Digitising cities
How might we optimise urban transport to revitalise shopping streets in the city of Bocholt, Germany?
UX Research | Service design | Team work | 4 monthsUsecase
Bocholt‘s shops are becoming less frequented and are feeling the competitive pressure from large chain and online shops more and more. To prevent the extinction of independent shops in Bocholt, it was the task of our study programme to focus on certain topics in groups to realise an overall concept for optimising the shopping experience in Bocholt.
Project strategyUser interviews • Quantitative research analysis • Market analysis • Concept & Mockups • Time & Budget planning • Pitch
Process
In order to focus on the citizen’s main pain points in our choice of topic, we first interviewed city visitors in the shopping streets about their experience. These qualitative, as well as other quantitative insights from further research revealed that city visitors are particularly dissatisfied with parking facilities in the city centre. For this reason, we focused on creating more value for the urban transport to optimise people’s way into town.
As the city had a smart city project running already, we were in exchange with the experts of this project and centred our concept specifically on smart technologies and solutions.
Result
The final result of this project was a concept for optimising parking space finding for car drivers and rewarding the use of public or climate-friendly means of transport, such as car sharing or cycling. We developed a smart parking system to locate free parking lots in an app by using sensors that are integrated in the parking space.
The use of climate-friendly transport in the city of Bocholt was linked to a reward system to motivate inhabitants to use greener transportation. Users could thus collect points in the app, which they could use as currency when paying in Bocholt shops or to compensate parking fees. With this concept, we were able to circumvent the problem of the lack of parking spaces in the city and attract residents back to the city centre shops.
Urban transport was just one part of the developed app. Together with the other groups, the app covered many new solutions for the city’s revitalisation of shopping streets.
