Case Study
While carrying out research on this topic, FutureEverything held their annual European digital festival in Manchester, which brings people together to imagine, shape and question the vision of a truly participatory society. Already in contact with several members of the team for research purposes, I was invited to attend a Lean Startup weekend which promoted the use of multi-disciplinary teams made up from entrepreneurs, technologists, creative professionals and social innovators, with the aim to solve key societal issues within the local area. This was a collaborative project developed by FutureEverything, Digital Catapult, Future Cities Catapult, and Greater Manchester’s Local Authorities.
Seen as an opportunity to explore a creative human-centered discovery process through iterative cycles of prototyping, testing and refinement, within a participatory environment, I volunteered to take part in the weekend. This lead to the development of my case study;
GRIPE, a community focused, technological tool which empowers citizens of a city to become more involved in their local neighbourhood and connect with local councils.
The weekend opened with a relaxed environment where participants were introduced to a team of facilitators, mentors, designers and developers who would guide us through the weekend and remind each team to remain user focused, to validate ideas through user testing, understand their pain points and to design concepts using prototypes. Provided with five pre-defined social challenges, each team would have 48hours to choose a problem, develop a solution, carry out user testing, prototype and present a 4 minute pitch to a panel of judges.
Teams were created by the organisers, based on experience and skills of the participants.
My project team consisted of four people, a medical student, a professional researcher, a data scientist and myself, a masters student with a background in creative design and development. Each of us had varied backgrounds, cultures, careers and age ranges, the ideal scenario according to literature.
The project consisted of 3 phases, Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation.
Inspiration Phase
A short conversation lead to us introducing ourselves, our skills and backgrounds before choosing a problem to solve: How might we empower citizens to enhance their neighbourhood? Shortly after we identified a clear user group: ‘active residents of Manchester’ to focus our solution and user testing towards.
We began by identifying any pain points that we’ve personally experienced as residents in Manchester and brainstormed possible solutions that could empower citizens to become more involved in their neighbourhood.
A first round of brainstorming lead to the assumption that there was a need for a service to connect people with their local council, allowing for a better communication channel and encouraging people to highlight issues that they discover within their neighbourhood.
Presenting our ideas back to the event organisers and participants for feedback, we created a statement which defined our aim and a list of assumptions that we needed to confirm through a first round of user interviews, hoping for validation, inspiration and a collection of insights.
Statement:
We are creating a service to empower active residents to connect with the local council and enhance their neighbourhood.
Our assumptions:
● People will report something they are not happy about
● We assume that people care about their neighbourhood
● People want to be heard by the council and better connected to the councillors
● The council will act upon the problems that are reported
● We are assuming that councils will want to work with this technology
● We assume allowing people to be visual (i.e take a picture on their phone) will cause action for people to become involved
User Testing — Round 1
To test our assumptions and confirm a need for this type of service, we identified two user groups we would like to interview. Residents within Manchester City and councillors within local government. To complete this task within a short time period of time we created key questions as a collective and then split the team into two groups to carry out the research.
Group 1 roamed Oxford Road, interviewing 5 people from different backgrounds and age ranges, with an aim to ask various questions to identify pain points, constraints and if (or how) they currently report issues to the local council.
Group 2 contacted numerous councillors within Greater Manchester (Salford, Trafford and Manchester City) by email asking for an interview via Skype, created an online survey to collect quantitative data and carried out desk research to gather facts about Manchester
City Council’s current position.
The findings from user interviews and an online survey indicated:
● People feel there is a deteriorating state of neighbourhoods (i.e dirty streets, litter, graffiti)
● There has been a loss of faith in local government — 91% surveyed believe the council wouldn’t react to a report of an issue
● Residents are unsure of what department to call or who to contact if there is an issue in their local area
● Individuals feel they are within a voiceless community where councils don’t listen to their needs and thoughts
● There is no ‘easy’ way to report an issue as phone calls can be expensive and residents feel emails are ignored as there is often no personal reply, just a auto response
● 100% surveyed would be more likely to report a problem knowing that their council would act on their feedback
Desk research indicated a financial problem within the local council that is having a direct effect on the amount of funding going into city services.
● £250 million in budget cuts to Manchester City Council from 2011–2015. This equates to £311.94 less per resident
● 3000 jobs within the council lost since 2011 with approximately another 600 jobs at risk
● £55 million forecasted cuts in 2015/16 and a further £30 million in 2016/17
● The amount of funding towards services has dropped by over 40% between 2010 and 2014.
