Ayuntamiento de Santo Domingo Este · 2021–2022
A city in your pocket
Rubbish, asphalt, drainage, street lighting, traffic, fumigation, tree pruning, animal protection: the things a city actually breaks, and eight services on one screen. Pick one, describe what is wrong, and follow it in a list of your own claims.
01
Ship for the opening date
The town hall wanted an alpha ready for an opening date, and there was no backoffice to receive anything. So we cut functions and routed reports by email until one existed. Both teams were small enough to coordinate over WhatsApp. The alternative to shipping that was shipping nothing.
Constraints were the point: an old phone, a slow connection, a resident with no patience for an app that wastes their gesture. Every screen took the shortest path from "this is broken" to "the city knows".
02
What testing showed
In the first week, more than a hundred residents filed 250+ reports, and interactions with the town hall went up. What the sessions kept showing was never a usability finding. It was that people love their city, and will do unpaid work for it if you give them somewhere to put it. The next step wrote itself: the backoffice to sustain every service.
- 250+
- Reports filed in the first week of testing
- 100+
- Residents in the first test group
- 8
- City services a resident can report from one screen
People love their city, and will do unpaid work for it if you give them somewhere to put it.