I’m starting to think about cities more and more in terms of user experience. It works pretty well as a metaphor – maybe so well that you don’t even need to call it a metaphor at all.
When you’re navigating the city, you want certain things to happen, you want a nice experience, just as you do with a website. You want the city to open up for you at all the right moments. And every city has their own unique user experience, just like every website or app does.
So what is the user experience of New York City? Generally pretty good. Maybe even great. And certainly a lot better than it was ten years ago (getting mugged = a really bad user experience).
But yesterday, jumping into a cab, there was one really bad bit of City UX that jumped out at me: that damn TV screen that is in the back of every cab, always on.
thanks @ flickr user azugaldia
I immediately turned if off, so I could continue my conversation. And of course, it immediately turned itself back on, as it always does (why do they even have an “off” button?)
Think about this: for everyone getting off a plane at JFK and hopping into a cab to get into the city, this is their first encounter with NYC. It’s infuriating. Uncontrollable. The worst user experience possible.
And for all of those people coming in from JFK, it’s basically the landing page of NYC, where their interaction starts.
It’s like the equivalent of those dancing girl banner ads, stuck all across the city’s home page.
And the thing is, that first experience could be so cool. It could have realtime data in it, showing you where the traffic was, so you could answer the driver’s question about which route to take. It could have easy-to-navigate content about museums and shows in town, so you could plan your stay. Maybe it could even let you buy tickets to shows or something like that. Maybe help you decide where you’ll eat tonight after you drop off your bags. Maybe do all of this in different languages, for people visiting from around the world. It could help you, instead of annoying you. It could blow you away.
And it could look a lot like the touchscreens that faberNovel did for bus stops in Paris recently (small plug for the company I just started working with).
There are a million really cool things you could do with that tiny piece of real estate that would transform people’s experience of NYC, and open the city up for them.
Maybe now that I’m working with faberNovel, and working explicitly on these kinds of things (as well as on other kinds of things), I’ll get a chance to help the city get that negative user experience out of the cabs and get something better in there so we can all enjoy our cabbing experience a bit more. I hope so.
In general there are a million ways to think about cities from the UX perspective. All of it can be improved on. What is your city’s UX like? Is it good? Is it bad?
John Geraci lives in NYC where he is Head of New York Operations for 
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Good point… And it is a subject where Europe with its more complex urbanism
may have something to show and could be – that was my bet – a good field of experimentations. I guess it is also the reason why NYC is offering more and more “urban start up” to the world. The city is in not in the Valley, is it ?
PS : Did you already experiment the “smell of a town” ? Each time I am in NYC, SF or London (and then back to Paris) I tell myself each of these cities has its own particular fragrance.
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Great points.
Those screens should do is something similar to the idealized version of the 1950′s NYC movie cab-driver: giving the city a human context. As you travel down Lexington or Broadway, there should be location-based information accessible to you about what is flying past you, about the upcoming weather and events – as you already laid out – in comforting and human terms, just ass if it were a tour guide of a local relative/friend. Even pausing and amplifying moments when there’s an iconic view coming across a bridge into Manhattan.
Being launched into this sometimes overwhelming city can take lot of getting used to, and anything we can do to make it more pleasant initially will set the tone for the rest of the trip. This also applies for re-entry for residents coming back from far-flung places, needing a quick recalibration and reminder of exactly how great NYC can be.
Would you believe it- this post is on the first page of Google search results for ‘New York’. (I’ve not visited it before.)
Nice luck, and nice post, too John!
Way to go, #UX — User Experience!
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