Malmö Civic Lab: Felanmälan prototype pt. 1
Four weeks ago I joined Malmö Civic lab. Malmö Civic Lab is an experiment by the city of Malmö to reveal ways of improving life for the citizens by prototyping using tech and design. It has only been around for a couple of months and is run by Måns Adler and Timo Engelhardt.
For long I’ve been interested in how we procure and build software within the public sector, so this sounded like a great opportunity for me to learn more.
There is an endless amount of projects here to dig into — Should we help customer service procure a new management software, help social services figure out how to place homeless people using data or start prototyping a kitchen and food reporting tool for the schools? All equally exciting and important!
Stop spending🙅♀…️ Start prototyping!
But the goal in this early phase is to create internal awareness — that there are different ways of approaching problems than what they are used to. Prototype instead of reports, building and reusing existing tools instead of buying expensive tools, small and fast failures instead of slow and safe.
And while Måns and Timo somehow are balancing several complex problems and still come to work with a smile, I figured that I needed to put my focus and energy into a single, smaller project, especially if I wanted to prototype and release something quickly.
My first project: Felanmälan
So we landed on Felanmälan, or error reporting. A somewhat simple problem solved with a somewhat simple solution, a first project that directly touches the citizens and hopefully something we could release in a short time frame.
Error reporting exist to keep the city nice and neat, and it works by having citizens report problems they see in the city. This could be graffiti, broken lamps, potholes etc. Today reporting in Malmö can be done over email, phone or using an online form.
The online form isn’t optimized for mobile and it’s hard to use, most people give up and end up calling in or emailing which is ineffective and expensive for the city — And this is what I want to solve.
Getting to know the service and people 👀
The first thing we always do when starting a project is talking to the people involved, we don’t try to come up with solutions or ask them for solutions, we simply try to understand the current problems.
Identifying actors
The first task was to figure out who I should in order to learn about the current service. Even though error reporting seems like a simple solution, it’s actually quite complex and there are a lot of people involved when a citizen reports.
I decided to look at three groups:
- Citizens — The ones who actually report problems.
- Costumer service and administrations — I later discovered that this group is rather complex. It consists of two different customer service call centres, one of them focuses on error reporting and is handling the reports coming in. There are 14 different administrations each with a specialised focus, I decided to mainly look at the administrators of property and street, as their work is very influenced by the error reporting.
- Entrepreneurs — There are a handful of different entrepreneurs doing the work for the city, mostly they are responsible for different areas of the city and some have specialities, such as graffiti-removing or parking spots and machines.
Visits and interviews
The first week I spend on talking and visiting anyone I could get a hold of in any of the above groups. Recruiting participants and schedule interviews is usually is a very time-consuming job, but being on site (in the city house) helped me a lot.
“You can’t safely challenge the prevailing way these things are done without understanding the reasons why they work that way in the first place” — From the book Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
I had no clue how to recruit citizens using the service, but by talking to a local politician I became aware of various Facebook groups, where citizens would write about happenings and errors in their local area, these turned out to be a good place to look for already existing users of felanmälan.
Understanding how they work together
Spending the first couple of days talking to 9 citizens, 3 from the administration and customer service and 4 entrepreneurs we now had a pretty good picture of how they’re all currently working together. We also realized that they have one common goal to make Malmö city a better place to be in — Which makes our job a whole lot easier.
After just a few days of phone calls and onsite visits we started to see patterns in terms of needs and wants, within the different groups. Especially two areas were very prominent; communication and location, which were the two we started to dig into.
Things we learned
📍Locating the error
- Entrepreneurs use photos to locate the error, it’s often a particular pothole or trash can, so a pin on a map won’t help them to the exact place
- Citizens upload photos, they are not really aware of how the photos are being used, but they share them as a sort of evidence
- Broken streetlamps are impossible to identify for the entrepreneur during daylight
💕 Communication between city and citizens
- Entrepreneurs contact citizens with questions about the error or its location because it’s either hard to find or understand
- Citizens are happy to help the city and its entrepreneurs, they like to feel helpful
- Citizens want to know what is happening with their error report and if it was of any use
- When citizens don’t have the full picture they come up with the answers… “It’s probably because they need to order a spare part”
- Citizens want to show their appreciation towards the city when an error is being fixed
TBC…
Now, not even two weeks within the project, we have a strong understanding of the needs and wants from our different actors and a closer relationship with them. We are aware of the barriers and areas that need improvement.
With this in mind, we felt well prepared and ready to start coming up with solutions, that we want to test with the users. In the next post, I will cover how we went from sketching to putting something in the hand of our users within a few days and what we learned from it.. Stay tuned!
