Urban User Experience Design (Urban UX, UUX) is the term coined to describe the combined disciplines of wayfinding, information, graphic, and product design. This combination is enhanced by an understanding of how humans behave, and why they make certain choices.
This combination of disciplines and understanding enables us to develop solutions that help users comfortably and easily find their way in unfamiliar urban environments. Our work also encompasses urban and street furniture, and an understanding of how it can enhance recreation, travel, work and entertainment.
Malta -based Urban UX has grown out of the long-established design partnership of Mangion & Lightfoot, now in it’s 20th year.
Designers and business owners Matthew Mangion and Mark Lightfoot are both graduates of leading London design schools. Both have a keen interest in how design impacts users and they understand how to use design to enhance the brand experience.
Since their first major branding project in 1997 for Arkadia, they have been delivering design solutions for websites, award-winning apps, branding, packaging and of course, wayfinding and signage.
From finding your way around outdoor spaces, large urban centres, living in and around the built environment, users need signs and other functional elements to have the best experience possible. They need to feel they are not just alive and able to find their way around, they need to feel they can use space for relaxing, for work, for play.
From outdoor to indoor, people need help to both understand and make sense of the world around them. You look for clues – is it that way? Where do I want to go? Can you show me the way? The questions of wayfinding should be answered before they have been asked.
Can I sit down? Where can I park my bike? Can I throw this paper away? I need shade. I need somewhere to rest. My children need somewhere to play. Can I find my car in the car park! Can I find the car park?
These are all elements of urban user experience at the ‘interface level’ and we provide ways for our users to use enjoy and benefit from interaction with the environment.
Urban interfaces – the streets, buildings, transport nodes, different types of services, utilities and the resulting urban user experience – analogous to human computer experience and user experience (we have become so used to the digital screens), means we need to give more time and thought to our physical spaces and remember ‘social design for the real world’.
Find out more at www.uux.com.mt
