Business workshops with the staff
Needs-expression workshops with the community-life department's staff
To begin, the project team defines the 5 major dimensions to address in this project: association data, grants, scheduling and bookings, directory and volunteering.
We first take part in a workshop as observers, then facilitate two workshops on the theme of grant applications and the processing of those files.
These workshops are run remotely with the help of the MIRO tool, to make exchanges, participation and the collaborative work of remote staff easier.
User research
Involving citizens and associations to understand their journeys
Building on our immersion in the business, we involve the department’s target users in various formats. These are, on the one hand, association members and, on the other, citizens who use the services and activities of associations.
We want to learn more about citizens’ habits when looking for information about associations and volunteering.
To this end, the citizens recruited for these interviews are board members, members or volunteers in associations of varying sizes.
These interviews aim to understand the journey of running an association and the interactions with the association administration, in order to better grasp the needs and opportunities.
To complete the data, we then run two workshops, one with small associations and the other with larger structures.
The discussion is led around five major areas of association activity: information search, booking and scheduling, grants, volunteering and promoting the activities on offer.
The session unfolds in three steps:
- sharing the journeys identified during the interviews with citizens;
- discussing and debating to consolidate the model (validating steps, adding actions, needs, obstacles);
- ideating on the features to implement and prioritising them.
Finally, a questionnaire is distributed to citizens across 14 municipalities of the Bordeaux Metropolitan area to widen the consultation to further feedback.
The questions relate to both the activity side and/or the volunteering side of associations.
The goal of this questionnaire is to identify the information people look for and the channels they favour for these searches, as well as to test the appetite for a shared metropolitan directory of associations.
For this analysis, we cross-reference the feedback from citizens, volunteers and association board members to gain an overall view of the different user profiles. The journey steps mirror the main themes (visibility, grants, scheduling and booking, volunteering and a shared directory).
Co-designing the interaction map
Finalising a map close to a service blueprint
An iteration with the project team allows us to finalise the map and then produce the deliverable that follows.
After presenting all the results, we facilitate a co-design workshop with the project team on creating a map of the interactions of the community-life portal.
The aim of this workshop is to present a map that synthesises all the data from the exploration phase. It details, at the surface and in depth, the actions, needs and internal processes attached to them. This map, close to a service blueprint, is built to show the invisible part of the citizen journey on the community-life portal.
We then propose a graphic consolidation of the map to highlight it.
Producing a visual communication material will let the project teams use it to present the work carried out and keep the project alive.
The main benefit of this approach to visualising and understanding the user experience is that it enables the search for solutions or the ideation of effective processes.
Writing the ergonomic specifications
Describing the acceptable minimum as user stories
Finally, ergonomic specifications are produced. They describe the major ergonomic principles the tool will have to respect to ensure the “acceptable minimum” in terms of ease of use. Here, they are written as user stories. This format allows a more functional reading of the future community-life portal. Some points could not yet be validated during this study and remain to be explored.
