URBO
SMART CITY OPERATIONS & URBAN MANAGEMENT PLATFORM
A connected digital ecosystem designed to help cities monitor infrastructure, manage mobility, coordinate maintenance, and respond to operational needs through one centralized platform.
ROLE:
Junior Product UX/UI Designer
TIMELINE:
Junior Product UX/UI Designer
TIMELINE:
2018 - 2020
FOCUS:
Smart Cities · Urban Mobility · IoT · Asset Management · Operations
RESPONSIBILITIES:
UX/UI Design · Product Design · User Flows · Interaction Design · Prototyping · Design Systems
TOOLS:
Figma · Adobe XD · Illustrator · Photoshop
The Challenge
URBO brought together multiple layers of city operations into a single digital ecosystem, including public transportation, infrastructure, maintenance, IoT devices, organizations, users, and operational data.
The challenge was to turn this complexity into an interface that could support different workflows and responsibilities without overwhelming the people managing them. The platform needed to make large amounts of information easier to navigate, monitor, and act on while maintaining consistency across an expanding set of tools.
My Contribution
As a Junior Designer, I worked on the UX and UI of several areas across the URBO ecosystem, translating operational requirements into clear workflows, interfaces, dashboards, and management tools.
My work included designing flows for transportation management, fleet maintenance, incident reporting, organization and user administration, IoT device management, and other smart-city operations while helping maintain a consistent visual and interaction language across the platform.
Structuring the Product
URBO was not designed as a single-purpose application. It was a growing ecosystem of tools for managing cities, transportation networks, infrastructure, connected devices, organizations, and operational teams.
As the platform expanded, one of the main design challenges was determining how these capabilities should be organized, connected, and presented to different types of users.
The product structure had to make complex municipal operations feel manageable while allowing users to move between high-level city information and highly specific operational tasks—from monitoring a transportation unit to reporting an incident or scheduling a repair.
This required us to think beyond individual screens and design a scalable information architecture capable of supporting the wider URBO ecosystem.
URBO connects city services, infrastructure, mobility, IoT, maintenance, and administration within one operational ecosystem.
Core Product Flows
With such a broad ecosystem, URBO needed to support very different operational tasks while keeping them connected through a consistent platform structure.
The experience was organized around workflows that allowed users to move from city-level information into specific assets, services, and actions. Depending on their role, users could monitor operations, manage organizations and users, plan transportation services, register connected devices, track maintenance, or respond to incidents.
Rather than treating these capabilities as isolated tools, the platform connected them around the same operational data—helping users move from monitoring, to identifying a problem, to taking action within the same system.
A connected view of how URBO brings together city administration, transit operations, maintenance workflows, IoT infrastructure, and operational data within a single smart city platform.
Designing Around Different City Roles
URBO was designed for a network of organizations and users rather than a single type of operator. Government teams, contractors, transit operators, administrators, and service providers could interact with the same city infrastructure while requiring different levels of access, responsibilities, and visibility.
This made role-based access and organizational structure a fundamental part of the product experience. Instead of treating permissions as a secondary administrative feature, the platform had to ensure that each user could access the tools, assets, and workflows relevant to their responsibilities without exposing unnecessary complexity.
Mapping the relationships between city stakeholders helped define how information, responsibilities, and decisions needed to move through the URBO ecosystem.
The Design Challenge
Create one connected platform that could support multiple organizations and operational roles without making the experience feel fragmented.
This influenced how we structured:
Organizations → Users → Groups → Permissions → Operational Modules
The core design challenge was to unify diverse city stakeholders, services, and operational workflows within one connected platform while keeping the experience clear, role-specific, and manageable.
Designing a Modular Platform
URBO needed to support very different city operations without feeling like a collection of disconnected tools. The interface was structured around a shared platform framework, allowing modules such as mobility, maintenance, IoT, asset management, and administration to behave as parts of the same system.
Instead of designing every service independently, I worked around reusable patterns for navigation, dashboards, data tables, filters, status indicators, forms, permissions, and multi-step workflows. This created consistency across the platform while still allowing each operational area to adapt to its own requirements.
The result was an interface architecture that could expand alongside the city; new services, organizations, users, assets, and connected devices could be introduced without requiring the experience to be redesigned from scratch.
