Co-creating a new portal for the public sector together with users and backstage.
A good example of why you can’t design a new interface if you are not willing to also change the service from the inside.
The digital department of the Region where I lived commissioned us with the redesign of a portal dedicated to economic supports for citizens, associations and companies through grants, allowances, announcements, competitions and tenders.
Challenges
The main challenges were to unify all the content from different portals dedicated to the same goal (including subventions from the EU) into a comprehensive “market place”-like service and make it accessible and user friendly. When we spoke with the client, we discovered one more challenge: discover how to reorganize the backstage in order to meet the previously named challenges.
We agreed to support them not only with UX design, but also with precious insights about internal reorganisation opportunities.
Insight driven multidisciplinary workshops
In this project, I was in charge of finding crucial insights through user research and co-creation workshops and to make sure the UX designer integrated the insights in the redesign.
The user research was partially focussed on the end user experience and partially on the employees having different roles in the back stage of the portal.
I planned 3 co-creative workshops informed from the results of the 3 research phases, so no content for the workshop was decided upstream — it was rather iterated.
1st Workshop: Empathize and create
For the first workshop we invited representants from the end users (corresponding to previously identified personas) and employees from the Region with various key positions.
The aim was to empathize with the end users, create grounded user journeys and ideate solutions to the main pain points in crucial phases.
Storyboards and paper prototypes were created, that served as a ground for the first UX design concepts.
2nd Workshop: Align and “oil” the backstage machinery
When I started researching the backstage through meetings, tests and interviews, I realized it worked pretty much like an assembly line where people were not very much aware of what the person before and after was really doing.
I created a workshop with the aim that everybody working on the backstage would align on every step and challenge throughout the “assembly line” in order to pinpoint pitfalls and opportunities, creating a new more collaborative and synchronized way of working.
The other aim was to find common solutions to make sure that the wanted user journey could be supported by the whole backstage machinery, both organisatory and technically.
The participants of the workshop were representative of the different roles involved in the backstage.
All the exercises I chose solicited the participants to work together and build upon the other’s steps or ideas. For instance I opted for a collaborative brain writing exercise and the WINFY (what I need from you) exercise.
3rd Workshop: Listen first, then communicate
How to write for such a portal, how to interact verbally and visually with citizens and companies before and after the application of an allowance were hot topics that came out from the latest interplay with the stakeholders and as one main pain point from the user research.
Before you plan your communication you have to know who you are communicating with. Before speaking you have to listen.
So I decided to concentrate the last workshop on finding out habits, needs and drives of the end user connected to the “before” and “after” phase of the journey.
What better way than interviewing the end users and get direct information to work on during the workshop?
A great part of the workshop consisted in tutoring the client through interview techniques and the run of live users interviews. Once we clustered the findings, the clients (participants were mainly from the communication department) were ready to draft solutions.
In short: Methods and my role
Method:
User research
Personas
User journey
Workflow diagrams
Crazy 8
Impact/Difficulty matrix
Storyboard
Prototype
Rose, thorn, bud
Affinity clustering
Workflow mapping
Brain writing
PMI (plus, minus, interesting)
WINFY (what I need from you)
Interview
Empathy map
My role: I was in charge of the user research (interviews, tests, service safaris, observations) and of the planning, running and reporting of the workshops. I also kept regular work progress meetings with the client and supported the UX designer with insights and design critique.
