DCC BETA
A service for people who work in Dublin City Council.
*Dublin City Council Beta is an alive mechanism for imagining, testing and implementing ways to improve the experience of life in the Capital.
High-Fidelity Prototype
Context
I collaborated with 2 service design students at NCAD to create a service for stakeholders of DCC BETA and the Dublin city council. I designed the product on the web and presentations and had meetings with stakeholders to discuss the issues.
Project type
Team
Role
Product / Visual designer
Length
5 weeks
After interviewing stakeholders, our team identified their problems and conceptualised the services they needed to carry out the project.
Key findings
The prioritisation process was not clear or universally applied.
No linkage between the Beta projects and DCC strategic plans
Neither Management nor staff was clear on the purpose of Beta or the process.
No job description
No way to measure the effectiveness of the process
Staff were reluctant to engage with Beta.
Slow, overly rigorous and inflexible
It forced them to carry out research to find an answer they think they already knew
Key insights
Management needed to be able to see and understand the benefits of the Beta process so that they could use it to further the innovation mindset in DCC.
Staff needed to be able to deliver projects efficiently because they wanted to do their job well but they were reluctant to engage with Beta because they felt it would slow them down.
Learnings from projects were not being captured.
Issues
DCC BETA implemented new ideas for projects in Dublin to improve the lives of citizens,
But the process from idea selection to implementation in the city was too slow.
User Journey map
This experience happens over a period or time-frame which varies from 3 days to 3 weeks and at which points the users need to be engaged and supported to achieve the different sub-tasks within that period. The user journey mapping was used to lay out these distinct phases so that they could be better addressed through the design process.
How might we
make it easier to obtain permissions to enable the process to flow as smoothly as possible?
Visualise the process(ver.01)
To find problems in the process, we visualised the process in detail after interviews with stakeholders.
BetaAssurance
BetaAssurance is one single platform that gives the user a good understanding of how the Beta process works and provides transparency to everyone within the organisation.
Concept
Identify what Permissions DCC might feel they need.
Enable users to understand what is happening during the permission stage.
Devise a way of making the permissions process as simple and user-friendly as possible so people will see the value of BetaAssurance.
Personas
Personas were created to allow us to better understand the potential users of BetaAssurance.
Scenarios helped us better envision the application of BetaAssurance in DCC’s working environment.
Ideation and sketches for the platform
Usability testing with stakeholders
Sketches
Learnings and Takeaways
No need for another main page
The information form is too simplified
Not clear where the metrics are coming from
mid-fi prototype
“Want to know the exact budget in numbers.”, “What if they want to have a discussion before rejecting the request?”
Final user flow
We tried to simplify it so that many people could easily use it.
Hi-fi prototype
The Hi-fi prototype allowed the users to get a sense of the final product.
Dublin City Council requested that BetaAssurance be accessible on SharePoint so we created a platform as simple as possible to use for the stakeholders of DCC BETA.
Projects(main page)
As we identified the problem, we focused on their communication regarding the projects. So the platform shows the list of the projects on the main page to make them easier to identify.
Request form
DCC BETA staff can easily request permission from Dublin City Council. One of the problems we identified was issues with the budgeting for trialling. So we decided to add the feature on the request form that provides greater clarification regarding budgeting.
Requests page
We created a platform to make it easier to respond to requests with a reminder system to ensure the efficient update of prospective projects.
Detail of the project
Using a pop-up screen, the stakeholders can view the detailed information of each project and observe its current stage on a progress bar. Also, users can communicate via comments directly on BetaAssurance instead of emailing each other.
Upload form
DCC BETA team had a complex excel sheet for the addition of new projects. My team decided to remove some unnecessary options and simplify existing ones.