Smart City

With Artificial Intelligence

A software app designed to simplify the processes for traffic planners and traffic controllers.

Smarty City helps to analyze the traffic recordings and enables immediate alerts of urgent detection.

The Challenge

Heavy traffic is always a headache in the world, it causes troubles of delaying and congestion to cities in rush hours. The worst situation in heavy traffic is that ambulances or fire trucks can’t go through and can’t arrive on time for emergencies.

Smart City acquires advanced AI technology that can analyze traffic recordings, also can recognize the types of vehicles and speed. Smart City is looking for software that provides an admin dashboard for users to process the traffic videos, and share the analyses with a customer with a click of a button.

Since the technology can identify the types of vehicles and speed, Smart city also needs another solution to send a notification to the designated users when an emergency happens in the traffic. Therefore, the customers will have two choices to use the software based on their needs.

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GOALS

The KPI is attracting more customers, therefore the experience in using the software will need to be intuitive and simple. While using the software, new customers should be able to get familiar quickly and don't need to seek tutorials from customer support.

ROLE

User Research
Information Architecture
User Experience Design

SCOPE

Industrial Design Project
Software App Design

DURATION

4 weeks

TOOLS

Figma

Teams

Stephen Kinney | UX Designer
Alice Sung | UX Designer
Dibyasom Puhan | Software Enginner

ROLE

User Research
Information Architecture
User Experience Design

SCOPE

Industrial Design Project
Software App Design

DURATION

4 weeks

TOOLS

Figma

Teams

Stephen Kinney | UX Designer
Alice Sung | UX Designer
Dibyasom Puhan | Software Enginner

Project Plan

‍Design two solutions in high fidelity prototype within 40 hours

We only had 40 hours to design two solutions, one can analyze traffic videos, and the other one can send a real-time alert based on the scenarios. In the first week, we created a project plan before we started working on researching. We used the project plan to confirm the final deliverable and the schedule with the team. The project plan helped the entire team understand the status of this project each week. Setting up a project plan is important, because it ensures the team is sailing the boat in the right direction and can arrive at the destination with a limited time.

Research

Understand what we have and what we don’t have

Before we start defining the MVPs, we thought about user-centricity and listed the functions that a user may want when using Smart City. After we created the user story, our team decided to do competitor research to identify which functions the competitors didn’t support, and we can add such functions to our solution.

In the competitive research, we have found out it was hard to recognize the movements and the ROI (region of interest), users would need to remember the names to add into the analytics. Our team decided to focus on simplifying the setting, so users can analyze the traffic recordings and trigger events without memorizing the lines and the movements.

Users

Define Target Audience

‍Characteristics:‍

Traffic planners and traffic control police
Spend hours manually counting traffic data
Manually monitoring traffic in busy cities

Build A Persona

‍Frustration
Spend Countless hours on counting traffic data by standing at a certain location and manually monitoring over 100s cameras.

‍Needs
Needs help to count the vehicles and monitor accidents in cities.

‍Goal
Create solutions based on traffic analytics in a few hours and get instant alerts without monitoring the cities cameras manually.

Ideation

How might we...?

How might we make ROI setting easy to create?
Ideas: Select directly on the objects, create lines by drawing with a mouse on the video.

How might we create an intuitive experience for users to continue without additional supports?
Ideas: Condense multiple steps into one page

Smart City Structure
Our team intentionally designed both solutions into the same user flow to help users recognize faster when switching between RealCount and RealLive. Since RealCount is to analyze existing videos, we decided to guide users to create a folder first then set up the ROI of the video within the folder. Since RealLive is a real-time feature, our team decided to guide users to set up the ROI first then connect the cameras to the designated location, such an approach could help users recognize which camera they are setting up without going back to the folder.

Sketches

Initial key screens in sketches

Wireframe

Initial key screens in sketches

Iteration

Wireframe Iteration

Initial key screens in low fidelity

Prototype

High Fidelity Key Screens

Revised key screens in high fidelity

The Final Solutions

Easy Navigation. Simplify ROI Setup. Customize Analysis.

Easy Navigation

Empower users to have easy access to the data source from any page

Traffic planners create solutions to eliminate congestion by analyzing multiple videos. Smart City provides two features where support users to categorize the video, find all the videos on the “Videos” page, and find the recent videos at top of the “Projects” page. This approach helps users target the recent projects within one click.

Smart City understands users may need to find the video but can’t remember which folder the video locates in. Smart City purposely puts all the videos on the “Videos” page to help users find their targeted video recordings within a few clicks.

Simplify ROI Setup

Complete the setup for the region of interest (ROI) without confusion

Smart City simplifies creating lines and movements by using a mouse to draw directly on the video, also allows users to checkmark the lines and the movements on the video.

The lists of lines and movements on the left correspond with the lines and movements on the video. Having both information displays altogether helps users to identify which region of interest they are focusing on.

Customize Notification

Send notification to designated users on specific conditions

During the rush hours, every second counts, therefore, Smart City supports customizing trigger events and sending notifications to the designated users. Such a feature helps manage the workload in a short amount of time in cities.

What I have learned from Smart City with AI

01 LEARNING

Simplify pages into one page helps users recognize what they are currently working on.

Combining setting steps from pages into one page helps users to remember what they are setting up. So users don’t need to memorize the names for the lines and the movements from the last step.

02 LEARNING

Tags not just help users organize files, but also help in searching for files.

Adding a tag feature helps users organize the analytics but also helps in searching for specific keywords. This approach helps to filter the files when searching through 100s of analytics.

03 LEARNING

Within a limited time, staying with the MVP is the priority.

Even though we had many interesting ideas that could implement into the solutions, but within only 40 hours, MVP needed to be the priority,. Without defining the MVP first for the skeleton, all of these ideas wouldn’t be able to add to the MVP.

What's Next?

If I have more time, I would like to try the other approach for RealCount where users can ask for videos from Smart City. Since the cameras will be installed for RealLive, the videos captured from the cameras can be compressed and send to cloud storage periodically, then users can request the video from cloud storage. This method could be a great potential to create convenience for users. Moreover, from a business perspective, Smart City can generate more business by providing such an offer.

More information?

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Detail in:

User Story
Competitor Analysis
Low-fi Mockups
Interactive Prototype

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