(Manchester.gov.uk, 2014)
Analysis of our research indicated a need for intervention to current practice. Cuts on council funding is clearly having an impact on local services, leading to the deterioration of streets and neighbourhoods, a loss of faith in local government and communities feeling they are ‘voiceless’, unsure of the current system and not listened too if they report a concern. Yet 100% of participants asked said they would be more likely to become involved in local issues and report problems, if they knew the council would act on their feedback.
Ideation Phase
Based on the insights and facts from the research and inspiration phase, we were confident our assumptions were validated and moved into an ideation phase. Using brainstorming and voting techniques we developed several ideas which could empower residents to become more involved in local issues, enhance their neighbourhood and improve the communication between individuals and local government.
We decided to create two digital solutions which would be tailored for each stakeholder within the concept. A web service for councils that would act as a notification and communication tool and a smartphone app for residents to help them identify issues that they believe should be in the attention of the council.
Rapid Prototyping, Testing and Competitor Analysis
Following the lean startup framework we wanted to validate our concept through a round of user testing by presenting the users with a visual prototype. Finding it difficult to contact councillors within a short time period we decided to focus this round of user testing on the residents of the city, looking to know if this service would provide value to them and if it would entice them to act.
Believing that prototypes don’t need to be complex, we sketched our idea onto paper using phone templates to visualise our thoughts and generate useful feedback to evolve the idea further through several more rounds of iteration.
While conducting the user testing we became aware of an online platform that currently provides a similar service, fixmystreet.com. It’s a UK based service which allows residents to report issues and offers councils an integrated platform to categorise and send each report to the right department. We carried out a competitor analysis of available services on the market and questioned if they meet the stakeholders needs which we identified within our research.
Although the current services available provide a digital communication channel and a platform to allow residents to report issues, it became clear that the market was in an ideal position to be disrupted. Few companies use the data collected to share knowledge with society, other than one service which ‘pins’ local reports on a map.
With the right infrastructure in place and publication of data to inform the public of current circumstances, there is potential to create a service for local awareness, encourage innovation, highlight the need for community participation (volunteering) in local neighbourhoods and help councils to balance their current financial problems with city services.
Entering another iteration round we developed the concept further by re:focusing our aims, stating the job each solution should provide to each stakeholder, adding a data driven approach to the current strategy and brainstorming to create a potential business model for the service.
Lastly a round of prototyping lead to the creation of a digital wireframe, using online software to illustrate the concept to the event organisers, participants of the event and a panel of judges.
Redefined aims:
● To raise awareness of the deteriorating nature of our neighbourhoods
● Highlight the increasing demand on local authorities, unable to cope with current needs due to budget cuts places on them
● To disrupt the current process / status quo
● To empower people to make a change in their local neighbourhoods through a higher process
● Create a crowdsourcing data-visualisation tool which could:
○ Show / illustrate local issues
○ Showcase the council’s problems with increasing demands and illustrate the current imbalance that they are facing
○ Allow private companies to see where councils need help. This potentially could create partnership and revenue streams
○ Open the data to allow comparison of districts within Greater Manchester or on a national scale across England.
For councils the service would:
● Reduce pressure on phone services
● Optimise resources
● Showcase the benefits of funding and the impact of cuts
● Communicate decision making
● Become aware of issues within their district that may otherwise be unknown
For citizens the service should
● Empower residents to become more involved and take pride in their city
● Encourage volunteering to help maintain local areas and fix issues
● Give a voice to residents
After careful deliberation, the judging panel made their decision and awarded several prizes to chosen teams. Describing the potential impact this concept could have in within local areas, we were awarded a top prize which included a dedicated UX, design and coding team to develop the idea further for another 3 days. The aim of this design sprint would be to create a MVP (minimum viable product) to be exhibited at the FutureEverything European Conference in Manchester Town Hall in 4 days time.
Implementation phase — Explanation and exhibition of the concept
The next morning, alongside one of my team members and we met our dedicated design team from Future Cities Catapult and Future Cities Design, spending several hours debriefing them on the concept background and development, explaining our research and vision.
Excited and passionate about the project, we brainstormed as a new collective team, creating ideas to differentiate the concept further from competition and wanting to make it more user friendly. Our initial thoughts were to make the solution more community focused, fun and engaging to use. Rather than positioning it as an app to report problems to your local council, a task many people may feel is a mundane, we needed to create a final concept which would allow this functionality but also capture the residents attention, engage the users and motivate them to act. To do this we questioned how to add a gamification technique into the concept.
