client
Philadelphia City Hall
role
client lead
UX designer
UX designer
City Hall in Philadelphia is a hub of a government activity, a tourist destination, a major transportation station, a public part, and geographically located in the heart the downtown. I worked as the project lead and the UX designer while partnering with an engineer, architect and researcher.
Due to the historical nature of the building design, high level of pedestrian traffic through the space, and lack of clear and coherent way-finding it can be difficult for both visitors and locals to navigate through the space. Often visitors are late to their city hall resource appointments from becoming lost and rely on city hall employees for directions.
Our team designed a unified way-finding strategy in the form of both digital and physical products to help visitors navigate city hall. This way-finding strategy caters to the drastically diverse set of Philadelphians across digital literacy rates and demographics that access the historic building for various city services.
Working as the UX designer and client lead driving the design process, this was the approach I took.
We began by conducting around 20 interviews with City Hall employees and visitors to understand how visitors find their way to city services and what infrastructure was (or was not) in place to guide visitors to their destinations.
We also mapped the typical user journey starting at home and ending at a city hall office across time and space. This helped us understand where the largest pain points existed when navigating to find city hall services.
We then aggregated our interview findings in to common themes. This enabled us to identify core pain points that visitors have when visiting city hall and searching for city related services.
We worked with our client to prioritize the pain points that they felt were the most impactful and to understand which problems would be feasible to solve for given their limited resources.
With the feedback from our client in hand, we chose three how might we statements that drove our design process.
Our team began generating ideas through a crazy 8 exercise. The crazy 8 exercise pushed our team to generate ideas in low fidelity that solve for our how might we statements.
As the sole UX designer, I selected two low fidelity prototypes to build by mapping our potential solutions against the top pain points. This prototype would ultimately be tested with visitors to city hall.
Recognizing varying demographics and digital literacy rates, our team also designed various physical prototypes to augment the digital solutions.
Given the diversity of city hall visitor demographics and digital literacy, we wanted to test our solutions with real visitors to understand how and if our initial ideas met their needs and which they preferred.
Visitors ranked our solution set against each other. Visitors found most of our solutions useful to help navigate city hall, with the exception of informational hand outs which we decided remove from our solution set.
We learned that there’s no 'one size fits all' solution, this takeaway confirmed our hypothesis that visitors would benefit from a way-finding ecosystem where they can choose what’s easiest and most useful for them to engage with at any given time or location.
We presented our refined solution set to visitors to collect feedback on how we could improve the prototypes and verified that these solutions would empower visitors to navigate city hall confidently.
From user testing, we learned a lot about the visitors that come to city hall for city services. Most improtantly:
We incorporated the feedback received from user testing and updated our prototypes accordingly when building high fidelity prototypes. The final solutions we built are a product of designing with the city hall visitors.
• simplified the overall flow of the app
• added landmarks to the map
• added an AR functionality
• provided destination office details
• consolidated route overview pane with directions
• added the ability to send directions to your phone
We returned to our mapping of impact vs. feasibility given City Hall’s unique resource, financial and technology constraints. The matrix emphasizes that while there are solutions that can be easily implemented, City Hall should pursue a suite of solutions to have the largest impact with visitors.
Visitors to city hall will use their phones to scan QR codes that are strategically placed throughout City Hall to receive realtime turn by turn direction support through both map based navigation and AR technology.
Large digital kiosks will be available throughout City Hall with different accessibility options. Visitors can interact with these touch screen kiosks to receive the directions they need to access their city hall services.
To augment the digital solutions we also designed the remaining high fidelity physical solutions.
From the time the visitor understands the need to go to city hall, through to arrival at their destination, our solution suite provides navigation support each step of the way.
Visitors have support at every space they might need navigation assistance. The combination of each solution provides holistic coverage of the physical spaces that visitors might get lost.
After presenting to the Philadelphia Commissioner of Public Spaces, our solution set was accepted and was proposed for funding. As a part of the hand off process, we outlined key next steps as well as a phased implementation plan.
