Ekinnolab – Smart City Innovations – but what is exactly a Smart City. Smart means something amusingly clever but also energetick and quick-to-react. What it really means in the context of a city is explained in short movie found on the Vinci Energies YouTube channel.
The most important message is that Smart Cities are built around users, so citizens open information data from OpenData. The best part is that the data can be access via your mobile phone. That’s why EkinnoLab built the Naviparking app to respond one of the key Smart City demands – improve city accessibility by improving the parking experience.
We have recently started designing our app Persona. It seems to be that the persona concept came from the marketing field, created as a helpful tool to categorize customer segments to “provide product identity with which customers can more closely associate” (Check Jenkinson ( 1993-1994 ) ‘Beyond segmentation’). Drawing from marketing solutions – Alan Cooper, an American software designer – transformed this concept as a Interaction Design tool for effectively gaining knowledge about users expectations. In Cooper’s book, “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity” we can read:
“Personas are archetypes built to identify our real users’ profile, needs, wants and expectations in order to design the best possible experience for them”
If you do a quick Internet search, you will find a lot of good advices on how to create the perfect “Persona”. Remembering the Cooper concept and Design Sprint Methods we have chosen some main elements of the persona construct, which are helping us build strong, mobile friendly products:
Something more about “smart” solutions.
System architecture was built on the principles of Open Data and RESTfull interfaces. The first integrated Opendata was Amsterdam CitySDK. Thanks to OpenData integration Naviparking provides user information about parking spot availability – like Eva did on movie below.
Feel free to let us know what you think are the most desirable Smart Cities features.
Download our app and experience the smartness of Amsterdam City!
References and recommended reading:
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/personas-ux.php
