Life-Event Scan - Ghent
Ghent (Belgium)
In a “life-eventscan” the city of Ghent examines its own services through the eyes of our citizens. We start from a broad perspective: instead of looking at a specific form or process, we start from the viewpoint of a citizen in a certain life-event such as buying a house, moving to a new town,… . Someone who starts up a restaurant in our city for example has to fill in more forms than just the ones on a local level. They also have obligations towards the fire department, the Flemish administration, the police, negotiations with the bank, with the neighbours of their premise,… Only through the eyes of the user can we get a total idea of all those ongoing processes. And only then can we take into account all those other obligations, forms, processes, terminology etc. and set up true user-oriented service.
In the “life-eventscan”, we examine this broader view from various dimensions (users/ touchpoints/ back office process/ data/ IT-system/ regulation). Depending on the topic, challenges, target audience,… we set up several methodologies, workshops,… to collect insights on how the user experiences our services:
- Interviews with colleagues or important stakeholders
- Interviews with citizens/users
- Broader surveys
- Observations at the city desk where they utilise our services
- “process-walks” in which we record users while they "walk" through certain services, look up information online or fill in forms
- Persona workshops
- Customer journey workshops
- Workshops focussing on backoffice processes
- Workshop on simplifying regulation
- Workshop on simplifying specific forms: focusing on the only once-principle
- Workshops to re-write complex letters and forms
- Surf-safari: surfing the city-websites from the viewpoint of a user.
- Analysis of online web-behaviour (hotjar/ data-analytics, key-word analysis,…)
At the end of the scan, a list of suggestions to improve and simplify the related city-services is translated to an action-plan.
A second important principle that is central to our approach is the concept that our “users” can be differentiated in all sorts of dimensions. And we have to be aware that some of our users are very different or have very different expectations. This is why in every life-eventscan we have workshops on making persona’s. The persona’s differentiate on literacy, available social network, digital skills, financial means, self-reliance,… This forces us to think on how these different groups of users experience our services and what kind of barriers they might experience. Another of our methods is the “process-walk” in which we have a group of volunteers that go through a service and let us follow (and even record) them doing it. This makes it very visible, and often painfully clear how difficult it is for some users to use our services, for example, making a reservation for a tennis court on our city-websites.
We believe that our methodology can be an inspiration to other cities and municipalities. It’s a method that creates a lot of important insights in a short period of time. By starting from the viewpoint of users on the one hand, and making those users and their barriers visible on the other, we create a lasting impression on our colleagues that convinces them to adjust their services and make them more user-centric.
We follow up on the execution of these action plans and measure the impact of it. Do we see fewer questions or complaints, did we reduce the number of documents necessary in a certain process, do we see shorter lead times? Off course a lot of impact will only be seen long term, but we’ve already realised some tangible results:
- “I want to become a Belgian” => a user-oriented flyer which contains the most asked information about the process.
- “I want to sport” => possibility to enter a discount code when the users have a specific social status which entitles them to a discount. Before they had to call or email separately from making the online reservation.
- “I want to sport” => a digital way to gather the necessary signatures for the employment of sportsteachers
- “I want to start a café/restaurant” => a more unified process: before two different agencies were involved and had to coordinate which led to different working methods or procedures
- “I’m getting evicted” => more user-oriented and more clearly written letters that explain to the target group what service they can ask from the city in this situation;
- “activities for seniors” => a more user-oriented webshop to make registrations and pay for activities, also with an easier way to get possible discounts when entitled to it.
- …
In the 7 scans that we’ve completed so far, we did 166 interviews, designed 30 different persona’s and customer journeys; executed 12 observations, followed 15 “process-walks” and did surveys with 786 users. 108 colleagues were involved in on or more workshops.
