- Fig 01 / Release Planning
Decision: Cut twenty features before launch, each with a one-line reason
Result: The launch date held, and every cut was traceable
Product & Platform
Smart Decisions, Smart Cities
CityForward was an innovative web platform developed by IBM as part of its Smarter Planet Initiative. Designed to serve city officials, researchers, academics, and engaged citizens, CityForward offered a comprehensive view of urban life across 250 major cities globally. The platform aimed to facilitate data-driven decision-making and foster a deeper understanding of urban trends.
Overview
- 01 / Problem
- City Forward was IBM's free public platform for exploring, charting and sharing city data, built on nine IBM products. Its data came in as OLAP cubes, and five weeks before launch the plan was 47% complete.
- 02 / Design Challenge
- Russ worked where the specification met the build: integrating the home and exploration pages and carrying design intent into the implementation.
- 03 / Approach
- To hold the launch date, the team cut twenty features, each with a one-line reason. The 2011–12 redesign concepts shifted the site's language from the tool toward what people do with it: explore, collaborate, tell stories.
- 04 / Outcome
- A public beta was live by September 2010. The March 2011 launch date comes from IBM's public materials, not the archive, which holds no metrics or feedback.
Process + Evidence Plates
Home page comp, September 2010, and the densest image in the archive at 442 OCR words. It shows the full IA as designed — Home / Explore Data / Community / Blog, with the four calls to action "See what others have done", "Create Exploration", "View Data", "Join the Discussion", plus "City Forward Suggests" and "My City Forward". Two things make it good evidence: the logged-in user is "Welcome, John Tolva | Sign Out" — IBM's own director of corporate citizenship, later Chicago's CTO, used as the placeholder account rather than a fictional name; and the content is deliberately mixed, with a real blog headline ("Will Chicago face water crisis?" by cityboy, 4 August 2010, 5 comments) sitting directly above Lorem Ipsum body copy. - Fig 02 / Information Architecture
Second variant of the September 2010 home comp, 401 words — the same IA and the same John Tolva logged-in state, with the promotional and blog blocks re-arranged. The a/b/c sequence records iteration on one screen rather than three screens. Decision: Version the IA document rather than redraw it
Result: Forty revisions stayed traceable, and the spec became a record of what shipped
- Fig 03 / Content Strategy
Third home variant, 370 words, and the one that adds a search affordance — "Search City Forward" appears alongside the nav, and a second editorial slot is introduced with the headline "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste". The Like and Tweet buttons are present in all three, dating the comps to the moment social sharing became standard page furniture. Decision: Reframe the top level from the tool to what people do: explore, collaborate, learn
Result: Data cubes read as an invitation to curiosity, not a database
- Fig 04 / Interaction Design
Home page comp, September 2010, and the densest image in the archive at 442 OCR words. It shows the full IA as designed — Home / Explore Data / Community / Blog, with the four calls to action "See what others have done", "Create Exploration", "View Data", "Join the Discussion", plus "City Forward Suggests" and "My City Forward". Two things make it good evidence: the logged-in user is "Welcome, John Tolva | Sign Out" — IBM's own director of corporate citizenship, later Chicago's CTO, used as the placeholder account rather than a fictional name; and the content is deliberately mixed, with a real blog headline ("Will Chicago face water crisis?" by cityboy, 4 August 2010, 5 comments) sitting directly above Lorem Ipsum body copy. Decision: Use the empty state to show what other people had made
Result: First-time visitors had a reason and a prompt to create their own exploration
- Fig 05 / Data Analysis & Visualization
cityforward-021.png Decision: Make the map the primary canvas for city data
Result: People started from a place they knew rather than a table
- Fig 06 / Digital Strategy
cityforward-03.png Decision: Make the platform free to use
Result: A global audience could work with urban data, not only those who could pay for it
- Fig 07 / Information Architecture
- Fig 07 / Data Analysis & Visualization
cityforward-webby1.png Decision: Gather city data scattered across government sites into one source
Result: Education, safety, health and transport statistics could be explored in one place and one format
- Fig 08 / Knowledge Sharing
cityforward-011.png Decision: Let users make visualizations and share them with a community
Result: City data became a conversation in which people exchanged ideas about urban problems
- Fig 09 / Data Analysis & Visualization
- Fig 09 / Experience Design
cityforward-04.png Decision: Keep the exploration tools simple enough for anyone
Result: Non-specialists found patterns, trends and correlations and took them to the community
- Fig 010 / Content Strategy
CityForward 00005.png Decision: Give users tools to build stories from city data
Result: Users made data-based narratives that could shape policy and public perception
- Fig 011 / Data Analysis & Visualization
0000a_Home_1d_popups.png Decision: Put cities side by side on the same measures
Result: Users saw patterns and trends across cities that offered new perspectives on urban policy
- Fig 012 / User Flow Analysis
CityForward 00001.png Decision: Join data access, exploration and storytelling in one workflow
Result: Users went from finding data to making a case without leaving the platform
Recognition
MITx
- Visionary
Webby Awards
- Corporate Social Responsibility