We live in cities, yet it often feels like cities aren’t built for us. It’s difficult to balance the different factors that weave a social fabric together– conflicting stakeholders, environmental constraints, economic conditions and more. In juggling many of these together, user needs can often fall through the cracks. This might mean a strip mall being built in a neighborhood that really just needed a better public library or even just an unintuitive placement of doors in a hallway. By contrast, human-centered design is increasingly the norm for digital design, supported by research into the value of design for business. With the emphasis on what users care about and where they tend to make errors, technology is able to seamlessly integrate into everyday life and support a range of human behavior.

Just from that lens, I believe there’s a lot the world of urban design could pick up from their digital product design peers to make our urban environments feel like they are actually designed to accommodate people.

What urban design is, and what it isn’t

Urban design is the discipline for creating our built environment like public spaces (e.g. parks), transit systems, roads, housing complexes, and neighborhoods.

An urban designer has to take many factors into account when designing any of these systems, such as public safety, government policies, accessibility, and natural factors like climate and access to water. There are a couple of different things, though, that urban design is used interchangeably with when, in fact, they are quite different.

Urban design is not architecture. Architecture dictates the design of a building; urban design is the network supporting that building.

Also, urban design isn’t urban planning. If urban design is the network that supports a building, urban planning decides where the lines in that network will be drawn and develops the policies, zones, and framework that an urban designer will use to populate a city’s features.

If you are trying to bake a cake, urban planning is like the recipe. Urban design, on the other hand, is the ingredients and layers that make up the cake. Architecture serves as the decoration on top.

For software designers, this may be familiar: urban planning is like a design system: you establish a structure and building blocks. Urban design is like user experience design, identifying user pain points and coming up with necessary elements, information architecture, and ways for users to interact. Architecture is like user interface design, building each element with a strong foundation and aesthetics.

Ultimately, all three are important in creating a functional and attractive urban environment but shouldn’t be confused with one another.

Urban design should be human-centered

Cities where humans live should be cities that emphasize human needs, desires, and actions. Ideally, this is done by either involving people in the design process or vetting assumptions against real-life experiences. This is, unfortunately, frequently challenging to execute. Most common examples are when sidewalks and buildings often don’t have ramps making them inaccessible for people with disabilities, limited presence of green spaces within an urban environment drastically reduces air quality over time, eerily desolate streets with inactive facades and little activity festers the feeling of a physically unsafe space.

Currently urban design is failing its users

To expand on that, essentially, a lack of consideration for user needs can harm their lifestyle over the long-term. Such situations are becoming more common globally, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing human needs when designing.

Highways in the United States are increasingly being viewed as contentious. They were proposed by people who viewed city plans from a bird’s-eye view and decided to cut through spaces and communities as if playing with Legos. At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do to help scale cities with the growing use of automobiles. However, little thought was given to the lives that would be disrupted through this system and the way communities would be affected at the ground level.

Joseph DiMento, co-author of Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways, noted how “[highway engineers] were trained to design without much consideration for how a highway might impact urban fabric — they were worried about the most efficient way of moving people from A to B.” Separately, in a personal anecdote, urban planner Amy Stelly recounted how the construction of an interstate through her neighborhood in New Orleans wrecked her experience of city living as a child. Additionally, projects such as Segregated by Design aim to “document the destruction of communities of color due to redlining, ‘urban renewal,’ and freeway construction.”

Our car-centered culture prioritizes the needs of cars over those of people in cities. While walking through the winding streets of Florence, Italy, I was struck by the number of people who darted across the road without waiting for cars to pass, or needing a sidewalk. Discussing this with my urban design professor, he turned my perspective on its head — were the people jaywalking or were the cars blocking their safe passage from one point to another?

The digital design process

The digital product design process has built-in steps to ensure it centers users’ needs. This framework can be broken down into three phases: define, design, and develop. (A way to think of this is through the lens of the double diamond process, which is a popular framework referenced by many designers worldwide.)

The first phase, define, entails conducting stakeholder and user interviews to understand the problem they’re solving holistically. At this stage, the designer conducts a thorough audit of the existing product and its pain points. For example, if a freelance designer’s website isn’t generating enough interest, they could analyze a user’s site journey to identify and address errors. They could also audit other freelance business websites to gauge industry-standard practices and brainstorm ways to stand out.

In the design phase, the designer interprets insights collected from the define phase, turning them into requirements and solutions. They then improve upon existing features or propose entirely new ones to mitigate pain points. Finally, the develop phase implements the resulting ideas and blueprints and places the product into a user’s hands to see how it functions in real life.

