A City of Data: Creating a living map for Live XYZ
Live XYZ is an interactive map where every business, space, and event is indexed and searchable. I was hired to design a consumer mobile app, internal mapping tools, web platform, and other experimental projects all using their live city data and creating a larger ecosystem of live maps.
Local discovery is fragmented and outdated
Mainstream maps highlight major businesses but miss smaller storefronts, pop-ups, cultural spots, and temporary events, offering little sense of what’s happening right now. Without real-time activity or hyperlocal detail, whole parts of a city stay invisible. But collecting that real-time data is a challenge. And what is the best way to deliver it to users? Those are the challenges I faced when designing for Live XYZ.
Inspiration & Competition
LiveXYZ Map
Hyperlocal street-level mapping
Live XYZ aims to map every place and event on every block. This includes indexing businesses of all kinds and mapping them to the actual front-door entrances, whether on the side of street or in a mall. Live does this by literally sending mappers out to walk every block and manually plot every space as a dot on their map. My goal was to make this as efficient and accurate as possible. The faster the process was, the more frequently the city could remapped.
Internal Tools
Internal Tools
"Official Map of NYC"
Real-time directory, discovery, and community
Once the data was collected and stored, the features of the app started coming together. Users could search or filter businesses and events by type, tag, location, time of day, and more. They could also browse nearby and discover as they walked around exploring the city. They could even create and follow user generated curated lists, creating a community within the platform.
Consumer App
App Details
Web integration and city partnerships
Upon designing the mobile app, I began work on porting it over to the web. The web version functioned largely the same, just with more map exposed. With web embeds now available, we could partner with the local government, parks departments, and neighborhood improvement districts to showcase the data on other websites and external dashboards.
Embedded Map
Partnerships
Dashboards
The Future of Live
LiveXYZ has since shut down its consumer app, but the data lives on. With continued partnerships with the city and BIDs, projects like wayfinding displays and data reports and dashboards have remained strong.
Wayfinding
Data Visualization & Reports
Printed Maps