How UX Designers Can Improve Our Cities
By Paul McConnell, Design Director, Intersection
An excerpt from Designing for Cities
Intersection Design Lead Practice Paul McConnell, with Mike Clare, recently authored Designing for Cities, an O’Reilly report on designing to solve urban challenges through stages of discovery, concepting, testing, and deployment. Here’s an excerpt on the ways user experience is enabling more effective solutions and delivering great urban experiences for citizens.
The methods and approaches that are core to creative and empathetic problem solving — already native to the design community —are suited to help address the ongoing challenges in cities. There is a unique opportunity for those who can ask the right questions, empathize with people, facilitate discussions, and bring form to ideas. Thinking like a designer is not limited to those who might consider themselves a professional designer. These capabilities can be extended to urban planners, government employees, entrepreneurs, technologist, and active members of the community. The following are traits often seen in designers that add great value when working at the urban scale.
Understanding people
Designers place extraordinary value on understanding people in order to shape effective solutions. Many in the design community have embraced the popular human-centered design approach in order to develop concepts for products and services. This approach builds on methods traditionally associated with ethnographic research, industrial design, and interaction design. As the name implies, the people that designers are trying to help are at the center of their process. By understanding their needs, behaviors, and motivations, the method promotes more relevant solutions for actual problems.
New perspective
Some might wonder why designers should attempt to address such complex subjects as cities, which are usually the domain of politicians and academics. While civic problems might seem beyond the reach of a designer, looking at a problem from a different perspective often leads to breakthroughs. Designers often spend their careers working within a range of industries, which allows them to quickly enter new fields and apply fresh perspectives to problems that others have spent years trying to solve, enabling them to approach the challenge in a new way. This experience gives designers an ability to quickly apply analogous learning to new problems.
Making the complex simple
Design often steps up in moments of confusion to solve complex problems and shape inspiring experiences. When the collaboration between technology and design occurs, it can lead to remarkable results. Dieter Rams’ successful designs for Braun came from a desire to take complex and unfamiliar new technologies that people were unfamiliar with and make them simple and easy to interact with. Google transformed the complexity of searching the entire Internet into a simple text box and a button, making it more approachable and easy to understand.
When designing for cities, we can expect to face a lot of complexity in the challenges we are trying to overcome. Designers can help make products and services more simple, easier to understand, approachable, and more usable.
Delivering great experiences
In order to keep pace with consumer expectations of well-designed, user friendly, high-quality products and services, private sector brands continually strive to improve the experience and demonstrate a clear value. If not, customers have a wealth of options.
People not only require this of consumer products, but of the cities we live in and government-provided services. “In the past, there’s been an assumption that if it’s in the public sector it doesn’t have to be as good as in the private sector. That is ridiculous,” says Ben Terrett of the UK Government Digital Service.
Designers familiar with working in this space can take the same approaches, tools, and expectation of quality that they deliver in the private sector and apply them to public sector challenges. These unique traits make designers ideal candidates for joining teams that seek to innovate within cities, complementing the skills brought by the diverse range of team members required to achieve success in the public realm.
Check out the Designing for Cities report at O’Reilly.
