UX on the 30th Floor: 8 Months with Planning Labs and NYC Department of City Planning
Last spring I started a contract embedded as part of the Planning Labs team at New York City’s Department of City Planning. I had been getting into the rhythm of design sprints for more customer-centric applications and was excited for a change of pace and the opportunity to help improve citywide products. Eight months later, I have a few takeaways I thought to share from my foray into civic tech and my experience working with the department.
A brief history of Planning Labs
For the uninitiated, Planning Labs was founded on the idea that a nimble internal team within the department can solve big problems using a modern web stack, open-source, and agile workflow. Given the specialized needs of planners and the data-dependent nature of the department’s everyday tasks, there’s certainly no shortage of problems to solve for. Two years later, Planning Labs has grown to a team of eight and oversees a suite of widely-used web applications, including ZoLa, Community Profiles, and Metro Region Explorer, all of which help to make dense city data more accessible and public. I was brought onto the team to conduct user research and provide design solutions for one of the department’s white whales — a new online platform for zoning applications. As part of Labs, I also lent a hand to CD Priorities, which helps community districts turn in their budgetary requests and Electronic Sign-In, which controls display screens and devices related to speaking order at City Planning Commission meetings.
Solving Classic UX / UI Problems
Left to its own devices, government products can default into an abyss of requirements that result in dense training materials to fill in usability gaps. This is UX gold, a place to review best practices, break out your toolkit and parse through the nuances of business, technology, and user needs. In city agencies, UX artifacts like personas have a cumulative effect with journeys and wireframes going a long way to elicit feedback and test assumptions. Once a structured design and development process is in place the potential for better design is wide open.
Mine, Research, Repeat
User research and recruitment is one of the hidden gems of working in government. Once you brush past some initial skepticism, potential users both inside and outside the department are more than happy to give you their input, as you gather research on a product that often impacts day-to-day lives. With no shortage of recruits, forging systematic ways to collect and synthesize ever-growing results of testing sessions, interviews, and surveys is key.
Gov ❤️ UX Strategy
Consumer products are driven by an inherent need to either compete for a base of users or to solve problems that define a potential set of new users. With little competition, civic products can suffer from the dependent nature of their audiences. This puts pressure on the ingenuity of teams to advocate for better, more pro-active user needs and prove that value in the department. Internal design teams can inform department objectives and produce visual documentation that helps align product initiatives with department personnel.
Design collaboratively
Wide-reaching digital initiatives are best realized through partnerships across the department and exploring ways to collaborate on specific product tasks. There is no shortage of design tools that can be well suited for sharing design documents and coordinating changes. For the bulk of my time here I used Figma to share and test wireframes/prototypes, Miro to share technical diagrams, and Microsoft Office 365’s collaborative document editing features. For research recruitment, scheduling, and recording I used Calendly chained with Zoom.us and Microsoft Office integrations.
The Dev & Design Sandbox
The downside of working with a small but successful web team overlooking a suite of products is that cross-functional design and development time is limited. This brings me to one of the major pitfalls of working in civic tech. In the private sector, teams that have proven their value grow into larger, more specialized teams. Design thinking is relatively new to the civic space and design research has yet to prove itself in the same way that engineering has. This leads to the prioritization of active development and an MVP mindset that can lead to design tasks at the periphery. The catch-22 is that product and UX design is best positioned to build alliances and help convey results to stakeholders and executives.
UX work doesn’t happen in a bubble, and my best ideas are wrought from conversations within the department, sessions with users, and other members of the Planning Labs team. The Department of City Planning is full of talented planners and technology professionals all working with civic touch points that are invaluable to many. I’m going to miss the type of work I did with Planning Labs and the department as a whole. For those jaded by conversion metrics and research incentives, this is UX in its purest form — discover and solve user problems that make a difference. My big takeaway is that designing in the civil space is not for the faint of heart and comes with its share of obstacles, but can be some of the most rewarding and impactful work you’ll be a part of.
