City Experience Playbook (Madinah)
The City Experience Playbook is a comprehensive guide designed to articulate the vision, design, and orchestration of human-centred experiences across the smart city of Madinah.
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Project Summary
The City Experience Playbook is a first-of-its-kind toolkit designed to guide public and private actors in delivering consistent, impactful experiences across all touchpoints in a growing Saudi city. It operationalises Vision 2030 through experience and service design principles.
The Challenge
The city needed a cohesive way to align cultural, digital, operational, and mobility elements across its many projects, assets, and departments. There was:
- No shared framework for “experience delivery”
- Inconsistent user journeys and lack of performance metrics
- Need for language that bridged visionary strategy and day-to-day execution
Our Approach
- Conducted visitor and resident research
- Conducted co-design workshops with city stakeholders
- Created a common journey language across resident, visitor, investor, and service personas
- Built templates for KPIs, experience audits, and activation strategy
- Delivered a beautifully designed playbook for experience implementation guidance, training, procurement, and policy integration
Results & Impact
- Playbook adopted as a strategic tool across the authority
- Awarded at the Smart City Expo
- Cited by Gartner in city innovation strategy frameworks as a model for experience-led, place-based urban design
- Enabled faster onboarding of vendors, investors, and partners
“This gave us a shared language. We finally had something we could use to align developers, planners, and policy teams around the same north star.”
— Senior Official, Madinah Region Development Authority (MDA)
