App pipeline, based on in-person conversations with our users and stakeholders.
Step 1: Research
I structured an initial research plan , including an audit of the existing tool and interviews with planners, environmental review teams, and outside consultants. From there I diagrammed user flows, personas, and information architecture.
Step 2: Prototypes
Working with the engineering team, we wrote user stories for features based on what we learned in the initial research. I sketched early prototypes of features of the transportation chapter by hand.
Once we were able to get approval and consensus on direction, I moved on to designing click-through prototypes using Figma and Adobe XD that could be tested internally.
Step 3: Testing
We used our click-through prototypes to test ready-to-build features of the Transportation chapter. Our internal environmental review team approved the design and we created live prototypes to test with outside consultants.
We also took the opportunity to begin initial research on some planned features and test hand-drawn prototypes with outside groups.
Step 4: Results and Revisioning
Our tests proved that while our consultant users were excited by the opportunities of the Transportation features that we built, we also learned that their workflow was significantly more complicated than the Public Schools chapter.
We improved bugs and major problems UX issues surfaced in our initial tests, and are this month going back out for more usability testing on specific features, rather than trying to replicate the end-to-end workflow.
Our support tools for Transportation will be released later this month, follow the project on Github!
