Demystifying Planning
By: Gemma Campbell
Tags: Human Centered Design, City Planning, Civic Engagement, Civic Innovation

Being the lead product manager for a civic engagement platform Participate Melbourne*, I am a big advocate for how technology better facilitates the shaping of cities. So, I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to lead a piece of research last year on ‘Demystifing Planning’, with particular focus on planning scheme amendments. We partnered with Eliza (now known as Pretzel Lab).

Project

Participate Melbourne is the City of Melbourne civic engagement platform. It encourages the community to engage in formal consultations on city shaping, policy and community-building plans for the municipality.

Planning Scheme Amendments are a dominant part of the consultation in local government. At the City of Melbourne, the consultation process is facilitated via the Participate Melbourne platform.

During our preliminary research, we learnt that whilst most of the community understand the development of a strategic city plan, we were able to validated that the policy stage was unclear, and that the community was unclear on how their feedback informed city plans.

So, I engaged the City of Melbourne Planning Policy team along with consultants Eliza to better understand how we could improve this process and the technology that supports it.

Here are the consolidated findings, outputs and recommendations from the design sprints that were delivered in February 2020.

The sprints involved:

Qualitative research with community members that live in the City of Melbourne boundary.

2 ideation and problem identification workshops with a range of representatives from the City of Melbourne, and

The design and testing of a letter prototype and a digital prototype concept that could help the citizens better understand the amendment process.

Process

Understand the users by developing a deep understanding of the citizens’ contexts, needs and expectations:

2 rounds of 45 mins user interviews with citizens (7 participants, 11 sessions)

Explore the possibilities by brainstorm ideas and potential solutions:

Ideation on possible solutions to demystify the amendment process

Defined what success looks like for a successful engagement

Decide what to focus on: Clearly articulate the problem you want to solve. Narrow down 1 idea or solution and flesh it out:

Prioritised themes: online communication, interactive digital experience and community engagement.

Prioritised idea: Interactive timeline

Prototype: Build something as quickly as possible to show our users:

1x Letter prototype

1x Clickable interactive timeline prototype

Validate and learn: Test with users to refine the solution and get feedback on what’s working and what’s not:

1 round of 45 mins user testing with citizens (6 participants, 6sessions)

We facilitated 2 workshops through which representatives from the City of Melbourne collaborated to generate and prioritise ideas that would respond to citizens’ needs. We asked participants to generate ideas that respond to the things they have learned, contextualised with their knowledge as citizens.

We asked everyone to vote on the ideas they felt had the highest value for our citizens at each stage of the amendment process.

If citizens feel and see that the City of Melbourne acknowledges their voice, they will feel like a valued member of the community.

If citizens are communicated with transparency, they will feel more connected with their council and will build trust with the City of Melbourne.

If citizens learn about council planning in a fun and compelling way, they will feel empowered, prepared and confident.

If it is easy to find information and understand how it affects them, citizens will be more engaged with the City of Melbourne.

To test our 4th hypothesis, a lo-fi prototype of the amendment letter was developed and participants were asked to share their thoughts on each section.

Five themes were defined from citizen interview insights:

Be upfront.

Citizens generally feel that information is received too late and disempowered once a decision is made. Government roles and responsibilities are generally misunderstood and confusing.

Tell me what I need to know.

Citizens only care about information that affects them. Citizens expect to be told information that is important to them.

Talk to me in my language.

Citizens don’t understand planning and the process is not clear. Humanising each touch points with a friendly tone of voice and simplified language will help.

Make is easy for everyone.

Citizens find it hard to find things on government websites. When looking for information, citizens use the search feature on websites.

Know your people.

Citizens don’t feel a personal connection to the council due to a lack of personalised communication methods. Citizens feel that the council doesn’t use the data and information they have effectively.

Solution

From user interviews; priorisation workshops and prototype feedback, one of the predominant solutions was the ‘city shaping tool’.

The tool is intended to sit within the Participate Melbourne website and surfaced throughout, wherever it may be suitable to give citizens complete visibility on the planning scheme amendment process.

It is designed to allow users to navigate through the process in their own way and pace, with the critical information dissected into easily digestible chunks allowing users to quickly understand and decide what is relevant to them.

The layout of the page is clear and concise to consistently enable users to orientate themselves with the process, understand each step and follow a call to action.

The prototype covers:

Quick submission feature

Citizen portal

Project tracker

You can preview the prototype.

Feedback from the prototypes

In order to understand whether citizens would find our concepts useful and therefore aid in lifting their overall perception with city planning, we conducted 1 round of user testing (45 mins each session) with 6 participants.

We first gave each of our participants a real-life scenario for context and then followed up with a few carefully designed tasks and a line of inquiries to observe how they interact with the concept.

Users liked:

Easy to read, layout and headings are clear and engaging

Love the information presented

Ability to make a submission from the timeline

Chat feature

Interactivity between stages

Areas for improvement:

If users are directed to the timeline from an amendment letter, it feels too generic and would like more detailed info.

The stage headings and language could be more down to earth

Users liked:

Would log into a portal for personalised information

Ability to track a project and see the current status

Dashboard view of where each project is at

All documents in one spot

Information about what to expect in the current stage

Areas for improvement:

Users didn’t like the thought of logging in through Facebook.

The project tracker could have suggested time frames for each phase

and what the estimated wait time will be.

Would an interactive timeline and a citizen portal provide a better experience for citizens?

Having led the process, there was a strong attachment to seeing outcomes right away. This won’t happen. At times you will have quick wins but broadly this will initiate your road map.

Reflection

It is evident in the research that communicating and facilitating city shaping needs a shared approach. There is also a need for better education for the community to understand where their impact matters and holistically how planning projects fit into the border plan for their neighbourhood. There’s still hope that legacy processes will transform but it requires strong leadership to champion new approaches.