Alert Reykjavik

Local public services are usually taken for granted until they fail. When the garbage truck is late or a road crew closes your commute route without warning, you often find out the hard way. For residents of the Reykjavik metro area, that moment of discovery often comes too late and from the wrong place – a neighbor’s Facebook post or a news headline.

To gauge public opinion and gather stories about service disruptions, I launched a screener survey – in Icelandic, distributed through neighborhood Facebook groups, that gathered 155 responses from across the Reykjavik metropolitan area.

When asked how satisfied they were with municipal communication about service disruptions, respondents gave a mean score of 4.77 out of 10.

When asked how they currently learned about disruptions, 67.2% cited news and media and 62.9% cited social media – primarily neighborhood Facebook groups.

Asked to imagine a world where proactive real-time notifications existed and they could choose their preferred delivery method, 76.6% chose a direct notification.

I also conducted 6 interviews with residents of Reykjavik and surrounding towns. The interviews confirmed the survey findings but added some insights.

One theme recurred in almost every conversation: the frustration wasn’t the disruption itself but the silence around it. The interviews also revealed a pattern of workaround behavior. Residents had developed their own informal infrastructure for civic information, for instance Facebook groups where neighbors paste screenshots from City press releases.

Kári Sveinsson is the primary persona based on the research findings.

After doing paper wireframes translated to a mid-fi prototype, I designed hi-fi wireframes and built a clickable prototype.

The design has three distinct parts: the landing page (public dashboard) visible to anyone on reykjavik.is, the sign-up flow that converts a visitor into a subscriber, and the notifications themselves.

The landing page has three jobs: explain the service clearly, encourage people to sign up and serve as the entry point to the public notifications dashboard.

I made the deliberate choice to make the dashboard highly visible, a live feed of real notifications, browsable by district and notification type. This gives visitors immediate evidence of what the service does.

The sign-up follows the established pattern for service applications on My Pages – a multi-step flow with a progress indicator, authenticated via Icelandic digital ID.

I decided to include validation or correction of phone number and email in the process. I also decided that it made sense to allow non-residents to sign up, for instance to monitor the street where they work or where close relatives live.

There was also the question of letting users choose the channel for each notification (SMS, email, or both), or making the channel decision on their behalf based on the type of alert.

Every additional toggle in a sign-up flow is friction, and the value of SMS depends entirely on its rarity. I decided to split channels by alert type, not by user preference:

• City-wide alerts – severe weather, city-wide pollution, major incidents, civil protection emergencies, delivered by SMS only. These are rare, affect everyone, and require immediate attention.
• Local notifications – construction close to your street, delayed garbage collection, a nearby school closure. This is delivered by email only.

The notifications are designed for trust, clarity and right information at the right time. The email notification covers what, where, when, why and what to do. A map shows location for users unfamiliar with street names. A footer contains a one-click link to subscription settings. The SMS alert contains only actionable information and a link to further information.