How Urban Design Principles Can Inspire UX Design
In many ways, cities will always remain the pinnacle of human achievement. If you’ve ever visited any old European city center, you’ll know — the meticulously-planned, gorgeously-ornamented, and undeniably-livable cities are wondrous feats of design.
As purveyors of “user experience,” it behooves us digital designers and researchers to look away from the screen and seek inspiration from our cities. In these marvels of the built world lie incredibly important design lessons of how we can craft a more liveable, democratic, and enjoyable digital world.
Below are just six principles of effective urban design that I’ve personally looked to for inspiration in my career as a design researcher for digital products. They’re mostly inspired from literature on urban studies, as well as my own observations in the cities I’ve lived in.
Let’s start with the basics: any vibrant, liveable, and exciting city must have a dense urban core or city center. This is the always-accessible place of congregation and discovery.
Manhattan is the ultimate example of a city that’s perfected the energy and livability that comes through density. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote extensively on how urban density shaped the fabric of New York City and was fundamental to it being the city that is. She wrote:
Anecdotally, I’ve constantly heard countless people say how they’re attracted to this energy in the streets of New York that you truly can’t find elsewhere; this is also certainly true for me. This energy is actually the result of great design, which in many ways was intentional. Through a dense mix of residential, recreational, and commercial areas — coupled with inventive public space — the city center achieved beautiful conviviality.
In the realm of digital products, this city center manifests itself through an always-reliable, vibrant, and easily navigable “home.” For LinkedIn’s flagship consumer product, for example, this is our Feed. Easily accessed through the always-present “Home” button, the LinkedIn Feed allows the user to congregate, meet, and exchange perspectives with their professional network. Just like the center of a city, it’s a place that’s the “true north” — just familiar enough for comfort, yet capable of offering a new experience with each visit.
Digital products that are inherently social, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, typically find their dense, “urban” core through versions of a Feed, while others such as Spotify offer this through their “Home” button which surfaces up plenty of opportunity for discovery and rediscovery.
So, designers of digital products should remember what cities have long mastered: they should have a reliable, go-to place that serves as a place of both comfort and discovery.
This one’s no surprise, but it’s important to remember that aesthetics matter. It’s no wonder that you’re likely to feel much happier while traversing the streets of Amsterdam — with its colorful, storybook-esque houses and picture-perfect canals — than through a town of lifeless suburban sprawl.
I’ve spent many years living in Amsterdam, and can truly say from experience that the sheer beauty of the city’s design contributed, in large part, to just how happy I felt there. These were some of the best months of my life, and I stand as a first-hand example of how fulfilled, inspired, and happy beautiful design can make you feel.
Just as aesthetics fundamentally shape how we feel in the cities and spaces we occupy, our digital experiences are certainly influenced by how they look and feel. As UX designers, we all know that the user experience is comprised foremost of ease, efficiency, and keeping the users’ needs front and center — but let’s not forget the role that aesthetics play, too.
In digital product design, this might include the effective use and combination of colors; carefully considered typography and font hierarchy; clean, clear signals and call-to-actions; and the use of white space so as to not overwhelm the user.
Just like cities do, beautifully designed products delight their users, and make them wanting to come back.
One of the most important functions of a well-designed city is intuitive mobility and transportation. Getting around with ease and efficiency is not only empowering and democratizing, but has a profound effect on our lived experience.
Personally, one of my main frustrations with living in San Francisco has been the lack of proper mobility about the city. In all frankness, each morning commute is its own saga — the underground Metro I take to work is often delayed anywhere from five to fifty minutes. Buses don’t run on direct routes; there’s far too much traffic at most times of the day; walking anywhere can be quite difficult. This lack of easy urban mobility has significantly affected my experience of living in the city.
On the contrary, I’ve had the great privilege of living and spending time in vibrant, exciting cities across the globe, including Boston, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin. In these places, well-planned and efficient public transport (Berlin), walkability (Boston), and a prevalent biking culture (Amsterdam) all allow great urban mobility.
Urban mobility, in many ways, ultimately leads to a sense of urban freedom — thus contributing significantly to the quality of life.
For digital products, this is manifested through an easy, efficient, reliable, and intuitive navigation throughout the various parts of the product. My first few research projects as a UX Researcher at LinkedIn were actually with our horizontal Navigation team, so this one is especially near and dear to me. Navigation is the lynchpin of the overall product experience.
