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Applying a scoring system to upgrade modern citizens

A Nutanix Design Challenge case study

Context

This article is regarding the Nutanix Design Competition organized earlier in March. The problem statement was anything like I have heard about and this made me want it to attempt even more. Alas, I couldn’t make it in time for the submission but this was my first ever attempt at a UX problem and decided to share my experience anyway. :D

Theme

We are sharing and consuming enormous amounts of data — impacting our perception of others and vice versa. Similar to rating systems like CIBIL (India), Credit scores(USA) developed and used by financial institutions, there have been talks of a social rating system. It would be interesting to consider how such a system could evaluate individuals on factors ranging from personal themes such as health, personal finance to broader ones like carbon footprint, crime and more.

The Challenge

The challenge was to promote responsible living in a town by providing its mayor with an interface that helps her:

1. Monitor current state across parameters
2. Rate/score citizens for their behavior
3. Identify issues and suggest solutions

You can view the complete brief here.

RESEARCH PHASE: Scoring Systems

Understanding the credit score system.

The credit score is a measure of the creditworthiness of a person. It has been designed to help lenders decide whether to load their money or not and if yes, at what interest rates.

The 3-digit credit score is based on a credit report, which is maintained by credit bureaus. It takes into the account of the following things:

The FICO score model is most commonly used by credit bureaus.

The score provided lenders a more efficient, objective and unbiased way to give out loans.

Understanding China’s Social Credit

China already began its experiments with citizen monitoring and rating system in 2009. They had developed a social credit system, where a person is assessed individually on every parameter. They planned to launch it fully-fledged in 2020 across the whole nation.

• Each citizen is granted 1000 points at the start.
• Positive activities increased the score while negative activities decreased the score.
• Numerous activities are recorded. For example:

1. Donating to charity
2. Volunteer work
3. Jaywalking
4. Online activities, like buying video games or clothes
5. Playing loud music in public
6. Spreading fake news or radical ideas
7. Drinking alcohol
8. Spending time with low-scoring people

• Penalties are given to those with low scores, these include travel bans from high-speed rails, flights, etc. lower internet speeds, ban from taking out loans and even public shaming.
• Rewards are given to high scorers including exemption from paying deposits while renting a car or a room, no waiting line in the hospitals, etc.
• The motive behind creating the system was to rate the “trustworthiness” of the people.
• There were officials assigned to particular areas who went and recorded activities of people in a journal. These journals were used as a source of information in the early phases of the plan. Later on, facial recognition cameras were installed in public places.

China’s social credit system was the central system in determining the services available for its citizens and laying down rules and thresholds to determine them. Hence, it received extreme reviews in both positive and negative ways.

My design of the scoring system: Citizen Rating Index (CRI)

“Responsible living starts by making eco-friendly choices, being a conscious consumer, volunteering, and helping your community.”

Reading more and more about what responsible living is and the parameters that should be taken into account, I divided them into 4 major aspects:

Civic: No one can be a responsible citizen without staying within the law. Hence, this includes your criminal records and other violations.

Social: Social responsibility is a duty every individual has to perform to maintain a balance between the economy and the ecosystems. Activities include using cleaner alternatives, avoiding littering, following traffic rules, etc.

Financial: To be financially responsible, you need to live within your means. this includes paying your bills on time, spending credit responsibly, includes things that have interest in the payment, budgeting, etc.

Online behavior: Being a responsible digital citizen means having online social skills to take part in online community life ethically and respectfully. There are various kinds of violations one could end up doing on the internet which include cyberbullying, phishing, sextortion, accessing banned websites, etc.

Now, each of these 4 domains carried some numerical weightage of these little activities, for which the domain-specific CRI is built. The combination of these gives us the overall CRI.

The City: Global metrics

All the small activities that are performed by citizens also affect the existing global parameters which are used to judge a city’s living conditions. I also took these into account so that the mayor can view these as well.

The new design provides an alternative metric to look that is more specific to its citizens!

The Interface

Now that the framework of the citizen scoring system was set. It was time to work on the next part: the interface. Before that, I needed to research the tasks that the mayor needed to perform as well as how the local government works as a whole.

The Mayor

A mayor is the elected leader of a municipal government. In the strong-mayor form of government, the mayor is the chief executive officer of the city.

So basically, a municipal corporation is a local government in India that administers urban areas with a population of more than one million. The urban area is divided into various areas called wards, and each ward had a representative in the corporation.

I looked at the specific subjects that the corporation and the Mayor are responsible for. I also found out that the public can also directly contact the corporation by using the “mayor helpline number”. After a lot of analyzing and prioritizing I divided the mayor’s work into what could be possibly added to the interface:

1. Head the meetings of the council.
2. Plan the budget for the city departments.
3. Listen to public complaints.
4. Planning and passing proposals for things like housing, public amenities.
5. Overlook the city on various metrics and identify issues.
6. Make changes and resolve issues.

Time to set down features and ideas into a working mayor’s dashboard. But before that, a few assumptions :)

1. For activities to be recorded for the rating index, it is assumed that all public places have mass surveillance systems with face recognition to accurately record a person’s activities.
2. Documents such as electricity bills are also taken into the record.
3. Each department (Health, police, banks, etc.) has capable tools and workforce to maintain individual databases that are used in developing the index.
4. Each department is given an individual application to stay connected with the mayor’s dashboard.
5. The rating algorithm is carefully constructed to allow the mayor to simply make changes in the weightage of any of the citizen activities.
6. There will be a complaint portal that connects the citizen directly to the mayor’s office.

Solution

And here we go! Epic logo reveal! :3

Big Brother is watching you ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I divided the navigation into three segments. First contains all the tools that can be used for the office work of the mayor. Second, all the city’s activities along with metrics. And third, the rating system.

The overview screen gives the mayor a look at all the data she needs to know briefly.

The overview tab contains three segments: Global Indicators, CRI, Activities. CRI Breakdown. On hovering, the mayor can look at any of the domain’s graph in detail. Activities are recorded and displayed along with the frequency.

Issue Identification: The mayor can look at the CRI breakdown for a particular domain as well as the drop or raise in the CRI locality wise.

Issue Solution: After looking at the metrics, the mayor can raise an issue she suspects in a locality.

The mayor can add comments and receive updates on the issue as well!

This allows a two-way issue identification.

And finally, the rating system, where the mayor can look at the weights of each activity and make necessary changes in the Index.

Conclusion

This whole project was super fun! (especially for a guy like me who spent years playing city simulation games :P). It was interesting to explore the whole idea of scoring systems and how it can be applied to a person’s life. Due to time constraints, I couldn’t figure out if there was a way to introduce this system in a more positive way than the way it is being done in China. Also, the algorithm to make the index must be very complicated, not something that can be so simply edited by a person. I think one could have done better in that part.

So overall, this was a great learning experience, even though I could only reach a few of the multiple layers that this problem had. I feel bad for not being able to submit (even though the deadline got extended). I hope to perform better (and participate :P) in the future!

Until then, thanks for reading!