Just enough research & service design
Overview
My role: Volunteer researcher & designer
When: April-June 2023 (a 10-week sprint)
Overview: I’ve been volunteering with U.S. Digital Response on rapid response digital service design projects for governments and non-profits since 2020. Most recently, I volunteered on Seattle by Design, a collaboration between the City of Seattle and U.S. Digital Response. This project was important to me because I recently moved to Seattle from Chicago at the beginning of the year, and I felt it important to get involved in my new community.
On this project, I was part of a 4-person volunteer team and played a hybrid researcher-designer role. We were tasked to work with the City’s Office of Economic Development (OED) to:
Better understand the experience of small business owners in Seattle applying for business loans as part of the Capital Access Program (CAP)
Identify opportunities to improve the experience.
Key takeaways
Local government teams are eager to innovate and improve residents’ experiences of interacting with government services. However, they tend to lack the knowledge of human-centered design and agile best practices. A large part of the work to improve government services through human-centered design is to simply champion human-centered design through knowledge-sharing and the principle of “showing, not telling.”
Communication across all parties involved in CAP is a key pain point throughout the experience.
Understanding user personas early on through stakeholder interviews can help you identify the right people to reach out to for interviews, which can help uncover new insights more quickly.
Process & learnings
At the beginning of the project, I initiated a workshop with stakeholders to understand the existing problem space. I facilitated the workshop, and our team learned a lot about the dynamics between stakeholders, known areas of friction in the current experience, collective hypotheses, and more about a certain user persona (lenders) that had not yet been researched in-depth.
Following the workshop, I suggested that we interview the lender user persona to learn about problems faced from their perspective. The team agreed and we decided to conduct stakeholder interviews as a proxy for talking to small business owners, a user persona that had already been thoroughly researched prior to us joining the project. As a team, we proposed to pivot the research in such a direction, ultimately gaining the support of our stakeholders.
Over the course of several weeks, we conducted qualitative interviews with 12 people — a mix of City stakeholders and lenders. We drafted interview guides, coordinated the interviews, facilitated them, synthesized the findings, conducted secondary research, and also analyzed extensive research that was previously done by the City.
As a result, we identified communication being the most pressing issue for all parties involved throughout the experience — from the beginning of the program design, to small business owners applying for loans, to post-CAP pilot. While communication was initially hypothesized to be a top issue for small business owners, stakeholders were surprised to hear it was a problem for CAP lenders, which was ultimately affecting the small business owner experience.
Deliverables
We created an editable user journey map that outlined the experience of Seattle’s small business owners and CAP lenders, including their existing pain points and potential opportunities. We wanted the map to be easily iterated on by our city partners, so rather than design a fancy map in Figma, we created one in Google Slides that was more accessible. We also created a 60-page slide deck that outlined our research process, salient quotes from user interviews, and areas of recommendations — this was presented to City stakeholders involved in the Seattle by Design effort, including the Deputy Mayor.
Impact
This work will inform the design of the City’s Capital Access Program (CAP) 2.0 which is currently being designed. Intentional improvements around communication between the City, small business owners, borrowers, and lenders should lead to an increase in the number of small business owners accessing capital through the CAP fund. We also provided the OED team with a few human-centered design tools such as the user journey map, resources about how to leverage design thinking, and templates for workshopping. This should hopefully help the team more easily leverage human-centered design beyond our time on this project.
