Search and search again; research!
TL;DR Wrapping up this sprint, we are focusing on identifying key parts of the client business model, research analogous domains, and beginning outreach to organizations that could provide us more insight into complex decision-making processes. We’re excited to see what insights may come out of our deep dive to better influence the iteration and design recommendations we will begin to put together in later weeks.
On the Importance of Communication
As we started this sprint, we were challenged to emphasize the importance of research as part of the design process. Our team recognized that connecting to marginalized populations through community-based organizations, non-profits, and exploring analogous domains is critical for us to empathize with users, identify unmet needs, and uncover key insights.
Communicating the importance of research before jumping into the design was crucial to ensure that our entire team was on the same page and could share a common, broader vision.
To keep an open conversation going, we have broken down research tasks among our team and are reliant on synthesizing information to uncover insights. With our client, we have set weekly meetings to touch base in-person to share findings, engage in design thinking, and demonstrate how research shapes our design direction.
Sprint 2: A quest to better understand our domain and users
Our goal in this sprint was to launch ourselves into our research with full force. We started off the sprint with stakeholder mapping, exploring who is involved in the benefits ecosystem. As we identify key stakeholders to contact as part of our primary research, we are also supplementing our boots-on-the-ground research with secondary resources.
Stakeholder Mapping with the Client
Stakeholder mapping was an opportunity for us to put our heads down together with the client to really connect the dots in our domain understanding. They quickly caught on to the way that we were visualizing the relationships and value exchanges between different stakeholder groups and were able to substantially increase the number of potential users, intermediaries, and other interested parties that we had on our radar. The map that we made together is going to direct us moving forward, especially as we formulate and execute on our research plan, so we hung it in our office!
Constructing a Research Plan
Our research plan involves reaching out to non-profit organizations where we can interview stakeholders who have some insight into what it can be like interacting with the state government in the benefits ecosystem. These organizations will likely have broad experiences with populations experiencing need at varying levels in their specific domains. We believe that this is an important piece of the interaction between people and the state government. In addition, this avenue could lead us to be in contact with populations we might otherwise have trouble finding; for example, other end users that we may get in touch with through prior contact with non-profits.
Because we expect contact with non-profit organizations to take time, we have planned other research activities to run in parallel so that we can build empathy for the populations we are trying to understand by immersing ourselves in the community or outreaching for people by visiting the communities first-hand and perform quick, guerrilla research to get our feets wet.
We expect that our research process will span across a large portion of the project and do not want to box ourselves into a specific timeframe for “completing” our research within specific sprints as will address questions that relate to foundational research for the needs of people as well as exploratory research for branching off to ideation. Instead, we plan to constantly evaluate where we are in the project and what next steps we need to take to ensure we are getting a complete picture as we move forward.
Investigating Analogous Domains
We were curious about what processes in analogous domains could teach us about common user experiences. We brainstormed aspects of applying for benefits:
- Time-sensitive
- Immediate needs
- High complexity
- Lack of assurance (no guaranteed outcome)
- Potential mismatch in screening vs. outcome
- Opacity/lack of transparency into why the decision is made
- Decision made by someone else
- Binary decisions
- Limited resources
These aspects led us to form the following question which guided us to identify analogous domains:
Driving Question: what can we learn from analogous domains which have complex decision-making processes that aim to address immediate human needs?
Up Next:
As we complete this sprint and move into the next our focus will be taking insights from our primary field research and looking at how the feasibility and use of technology apply to real user needs.
We will also be conducting a significant landscape analysis of government processes and other complex decision-making models. The hope is that as a team we can gather our insights of both the problem space and technology options we have to drive initial design recommendations.
We also hope to continue growing our secondary knowledge of the space because research is truly an ongoing process even as we hone in on a particular way to approach the problem space!
Chat with you next time, Humans!
— Laura, Tommy, Simran, Conlon, and Judy
