How might we create a valuable, meaningful and interactive experience in an urban environment?

Role: user researcher, interaction designer, strategist

Skills: primary and secondary research, analysis and synthesis, low & high fidelity prototyping, diagramming, systems design

Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD

Team: Alexis Arias & me

Improving interactions in public spaces

Context

There’s a lot of fuzz regarding how new technologies affect people. Insurmountable data is being gathered for and by autonomous vehicles daily. It will reshape how infrastructure is built within and across cities, how resources are deployed and how social agents act. Many companies will perish but people will survive and, hopefully, thrive.

Challenge

Information can go a long way in supporting a lot more than self-driving cars. The brief of the project was to be inspired by this type of data to create valuable and engaging interactive experiences for citizens. I decided to pair up with Alexis Arias, an Architecture PhD candidate, to put our different skill sets to the test while learning to work together in a role that was uncomfortable to both.

Actions

We dived into a very open-ended interaction design project, from research to prototyping. The project was managed in pairs. We defined our audience in time but didn’t have a client to partner with. 

This project was highly exploratory: our audience wasn’t defined so we had to draw inspiration from our surroundings. Patterns started to emerge from observations. As I sketched potential routes, I got excited about designing experiences for older citizens to increase agency and improve their health in the city. We dived into compelling secondary research that would substantiate our design; then, crystallized the interaction through storyboards that conveyed various use cases.

We designed wireframes and user journeys to delineate the conceptualized system structure. I decided to lay out how the experience model would work for different agents in the future. Once our prototypes reached an accurate level of fidelity, we conducted a remote interview with 80+ year-olds to ask about them. We carefully and thoroughly incorporated their feedback.

Results

The outcome was a large-scale system that reinforced elders’ physical and emotional health by nudging them to engage with their environment more consciously. Moreover, the system empowered more independent decision making, potentially prolonging their ability to take care of themselves.

The interfaces would be embedded in bus stops and bus stations, familiar urban objects for our audience that would invite them to engage with their environment effortlessly. Not only would the city gather data that would allow them to design proper services to older citizens but communities would acknowledge more explicitly the needs of this growing population.

Learnings

The most significant learnings were: the ability to self-manage with an open-ended brief, the importance of scoping the project properly and making decisions toward that goal from the start, and learning how to work effectively with a non-designer teammate. Within the technical portion of the project: the interesting body of knowledge of UI for elders, the capacity to envision a design in space and the true depth and complexity of an interactive system that goes way beyond screens.