Project Background
The City of Dubai government hosted a Proof of Concept (POC) App competition and invited multiple big-brand High-Technology companies across the world to join – SAP was one of these companies. The competition aimed at building a Smart City Platform, using innovation information and “Smart” services to make the city become more intelligent and efficient in the use of resources, resulting in cost and energy savings, improved service delivery and quality life.
My responsibilities
I worked closely with product manager, information architect and development team to do research, brainstorm/finalize use cases and propose solutions. After the user story had been finalized, I created the design, delivered it to the development team and reviewed the implementation on daily basis.
Design Goal
Create a "Smart Citizen" App which utilizes the City of Dubai's Smart City platform to help citizen save energy, improve citizen's life quality and citizen's engagement with public affairs. In a word, the App was designed to achieve the goal of "being the happiest city in the world”.
Challenge
The time for the design was extremely tight. We were only given four weeks to deliver the final POC – the first week was for technology feasibility analysis and presenting the document to Dubai city government, the second week was for design iteration and design delivery, the third and fourth week were for both design adjustment and implementation.
Solution
The city of Dubai government was looking for App to help improve their citizen's daily life. To achieve this goal, our design focuses on the following topics: 1)Help save energy; 2) Help complete personal tasks; 3) Make home smarter; 4) Help improve citizens’ engagement with the city.
To help save energy, the App shows users with real time energy consumption analysis and also provides insights to help them save more energy and cost. The design uses Gamification methodology to motive users to practice energy saving. The App can also remind users any upcoming personal events (like renewing their drive licenses) to make sure their lives go smoothly. With IoT technology, the user can remotely control their homes' appliances directly from this App. By integrating the government’s news/surveys into the system, the App can update citizens with the latest notice from the city and engage them with the city events even more.
Process captures
1. Layout explorations:
While I was working with the whole team to sort out the content, I also started exploring different layouts for potential content display and getting team's feedback.
2. Experimenting different visual treatments:
While playing with the layout, I needed to keep visual design in mind because the team expected quick design solutions in both interaction and visual design due to the tight timeline. The design process for this project almost started from mid/high-fidelity in the very beginning.
3. Finalize design and delivery:
Outcome
The design was presented to the City of Dubai government and was selected as one of the three finalists. The POC was displayed in SAP Innovation Center to showcase SAP customers how SAP design and technology can help improve our life quality.