Continuing our human centered approach, our aim was to put the user in the center of the process and develop for their needs. To do this we reevaluated our target audience, agreeing that ‘active residents of Manchester’ wasn’t specific enough. We needed to define a persona to understand a more specific representation of who would actively use the service, then design for this target.
We defined an ‘active resident within Manchester’ as someone who lives within the Greater Manchester area and has an engaged interest in public spaces, such as cyclists, dog walkers, park keepers, community activists and retailers.
Development of the app service
Aiming to make better use of the data collected within the service we wanted to provide the user with a more personalised experience, create a community feeling and a platform to provide residents with a voice. To do this we added some extra functionality to the core concept.
Still allowing residents to capture an image, categorise it, add a description and notify the local council of an issue, we introduced an information feed which would inform users (using live data) with knowledge of what is being reported in their local area. Within this feed, each user would have an option to answer a simple question on an issue; ‘Would you fix this?’. By voting Yes or No, individuals can communicate their personal view and inform the council where they feel funding and resources should be prioritised.
Residents can participate in the community by sharing their comments with other users, linking to social media websites to raise awareness and access up-to-date feedback from the council as they respond to each issue. A ‘top charts’ section would allow users to see the most discussed and voted upon reports while a ‘map’ section clearly visualises alerts within their current area.
Development of the council’s web service
Recognising the need for councils to gain insights, join conversations and provide up-todate information to the general public, we also added additional sections to the web service concept.
Once an issue has been submitted via the app, a representative at the council receives an email with a unique url to a personalised webpage, providing them with detailed information about the case.
Each webpage contains a picture, a title, a description and location details. Councillors can view residents comments on a particular issue, analyse the amount of Yes & No votes the report has received to-date and engage with the public by providing up-to-date information. This could include recognition that the issue has been documented, progress details, a status, or a possible completion date. This information would then be feedback to the residents automatically to be viewed within the app.
Wanting to encourage community participation in local neighbourhoods and empower residents to become more involved in their community we believe the councils could work closer with local businesses and individuals to solve some societal needs and take pressure of the current system. By asking residents to vote Yes or No on a simple question ‘Would you fix this’ or ‘Should this be fixed’, the council collects valuable information. Not only are they aware of the citizens opinion on local problems but they could potentially have access to a list of residents who believe action needs to be taken.
If an issue has been reported that doesn’t require a specialist to carry out the work, a council representative could launch a volunteering event and encourage citizens who have answered ‘Yes’ to get involved through a push notification on their phone. By opting-in or opting-out of notifications, data sharing or event information, the residents are in control of their personal information and can choose to get involved or not. By advertising and organising such events, local councils can save resources, cut costs, build community spirit and encourage citizens to take pride in their environment.
Lastly we added an element of competition to the concept by producing a leaderboard of the top 3 councils in the Greater Manchester Area, ranking councils in order of issues solved within their community.
Preparing for the exhibition
Having completed an ideation phase we divided the team to work on the wireframes, design, development and marketing for the MVP to be exhibited at FutureEverything’s Festival in 72 hours.
As the design and development team progressed with the visual look and coding, I brainstormed possible names for the concept, developed a value proposition, created marketing material (leaflets and business cards), developed a landing page for a website, prepared a slideshow presentation to be displayed at the exhibition stand and material for a small presentation. Wanting a name with personality which would be memorable, pronounceable, clear and most importantly linked to the purpose of the service, we voted on GRIPE. Gripe: to have a problem with something/someone. (Urban Dictionary, 2015)
Exhibiting at FutureEverything Festival — User testing and feedback
Surrounded by inspirational people and ideas, I proudly exhibited the GRIPE concept in Manchester Town Hall on 26th and 27th February 2015. Talking to local residents, business professionals, local councillors, Westminster politicians, academics, data scientists, students and community representatives, I presented the MVP as a demonstration, carried out user testing and handed out leaflets with further information.
I discussed the concept background, potential and vision in detail, gathering user feedback and noting useful insights and facts to validate our research and to help in future iterations.
At the end of day one I was invited to present a 5-minute pitch to The UK Cabinet office, explaining the research behind the project and describing the need a tool which empowers citizens of a city to become more involved in their local neighbourhood and connect with local councils.
Having received amazing feedback from all user groups and stakeholders at the event, I spent the following week analysing the data collected, considering the ethical issues discussed and contacting individuals who were interested taking part in future discussions.
A demo video of the MVP that was demonstrated at the events is below:
Password protection: gripeapp
