January 2022 - Mars 2022.
This project was separated from my bachelor thesis.
The team consisted of three members. Me, another student from Halmstad University and Lunds UX-designer.
Design challenge
The city of Lund provide many different services, from services regarding elementary school to building permits to hospital care etc. Christian Lie, the UX designer at Lund, described that they have a usability debt and the design team don't have the resources to individually walkthrough every service.
Research
We conducted a survey towards the inhabitants of Lund. The survey asked questions such as their thoughts of the city's digital services and what motivates them to leave feedback.
I contacted several other cities to understand how other departments at other areas worked with the usability of their digital services.
Within the design team we interviewed 9 employees at Lund. These were mainly people that were responsible for the different departments digital services but also Lunds digitalisation manager their call center.
Discussing the insights with Arvid Gulin, another student who were also involved in this project.
The city of Lund had already made an improvement of their digital services a couple of months before but there were still room for improvement. Another conclusion was that if a service was bad there it was hard to understand what made it bad.
Overall we summarised the insights to three main insights.
The main issue were that the employees responsible for the digital services had a hard time relating to the user. Instead of the services being constructed for a user perspective it was created from the perspective that made sense for the department the employee worked at.
The main employees that were responsible for the different digital services main task was to see that the content was there. It was therefore not a main task to see that the service had good usability and because of busy schedules if the service was flawed it was not a priority.
We found that many employees regarded their services sufficient but expressed that other departments were not. We came to the conclusion that it existed a tunnel vision among the employees - my service's fine, yours is not.
We summarised the the three main insights to one problem phase. This problem phase gave a common understanding what were trying to solve.
Prototyping
So after we had formulated a defined question of the issue we started sketching different concepts.
Within the design the team one conclusion to break break the tunnel vision the employees was to present feedback from the actual users. This was the concept that we mainly proceeded from.
We gave feedback to each other by pointing out different aspects that were interesting.
A couple of sketches with feedback.
After we hade communicated ideas ideas with sketches and combined the best parts from each concept converted them to wireframes Figma.
At this phase we started to understand to receive a common understanding of the elements and interactions that would be implemented
Some of the many examples in Figma.
During the prototype process I created a simple model of the consequences of deficient digital services at Lund and what good usability achieves.
Iterations
During the project were iterated the concept several times. Below are the main changes
One idea to break the tunnel vision and for the employee to understand from a user perspective was to present individual feedback from users. We later came to realise since the employees already are busy enough they won't have the time to review feedback single handedly. Therefore to achieve a more easier overview we added a graph of the overall experience of a service.
A usability test was constructed to test the concept which was performed with 5 employees at Lund individually. The users were asked to perform different tasks in order to understand how their digital service was experienced. During this phase we understood that the graph is not specific enough. The graph can say that something can be adjusted but not precisely what. Therefore the graph was further divided into four different categories. The categories were based on the survey earlier performed with citizens regarding they thought Lunds services might be lacking.
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Throughout the project we had the idea to the ones the were responsible for the digital service should be the only one to see how it was performing as well. Then during a usability test a user said that if she her service was bad she would like to se others that were performing well. The digitalisation manager also supported this idea since it could create a more competitive mindset between the departments.
We presented the projects in its entirety and the results for the stakeholders at Lund. We also presented 4 main contributions what the concept could give.
Enables employees to individually test their own service or order support.
