The challenge
There will be 35,000 infrastructure projects taking place in London within the next 25 years. These will be incredibly disruptive to the businesses and residents of London.
Take the example of maintenance work. If there are two utility companies planning to do maintenance work on the same street, they could explore the possibility of working together, to avoid closing the street down twice. But how do you coordinate projects between different infrastructure providers?
The tool
The Infrastructure Mapping Application is a visualisation and discovery tool for the Greater London Authority Infrastructure Coordination Team. It seeks to reduce the impact of maintaining and developing London’s infrastructure on residents and businesses, by bringing together data from individual infrastructure providers into one place.
︎︎︎User Interviews︎︎︎Insight synthesis
︎︎︎UX Design
︎︎︎User testing
︎︎︎UX Design
︎︎︎User testing
My role
As part of a multidisciplinary team at Arup, I worked closely with the Greater London Authority on version 3 of the tool, to add new functionality that allows the GLA coordination team to look for collaboration opportunities. In this process, we also redesigned the user experience and user interface of the existing application.
I led the team through discovery activities to understand what makes a good collaboration opportunity.
The challenge we had was understanding the attributes of a collaboration opportunity between utility companies and defining the parameters of a search that would allow the user to find potential collaborations. However, at the time we were developing the tool, there was only one real life example of such a collaboration.
I interviewed potential users, gathered user needs and worked closely with the GLA to create an intuitive way to move through the tool and define the settings of a collaboration search. These insights shaped the design of the user interface.
I organised usability testing sessions to make sure the tool made sense to the users in the GLA coordination team.
“The IMA is essential to our work. Through the use of the IMA we have identified over 15 multi-utility collaborative opportunities London wide that we are currently evaluating and progressing”.
The GLA Infrastructure Coordination Team
Impact
The GLA is currently in the process of engaging utility companies and local councils to introduce the collaboration search feature and has a dedicated team that use the tool on a daily basis to identify collaboration opportunities.
Since launch, more than 3000 private and public users have accessed and used the tool.
The GLA has identified 15 collaboration opportunities. From these, five are currently progressing, with one already completed.