A short video capturing learning so far
Over the last few months we’ve run service design workshops in Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow. These have been attended by a range of people working on the front line of delivering public and third-sector services to citizens, and citizens themselves.
One of the things we do in these workshops is journey mapping, you can read more about this approach in our earlier post.
Journey mapping is commonly used in service design and other disciplines, to map a current journey, to imagine a future journey, or both. Usually it will involve identification of actual “pain points” or potential “pain points” in an existing or imagined journey. This is so that action can be taken to reduce the challenges people face and improve the journey.
Based on our experience of working with clusters of organisations serving the same groups of citizens over the last few years, we started to notice that there are a common set of challenges that cannot easily be addressed with existing infrastructure or with organisations working alone.
These challenges can be thought of as particular types of “pain points” that are experienced by people; they are, in no particular order, cost, risk, effort and friction.
What is this like for citizens? For example they experience:
Friction when they are unable to sign-up for something they are entitled to because they don’t have the right evidence to hand.
Effort when they have to try to remember an important detail or repeat their story again to get help.
Risk when they are asked to transfer information about themselves in an insecure manner.
Cost when they are required or expected to travel somewhere to get something done or take time off work to deal with services.
These pain points are some of the negative consequences of data capture, storage and sharing that is arranged around organisations. A better understanding of different perspectives on how these factors are experienced aids the co-design of a different way of working. In the SAIDS Project, as at Mydex in general, we develop and promote tools to enable a truly citizen-centred approach to data capture, storage and sharing. This is to remove cost, risk, effort, and friction for all involved.
We’re using journey mapping as a way to systematically capture the experiences of citizens and front line workers in relation to these pain points in their services. The video at the top of this post gives a flavour of what we’ve learnt so far.
With thanks to the participants of our Better Services by Design open and in-house workshops for their time and insight.
