Designing digital actor engagement platforms for local high streets: an action design research study

High streets across Europe continue to lose consumers to online retail, leading to business closures and the decline of city centres, impairing cities’ overall liveability. To counter this vicious cycle, our study presents smartmarket2, the first instantiation of a digital actor engagement platform designed specifically for high streets. smartmarket2 enables hybrid online-offline customer journeys by connecting consumers to stores and other high street service providers. In an action design research (ADR) project, we design, implement and evaluate smartmarket2, involving 150 high street operators and 2,300 citizens in three cycles of building, intervention and evaluation. We derive four design principles that contribute prescriptive knowledge on the design of digital actor engagement platforms. Our results reveal that such a platform is able to increase engagement, but that it is subject to actors’ engagement dispositions.