In this design study, I explored a product idea allowing citizens to easily report damages, vandalism and other deficits to the city council via a lean mobile app. For cities, Stadtreport makes maintenance and service of communal areas much more efficient, and helps to receive real feedback about communal pain points directly from the citizen. Citizens on the other hand benefit from improved surroundings.
Since this project didn't build on existing solutions, I needed to get information from potential users themselves. I explored three main user groups:
To gain insights especially regarding city employees, I decided to set up an online poll and ask a broad range of cities to participate.I also did research about related existing products. Some larger cities already have a form or even a mobile app for reporting damages, but none of them has a big market share or stands out UX-wise.
Starting with flowcharts and rough scribbles, the idea quickly became visible. I started with the least complex (but possibly most challenging) part: The reporting application. My goal was to make the reporting process as easy as posting an Instagram story or calling an Uber.
Luckily, the smartphone already knows your location. First step though should be taking (or selecting) a photo/video: Taking a photo just takes a second, and makes textual descriptions needless. Besides location and a photo, only a category needs to be selected to allow a first prioritization.
After reporting the issue, the most important thing is feedback and easy communication. The city employee may have a question, or the reporter wants to add some more details. This is easily accomplished by a chat-like interface. In order to keep engagement high, additional gamification elements were explored.
The web app for managing the reports, used by city employees, has a different focus. Main goal here is to ensure issues are handeled promptly, assigned to the different departments, and feedback to the reporter is given. Furthermore, some analysis and statistics may be important, for example to gain insights on the geographical distribution – or concentration – of issues.
The solution for the worker might be the same web app, but running on a tablet to support the context of being busy in the city. Here, a map view is crucial in order to locate issues.
Of course, the visual design for all apps should be modern, clean and appealing – and consistent across all devices.
Usually, I would aim to test the concept with end-users before moving to the visual design. But to gain an impression of how Stadtreport could look like in real life, some key screens got a bit of colour already.
One aspect to keep in mind is customization: While the brand Stadtreport needs to have its own visual identity, customers – which will be mainly cities – will want to include their city branding to the applications. This was considered by the option to add the city logo and to define a brand color.
