Healthy Streets

Healthy Streets® gives towns and cities around the world an evidence-based approach to creating equitable, sustainable and attractive urban spaces. Its human-centred framework embeds public health in transport, the public realm and planning.

To engage a wider audience, Healthy Streets turned to Ten4 to create an intuitive, accessible tool that anyone could use to understand the health of their local streets. The platform needed to be easy to use, generate clean and reliable data, embody the Healthy Streets mission, strengthen the organisation’s brand, and make gathering on-street insights effortless.

At the core of the new platform is the set of 10 Healthy Streets Indicators — each one describing an aspect of the human experience of being on streets, from feeling safe to having places to stop and rest. These Indicators are the basis of the Healthy Streets Approach and the lens through which every survey response is recorded and measured.

We designed the app to make that process accessible to everyone. People can now choose between two complementary ways to assess a street:

• A quick, qualitative survey based on felt responses with intuitive sliders that capture immediate impressions.
• A more detailed, quantitative survey with structured multiple-choice questions, photos and notes.

This dual approach broadens participation while improving the quality and depth of the data, ensuring that insights reflect both instinctive human experience and rigorous evidence.

Our guiding principle was to design for the person standing on a street with their phone in hand. Mobile-first layouts, intuitive inputs, and effortless photo uploads make the experience seamless. Beneath the surface, we ensured every survey was consistent and mapped to a verified location using the open source openstreetmap.org API. By marrying usability with rigour, we created an experience that serves both people and policymakers.

The finished product is a web app that feels both immediate and trustworthy: straightforward, elegant, and truly belonging to the Healthy Streets brand. Participants locate a street via GPS, snap it to official mapping data, add notes and photos, and complete either the survey. Results appear instantly, visualised against the 10 Healthy Streets Indicators, while account holders unlock richer reports and downloads.

What was once a concept best understood by technical specialists has become a platform that embodies the public-health driven Healthy Streets approach, reinforcing the organisation’s position as a global leader in people-first urban planning.

The impact is already clear: more surveys are being completed, data quality is higher, and engagement with the Healthy Streets framework is growing. Importantly, the platform builds recognition and trust with the Healthy Streets brand, internationally.

When policymakers, campaigners, or communities encounter the tool, they don’t just see data — they see Healthy Streets leading the way towards healthier, fairer and more sustainable cities.

What began as an esoteric measurement framework has become something bigger: a way for the Healthy Streets organisation to extend its influence, strengthen its identity, and inspire change across borders. By combining thoughtful design with careful engineering, we helped transform a survey process into a global asset. And turn the Healthy Streets Indicators into lived, measurable experiences, connecting people everywhere to the future of their streets.