A modular dashboard system allowed users to combine operational, geographic, maintenance, and IoT information according to the context of each city asset.
Fleet Maintenance & Incident Management
Managing a city fleet involves more than keeping vehicles operational. Incidents need to be reported, maintenance must be coordinated across teams and service providers, and every intervention needs to remain traceable over time.
Within URBO, I worked on workflows that connected these activities into a continuous process, from identifying an issue on a vehicle to documenting its location, planning the repair, assigning a service provider,
and reviewing its maintenance history.
A key part of the experience was making complex operational information easier to capture. Instead of relying only on written descriptions, users could visually identify the affected area of a vehicle, selecting different views and marking the specific component involved.
This created a much clearer connection between what happened in the field and what maintenance teams needed to do next.
From Incident to Resolution
Managing a city fleet involves more than keeping vehicles operational. Incidents need to be reported, maintenance must be coordinated across teams and service providers, and every intervention needs to remain traceable over time.
Within URBO, I worked on workflows that connected these activities into a continuous process, from identifying an issue on a vehicle to documenting its location, planning the repair, assigning a service provider, and reviewing its maintenance history.
A key part of the experience was making complex operational information easier to capture. Instead of relying only on written descriptions, users could visually identify the affected area of a vehicle, selecting different views and marking the specific component involved.
This created a much clearer connection between what happened in the field and what maintenance teams needed to do next.
A connected maintenance workflow showing how URBO PRO brings incident reporting, asset assessment, repair coordination, and fleet performance monitoring into one operational system.
Connecting the Physical City to the Platform
URBO was designed to work not only with information entered by users, but also with data generated by the city itself. Through connected devices and infrastructure, the platform could extend its visibility from digital records into real-world urban operations.
One example was Sinapsis, VIKUA’s connected device ecosystem. Within URBO, organizations could register and manage compatible devices, linking physical infrastructure to the platform and making operational information available within the same environment used to manage cities, assets, mobility, and services.
This connection between physical infrastructure and digital management was an important part of the product vision: instead of treating information, assets, and operations as separate systems, URBO brought them together into a shared interface.
From physical assets to actionable information
The design challenge was to make connected infrastructure feel like a natural part of the platform rather than a highly technical system reserved for specialists. Device registration, status information, notifications, and administration therefore had to fit within the same interaction patterns already established across URBO.
By registering connected devices within URBO, physical infrastructure becomes part of a shared digital ecosystem where real-world assets can be monitored, managed, and transformed into actionable operational data.
Planning City Operations
From demand data to coordinated service
URBO was designed not only to monitor what was happening across the city, but also to help operational teams plan how services should respond to that information. For public transportation, this meant bringing route demand, available vehicles, capacity, travel times, speed and service intervals into a single planning workflow.
Instead of treating these variables as separate datasets, the experience connected them around a specific route, date and time period. Users could review system demand, adjust expected demand using origin–destination information, calculate service intervals, assign transportation companies and vehicles, and build the operational plan from the same interface.
A major part of my work was therefore turning a large amount of technical and operational information into a workflow that could be understood progressively rather than all at once. The interface had to support complex decisions while still making the next action clear.
From demand analysis to resource assignment, URBO turns operational data into coordinated transit planning.
Monitoring & Operational Intelligence
URBO brought operational information from across the city into centralized dashboards designed to support faster, more informed decisions. Rather than forcing users to navigate through separate modules to understand what was happening, the platform surfaced key activity, alerts, asset status, maintenance information, passenger data, and performance indicators in one place.
The challenge was not simply displaying more data. It was creating enough hierarchy for users to quickly distinguish between what was happening, what required attention, and what action could be taken next.
From planning to real-time oversight
Dashboards were structured around the context of the asset or service being monitored. For example, a transit unit could bring together its assigned routes, recent activity, incident reports, maintenance status, location, passenger counts, and connected-device information.
This created a more complete operational picture and allowed different city teams to move from isolated data points toward continuous situational awareness.
A centralized URBO operations dashboard brings together city maps, asset status, mobility data, maintenance activity, alerts, and performance indicators, giving teams a single view of what is happening across the urban network and where attention is needed.