User Experience in Planning

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Imagine this: you get home ready to binge on a great TV show on Netflix, but someone else has already chosen what you’re going to watch. They always choose what you watch – the people who decide do so at meetings that you are not able to attend.

You can ‘have your say’ but only after reading a 200-page document and navigating a clunky web interface. You’re desperate to tell them that you’d rather watch season 2 of Stranger Things than a documentary film portraying sugar as the physical incarnation of Satan, but they make it so hard.

If the UK planning system was an online streaming service we’d have cancelled our direct debits long ago. We all inhabit this world and should all have equal opportunities to shape it. By being time-consuming, inconvenient and opaque, the planning system is unwittingly undemocratic and unfair.

Localism and neighbourhood planning were ostensibly created to give more people a role in shaping their communities, but it is increasingly evident that these systems are largely perpetuating existing dynamics. The people creating neighbourhood plans at the bottom tend to look a lot like the people creating national planning policy at the top, leaving whole swathes of society without a voice in the system.

We can argue that the barriers to participation are myriad and complex, but the biggest factor is the most precious resource: time. Is a person working two jobs able to attend meetings in the middle of the day? No. Does someone singlehandedly caring for three children have time to read a long, boring policy document? Unlikely. Even if someone jumps through all the hoops, the system is so opaque they may never know what, if any, impact their participation had.

But we have this great thing now called UX (user experience for those not au fait with marketing jargon). If you log into Netflix everything is laid out before you and the power is in your hands. It’s easy to find the things that interest you and easy to share your opinions; thumbs up for The Crown, thumbs down for A Christmas Horror Story (don’t ask). You see the fruits of your not-so-hard labour instantly reflected in ‘Recommended for you’.

Participation in the planning system could be this easy – and even fun. Information could be presented clearly and content could be engaging. Platforms could be dynamic and responsive. Outcomes could be transparent and easily shared. It would take time and it would take money, but the results could be profound – a world of many shaped by more than just a few.

Written for and published by The Planner

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