This process likely sounds familiar to people in the design field, regardless of industry. But there are noteworthy distinctions within software design that have made technology products so effective at impacting human behavior.

Key differentiators and challenges

The design and develop phases are cyclical, with creators ping-ponging between each phase to refine and improve ideas. There aren’t linear goalposts where one phase is left behind after reaching the next. In the define phase, you might outline the goals for a site’s homepage (e.g., listing your services or showing relevant work). In the design phase, you may start laying out the foundation of design elements or information hierarchy that would help achieve the formerly defined goals. Before stepping into the development phase, you may choose to give a beta version of your site to a user sample in your targeted demographic and collect data on how well it performs.

The root of this is that designers often have to make assumptions about human behavior when creating their work. These assumptions need to be tested because often user behavior could actually signal some other insight instead. Digital designers test their system by running analytics once the product has shipped on different metrics. With enough time and a large enough sample size, those key details help fine-tune a site to ensure it is smooth, efficient, and a delight to use.

The urban design world can better accommodate user preferences by employing iteration and user testing. Of course, there are some challenges which make it more difficult to transfer the process directly from one field to another.

Challenges in application

Urban design doesn’t have as rigorous methods of testing the built environment as someone trying to optimize the SEO of their site, but there are sound reasons for why. It might be unfair to say that urban designers or planners simply don’t care about their users’ needs which, by the way, is not the claim I’m trying to make in the first place.

I like to think of it as more of a scale and speed issue.

With the scale of urban design, it can take years to plan and implement a project. The scale is massive in terms of resources required and the way people might be impacted. This poses a challenge to iteration because the ethos of such a process depends on building fast, observing mistakes, learning from them and fixing them. Once built, it is a lot more difficult to make changes to the physical environment than it is to software and “ship” it to the world.

It is also a lot more ambiguous and difficult to collect both qualitative and quantitative data for user testing in the built environment than it is for digital interfaces. Actions in the real world are not always as binary as clicking or not clicking on a button and there are far more variables to take into consideration. To do it without infringing on people’s privacy while still observing them or not disrupting them without coming in their path is not easy. That said, I’m still optimistic that there can be ways around this hurdles and many others around the world seem to have already begun recognizing them.

Overcoming the challenges

1. Isolating elements and focusing on them

Scale can be a significant barrier, so it’s helpful to limit scope and features by isolating one element at a time and zooming in. The way the digital design world does it is by defining an MVP aka minimum viable product. The purpose is simple: what is the baseline for this product to get it up and running while I can focus on expansion and improvement in the background? Urban design can scale it back further by testing even fewer variables at once. For instance, the Providence Streets Coalition ran a week-long experiment to test a new bike lane over a 1-mile stretch on a street with heavy traffic. Conducting surveys and studying lane traffic will help the coalition assess whether this addition will succeed and the city to decide whether to make it permanent.

2. Participatory design with relevant stakeholders

Taking in residents’ input as part of the design process can help bring important user perspectives to inform decisions, validating assumptions about user behavior from the get-go.

Arki_lab, an urban design studio in Copenhagen, emphasizes multidisciplinary participation as part of the design process. They’ve pioneered several tools and processes, such as the arki_nopoly board game, as workshop drivers to unite different stakeholders (residents, engineers, designers, policymakers, traffic police, etc.) when building parts of a city.

3. Using data to recommend feature improvements

Digital product design now has extensive toolkits dedicated to gather and analyze trends for user data on a site or app down to the seconds (where they look, click, for how long, etc).

Although data collection for urban spaces is a complex process, there are ways to gather insights and iterate on designs. Desire lines (marks left behind by pedestrians after taking unplanned routes) are a useful tool in urban planning. Studying them after a structure has been built provides key user data necessary to iterate.

Even before a path has been built, an urban planner or designer can observe people’s movement through a space and chart their courses. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) used such data to study commuter choices and make recommendations in the transit system. New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) runs a service performance dashboard that is available to view by anyone at any time. Imagine having such robust insights into the MTA’s user trends, on demand, and being able to make adjustments to the transit system based on that data. That would allow urban designers to have a large-scale impact, but in an incremental and intentional way.

Urban design is indeed very different from software design, yet it can impact our lives at a similar, if not bigger, scale. Despite the challenges of scale and speed, ensuring that policymakers, planners, and designers consider what features in their environment users will actually benefit from is crucial. Around the world, several initiatives are beginning to show how parts of the digital design process can be mirrored in the built-in environment, and that is just the beginning. With more cross-collaboration and willingness to share work practices, we can benefit from learnings in one area and apply them to another.