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How could a city support young citizens better? User research was part of the City as a Service for Young Citizens project.

Summer 2017

Team
Sara Ikävalko / Project Manager
Mirja Kälviäinen, Research Specialist
Kati Kumpulainen, RDI Specialist

My role: assisting research, analysing user data and creating personas based on the data.

About the project

What?

The whole project aimed to develop better city services for young citizens. My role was to take part in the first stage: find out who are the young citizens.

For who?

From April to September 2017 we met altogether 267 young (from 15 to 29 years old) citizens, mainly in the Lahti area. The average age of the participants was 20 years old. 61% identified themselves as a female, 38% as a male and 1% neither of those.

Topics:

  • How the urban environment is experienced?
  • Attitudes towards working, schools, future or other people?
  • What kind of general values there are among the youth?
  • How they use city services?

How?

My task was to collect, document, analyse and present the gathered data.

The information was gathered from different sources using different methods. We conducted altogether:

  • six workshops for high school, vocabulary and university students
  • self-reporting tasks for two high school student groups
  • self-reporting tasks (probes) for a wide range of young citizens
  • a workshop for immigrants (Finnish language course group)
  • interviews for young people (under 29) in working life
  • observation and interviews in the field (festival)

I planned half of the workshop tasks, assisted the workshop implementations, made a few of the interviews and participated in the field observation. Self-reporting tasks were done by other students as part of service design studies.

Main outcomes

The process of analysing the data. Emmi Putkonen

Personas

As a result, I presented eight user personas to guide the development in the next stages of the project. The goal with the personas was to crystallize and present the main finding from the user research. Personas show how different life situations people may have when growing from teenager to young adult. That is why some personas included two or three different “age versions”.

eight personas in one picture: ella(17, 21 and 26 years old), salla (16 and 24 years old), anna (18 and 22 years old), krisse (20 and 29 years old), eero (17 and 28 years old), natalia (24 years old), yeasit (27 years old) and henri (17 years old)
ELLA
Collage (from left) 1. friends, makeup, beauty, friends, gym 2. study, braveness, cat, home 3. love, family, home

Ella, 17

High school student living with a dad, stepmom and siblings.

Ella, 21

Employed as a customer servicer, still living with her parents.

Ella, 26

Working as nurse, living with a husband and 1 year old son.

SALLA

Salla, 16

High school art student living with her parents.

Salla, 24

Studying at the University of Applied Sciences, living alone in a studio apartment.

ANNA

Anna, 18

Final year high school student living with parents in a detached house.

Anna, 22

University student living her boyfriend.

KRISSE

Krisse, 20

Unemployed, living with his father.

Krisse, 29

Working as an intern, living in a rented flat at the city center.

EERO
two collages: 1. friends, family, competiton studying 2. work, office, style, running, food

Eero, 17

High school student living with his parents.

Eero, 28

Office work, wife, dog and three-room apartment.

NATALIA

Natalia, 24

Working at a kindergarten kitchen and living with her Finnish husband in a city center.

YASIR

Yasir, 27

Working as a cook, living alone at the suburbs.

HENRI
Collage: sports, friends, competition, family

Henri, 17

Studying at the high school and living with his parents in an apartment.

Persona moodboards

The aim of a moodboard is to support the vision of a person. Different age versions of each persona are combined into the same picture. See the moodboards for each persona behind the accordion below.

Read the full persona descriptions here (in Finnish).

Other results

In addition to personas, I analysed and created visualizations of how young citizens experience their city and how they use it. The results were valuable information for the City of Lahti.

How youth in Lahti experience their environment? Emmi Putkonen

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