Applying a service design mindset to help a new housing association tenant app succeed: case study
Part 1 of 3: Reflections from learners participating in Service Design in Practice
Service Design in Practice is a six month immersive learning and development programme which takes people with little or no experience of ‘Service Design’ to applying and practicing with the tools and approaches on real work based challenges.
But what do they end up doing? What does application of this way of working look and feel like?
We hear about four participants who experienced the full programme in this three part blog.
Marie Kiff and Howard Merrett both joined the programme from Valleys to Coast Housing Association (V2C), which is a not for profit organisation who provide and manage 5,835 homes across Bridgend, South Wales.
Learning about prototyping
During Service Design in Practice participants learn about and practice using common prototyping tools and methods.
Prototyping is different from piloting — which is usually the process of trying out a fully formed service with a small group of users. As the precursor to a wider roll-out. But by then it’s often too late to make any fundamental changes to what’s been developed.
Prototyping is useful to:
- test assumptions early on in a design process,
- to make ideas real in order to communicate them to others, and
- to test and iterate your design options later on in a design cycle.
You might start by prototyping in as cheap and fast a way as possible, so that you can throw away the bad ideas, without losing face or wasting resources and develop the more promising ideas. Over time, your prototypes become more developed, refined or ditched.
Common techniques used to prototype a service might include role play, cardboard mock up (say, of a reception area) or paper prototypes. It was this last one — paper prototypes, which turned out to be very valuable for Howard and Marie.
A chance to apply the learning
Imagine standing back and watching your organisation about to launch a new product that doesn’t meet the needs of the people it’s designed for.
Near the end of Marie and Howard’s participation in the programme, they realised that people in their organisation had decided they wanted a new self service “tenant app” to enable residents to access services at their convenience. A project group had been set up and an app developer appointed. The project group was putting together requirements for the new app when Marie and Howard got involved.
The organisation had decided that the app would initially only allow tenants to pay rent. The ability to ‘report a repair’ would come in a later iteration, because they were in the middle of making improvements to the repairs service.
A debate ensued internally — some thought that residents would want to be able to report a repair through the app, which would delay launch. Others were keen to press ahead with the project and launch the app.
Some of the mindsets developed during the programme are to question assumptions, listen to truly understand and empathise with people who use a service. With these mindsets firmly imprinted, Marie and Howard decided that they couldn’t sit back and let this happen and instead set about releasing this impasse and asked some residents for feedback.
Ask the user
Marie and Howard set up at the local community fun day and visited coffee mornings in their sheltered schemes. There they showed residents what they’d done so far and gathered some feedback. Rather than showing residents a well designed test system, they mocked up images of the screens using Google Drawings and printed them onto A4 paper. They flipped through the pages as if they pressed the buttons or menus shown on the paper. (This approach is sometimes called Guerrilla research and it has its pro’s and con’s).
They purposely omitted the ability to report a repair in order to test whether the users missed this functionality.
After speaking with a surprisingly small number of residents (around seven in total), they began to notice a pattern. People liked having access to their account and paying rent. However, many wondered how you went about reporting a repair and contacting their housing officer using the app.
Marie and Howard used interviewing techniques learned on the programme. For example, they asked ‘open’ questions rather than ‘closed’ yes / no questions. This allows for patterns to emerge in the information collected. It means you don’t have to predetermine what the possible answers might be, like you would in say a questionnaire.
Valuable insights
This approach also allowed other interesting insights to emerge. Things that they hadn’t anticipated. For example people said:
“It’s asking me for an account number to register, I’ve no idea what that is.”
“I’d like to login via my fingerprint like I do with my bank.”
“I don’t understand this account balance. It’s confusing.”
It also became apparent that some residents had trusted friends or relatives who did all their admin on their behalf. This user need hadn’t been considered in the development of the app.
This brief encounter with users was extremely valuable. It brought the views of the residents to the boardroom table next time they were discussing what to do about the app and which resulted in revised their priorities. This approach was new to the organisation. Without this input, the organisation risked continuing blindly on until launch before realising that it didn’t do what residents wanted it to do. This small action saved the organisation resources and the embarrassment of launching an inadequate app. The data collected was fed back to the developer and the breaks were put on the project for the time being.
Marie and Howard also noticed that when they later shared a digital prototype, which looked and felt like the finished product they got less quality feedback. People assume that you’ve put far more effort into a polished prototype and it’s too late to suggest fundamental changes to functionality. This insight helped them to realised that early testing with rough drafts of the prototype encouraged much more active engagement.
People like to please and hate to be critical especially of something that looks polished.
Change in direction
Armed with these valuable insights, the app developer is now working on the repairs reporting functionality for the app and launch of the app is currently on hold.
The organisation had already planned to redesign the repairs service. As a result of Marie and Howard’s involvement and the value they brought to this, using what they’d learned on the programme, they are now going to be involved in this work. They will use a service design approach whereas before, the organisation would have adopted a traditional project management approach.
Marie says, “This is exciting for us. Now we have the chance to involve colleagues who work on the repairs service to gather insight data, then share the ideas that emerge with managers. Rather than top down, these changes will be bottom up.”
They are currently working on the research plan for the discovery phase.
‘Service Design in Practice’ is a six month learning and development programme, which takes people with little or no experience of using service design to applying and practicing these tools and approaches on real work based challenges.
Apply to participate in the next programme in January 2021 or contact me to discuss — I don’t bite! jo@weareserviceworks.com.
This is the first in a series of three posts about the exploits of some of our recent programme participants.
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At Service Works, we help government and third sector employees to design services that work through training, consultancy and workshops.
