Major changes in Ciutadel

It has been more than a year since the last post, and there are some updates about Ciutadel that I would like to publish here.

After a year working as a tool to create smart cities, I found that there were some features or ideas that were not working properly, and I had the feeling that something was not working fine.

Here, some details about the way that we are going to take.

Having so many concepts like cities (as Ciutadel understands a City), groups, groups of groups, wishes, identities (and all the identity types that were on the first Ciutadel vision, like cooperative identities), the possibility to have more than one identity each of them with its own inventory and anonymities made Ciutadel a tool so hard to use that was close to be non-functional or at least not with a small effort.

Adding so many features, and changing the user experience as fast as we did, made it difficult for the user to get familiarized with the app and focusing our social media on these features and using it as a change log more than a channel to create a relation between our vision and our user community created the idea of Ciutadel being a project and not a service.

Image of Ciutadel home screen

The vision about creating Ciutadel was to bring smart cities easily, but adding complexity blurred that way. The truth is that if the solution is too complex maybe the intention and reason to be online is not clear.

If the tool implies the understanding of the user about the problem in a deep way, the tool itself is not helping, and Ciutadel making a direct representation of the city was implying for users to have the responsibility of creating smart cities, with all the complexity that this involves.

So we decided to do some brainstorming on this, before going on.

We are working on a new version of Ciutadel that will accomplish a new vision on building smart cities more focused in secure and smart communications and not in distribution of resources in what the city context means.

We are trying to develop a new service that will go straight to the essence of the first idea, representing in a clearer way our vision on what being a smart city means.

That’s why we closed our Beta to develop what we think that will be more enjoyable and useful for our users.