ASSIGNMENT – MIND MAPPING

Challenge and Selection

The tool to be used for this assignment is Mind Mapping in order to dive into the user

experience of different stakeholders within the government service delivery process and create

a set of ideas that will improve government to citizen (G2C) services through e-Services. Firstly

we came up with a design challenge to define our scope. The company’s mandate is already cut

out by government which identified 100 key services that are currently provided to citizens

manually. Therefore the team is tasked with automating government services with the aim of

improving processing time, service updates to citizens, mode of payment and ease of access.

This technique will be used to understand the end to end process of acquiring a service from the

citizen stand point and the validation process that government agents go through in order to

deliver the output required.  We shall then follow each pattern design a criteria that will enable

quick and easy automation of trial products that we can test.

Application

The team set off on a customer experience journey by deploying ethnographic techniques such

as observing and interviewing stakeholders. The aim of this approach was to identify the steps

to acquire services and patterns for example the number of trips a citizen takes to acquire a

birth certificate and the hidden requirements that are not documents. This was summed up in

the process below:

The trips mentioned above were observed and experienced by the team. Therefore we

concluded that it takes at least 7 trips to acquire a government document.

This gave us more insight into proximity between points of access, cost of each trip, how many

photocopies etc. We also classified each demographic and their behavior during each step.

Eventually we discovered certain patterns whereby citizens between 16 and 35 years of age

were impatient and felt overburdened by the steps, others over 40 felt the sense of importance

that the government put into delivering the service.

Insight and approach

After studying the patterns critically, the team began drafting sets of solutions by first designing

a criteria statement to guide the prototyping team on how to shorten the steps, eliminate

duplication and reduce processing. Through their individual experiences, every team member

designed a flow that they felt could solve the problem at hand. These shared insights were

slowly grouped together into conditions mainly centered on the value proposition that the

platform could deliver such as shortening/automation of the application form, digitizing payment

and notifying citizens on the status of their applications. The prototypes also had to incorporate

integration with external verification systems for example the national identification agency, land

registry, business registry and police criminal database. The aim of integration was to reduce

the amount of input data required to fill an application.

In short the team was able to come up with 3 trips to apply for government services as a phase

one approach to created awareness of e-services. Phase two will focus on improvements and

delivery of electronic certificates to citizens at the comfort of their homes.

