HopScotch Labs is a team that I help out on occasion. One of the projects was an app for the City of San Diego. The team was assigned to make design improvements to "Get It Done App." We facilitated design thinking workshops with users and administrators from every district to uncover problems and find new ways to improve engagement between the city employees and it's residents. Our successes include new interfaces in the app and ideas to enhance experiences in the physical space.
Ongoing problems that have plagued the City of San Diego and it's communities are deteriorating infrastructure, graffiti, and encampments, to name a few. It's a constant problem, and things aren't getting done. That's when the "Get It Done App" was conceived by our leaders of the city. But it turned out; the app was also causing problems because there was a big gaping communication whole between the residents and the city workers.
Our workshop consisted of 5 sessions, working with several groups of residents and city employees from different districts of San Diego. Our main objective was to capture pain points and frustrations of both residents and city employees. So we listened to them and guided them in open discussions and affinity mapping. While functioning as a group facilitator, I also created designs on the fly to quickly solve the major issues. We then placed the sketches on the wall to get dot voting for feedback as a way of figuring out what would work from the designs we presented.
We pinpointed the problem to be an operating procedure and a system gap between the residents reporting (User Experience) and the city employees (Service Design) reacting to get things done.
Here are a couple of examples that made it into the proposed solutions. We concluded that these functions would make the app more engaging and transparent with its results. And adding some old fashioned signage to appease our beloved residents.
One of the things that the app lacked was a proper homescreen to
A timeline report would allow the users to see that a particular issue is in the works. This detailed report would give the user peace of mind that the city is working to fix it.
"Add New Details" prevents users from making duplicate reports. This feature will free up the city's to-do list of duplicates and allow them to prioritize the ones that need immediate attention.
A quick fix for Service Design was to create some signage. It was evident that the app may have temporarily decreased the volume of phone complaints. But the problems remained there and sometimes would get lost in the system. A great affordable solution for the city that we suggested was making signs and placing them at the site.
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