UX research case study: Malmö Civic Lab — Structured city data
If you want to get digital transformation right, it means stop aiming for perfection and start doing more things, poorly.
For the past 4 months, I’ve been a part of Malmo Civic Lab, an experiment by the city of Malmö to reveal ways of improving life for the citizens by prototyping using tech and design.
Malmö Civic Lab is not put in this world to disrupt, but to transform. For me, digital transformation means that we, together, change ways of working and the mindset towards work. It means we become comfortable being uncomfortable and we start doing more stuf poorly.
A big risk in Digital Transformation is framing it as a transition from one steady state to another when it’s really a transition from steady state to a state of constant change, learning and iteration. — Richard Hylerstedt
Digital transformation often comes with long-term, fluffy plans and 2025 strategies. This is a trap we all fall in, setting fluffy, ambitious goals eg. “One day I want to run a marathon” without even being able of running 10K and having no plans of doing a small jog within the next week and thereby setting oneself up for one hundred per cent failure.
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly
Structured city data
A problem we’ve been experiencing in Malmö is the amount of inaccurate and outdated data the city is communicating; Wrong opening hours, inaccurate addresses and phone numbers coming from schools, social services, and everywhere in the city.
Our ambition is to have one master data sheet, updating all channels; website, Facebook, google maps etc. Many companies, cities etc are already doing this and doing it well and many learnings have already been done, so we can steal from the best.
This is a long-term and ambitious project, which depends on a lot of people and departments, so we wanted to start small — What could we do today?
Use what you have
A pain we felt ourselves, was navigating to the five social service offices in Malmö; Norr, Öster, Söder, Väster and Innerstad. The information was only accessible on the malmo.se website, behind a dropdown menu.
So, to reach our ambitious goal of having structured city data, we started small and used what was already accessible and used by millions of people, Google Maps. And instead of collecting data from all departments, we started small and solved our own pain — Locating the social service offices in Malmö. We spend a lunch break taking photos and an hour adding the locations to Google, and that was it.
It’s not perfect
It’s not perfect, it doesn’t solve the problem for everyone and it still isn’t accessible from your Nokia phone using Bing Maps, and it doesn’t need to be. At least not right now, now we just need to start.
