Designing User Experience (UX) to Support Public Participation in Spatial Planning
Case study: Indonesia
More Info
expand_more
Abstract
In modern-day spatial planning, the implementation of public participation has increased to find a balance between two major actors: the government as the powerholder and citizens as the individual affected by planning decisions. Cities are required to redefine their public participation strategies by adopting modern tools to increase their citizen’s satisfaction regarding the spatial planning process. This challenge has made geographic information system (GIS) technologies invaluable to enhance the place-making process by allowing citizens to express their needs and preferences. On the other hand, developing GIS technology with design or hierarchy left unchecked, could cause usability problem to the user. GIS technology would end up running into an unnavigable ocean of buttons and maps, resulting in users can easily get lost and become frustrated. Therefore, User Experience (UX) can become integral for engaging users with spatial planning products and effectively meeting their aspirations. This thesis aims to develop a User Experience (UX) design guideline together with a mockup design and apply it as a web-based GIS prototype. The focus of the study will be on spatial planning practice in Indonesia. The User Experience (UX) design guideline named ’4PHASE toolkit’ was made with several design phases: Phase 1: Define, Phase 2: Design, Phase 3: Build, Phase 4: Test. The first phase is related to top-down studies about participation in spatial planning process both in general and case study, resulting with the Actor-Network (ANT) diagram for conceptualizing user roles, participation tasks, and space-time setting during the participation. The second phase is related to the design process of the UX starting from building persona, creating user flow, sketching wireframes, and designing interfaces - resulting with the proposed mockup of 4D Musrenbang. The third phase is the development of the prototype based on the mockup design using HTML, CSS, and Javascript to add functionalities to the web. At last, Phase 4 is testing the prototype with real actors who share similar traits with the Persona. Based on the user tests, the prototype itself is considered as good, with usability score of 71%. Overall, this thesis project has successfully created three main products: The 4PHASE toolkit, a mockup, and a geo-web prototype.