The user should know, at any given time, where they are, how they got there, and how they can get to where they want to go next. And most importantly, this should all be done in an intuitive manner that minimizes the time they spend on it.
Without a doubt, how safe you feel in a city is at the core of your lived experience in it. In a city, a sense of safety can designed in many ways, big and small — from well-lit public spaces to designing streets that are safe for pedestrians and bicyclists. Feeling unsafe is likely one of the biggest detractors from feeling happy in a city.
To use Amsterdam as an example again (it’s my favorite city, after all!), safety by design is evident through many ways, especially with its bicycle paths throughout the city. Cycling is the most common transportation method; every morning, you’ll bike pasts hundreds of people — from those hurrying to work in their suits to moms biking their children on a bakfiets. These lanes have clearly-marked signals and separations from other forms of traffic. It’s so safe that practically no one ever wears a helmet, something that would be a death wish in most other cities.
Similarly, feeling safe in our digital lives is extremely important. Users deserve the utmost level of care with their privacy. With the passing of the European GDPR regulation on data privacy, this has rightfully been a hot-button topic amongst the design community.
This goes without saying, but as our digital lives become more complex and more enmeshed with the everyday, it’s incredibly important for us to practice privacy by design. How might we ensure complete privacy to our users? And even more importantly — how might we design our products in ways, both big and small, that allow our users to have full control over their safety?
Just as safety and privacy are key ingredients for a livable city, so are they in our digital world.
Hand-in-hand with safety is the separation of public and private space, and how the two interplay with one another in an effectively-designed city.
It should be no surprise that the number of safe, public spaces in a city is directly correlated with how liveable it is. The benefits of effective public space — parks, safe and vibrant streets, ease of transit — are aesthetic, psychological, and sociological. Public space is truly beautiful; it allows for a myriad of individuals, with their own distinct stories and journeys, to be together and amongst one another.
Private space, however, is also an important physical and sociological part of a well-designed city. Thinking through your day, imagine how much your private and semi-private spaces — from your bedroom and living room to your corner of the office — matter to you. Your privacy is important; you want to be sure that you’re safe, happy, and content in these spaces, and that these spaces can provide these feelings. Even more so, they can serve as retreats from the busy city.
Just like in the cities we live, it’s important for a well-designed digital product or experience to offer “private space,” as needed. For LinkedIn and other similar social platforms, this might mean a semi-private place for Messaging, for example. Users want to be sure that their messages are only shared within this space between themselves and their intended recipients. Instagram’s “Saved” feature is another example — in an otherwise public platform, it’s a private space of your collections of photos.
As UX designers and researchers, let’s remember to design private and semi-private experiences in clearly demarcated, well-thought-out ways that still carefully integrate into a larger ecosystem.
After the Second World War, Copenhagen was nearly transformed into a city of highways, cars and traffic jams, almost facing a fate similar to that of many cities today. However, today, it’s known as the most livable in the world — with its efficient bike lanes, beautiful architecture, abundant parks and public spaces, and creative milieu of art and design.
In many ways, Jan Gehl is the star architect and urban planner from Copenhagen who is responsible for saving the city from “modernist utopianism” and transforming it into a citizen-centered beacon of urban life instead. To this day, his design firm studies human behavior in public space all across the globe, using this research of the city as an “urban laboratory” to designing the right interventions.
Designing for people should remain at the crux of urban design, and as a UX Researcher on a digital product design team, this one is particularly near and dear to my heart. People are at the heart of everything I do. I have the exciting opportunity to shape the experience that jobseekers and hireres have on LinkedIn by actually considering them as a crucial part of our design process.
This is one that both cities and digital products likely need to work harder towards, but if the example of Copenhagen can teach us anything — it’s certainly possible, and if it’s done right, can breathe life into what we design.
Just as digital design can learn from urban design, there’s plenty to be learned the other way around, too. Cities are rapidly innovating from the human-centered design process, which is an extremely exciting new era for urban design that excites to no end.
Above are just six principles, and I’m sure there are many more. To distill it all, though: this article should hopefully serve as a reminder that inspiration is everywhere. Designing digital products can be overwhelming at times, but there’s plenty we can learn from centuries of well-planned, carefully-considered, and beautiful urban design.
I’m a User Experience Researcher at LinkedIn. As a researcher, I find inspiration from my academic background in urban studies and my own experiences in cities across the globe.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn as part of our UX team’s #POVember series.
How Urban Design Principles Can Inspire UX Design
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