With the backdrop of TSMs in mind, we’d like to make the case for good user-centred design as the underpinning methodology for building services that actually deliver what tenants need.
Having worked as chief product owner for the Scottish Courts & Tribunal Service and as product lead on Child Disability Payment, I’m familiar with the challenge of aligning service design and delivery with users’ needs in the real world. The ever-present reality of delivering to budget in a complex operating environment almost always requires some deviation from the intended service model and resulting user experience. However, the extent to which you deviate can be mitigated if users’ needs are properly understood and documented.
According to the Department for Education, user-centred design (UCD) is a design philosophy and process that places the needs, behaviours and experiences of users at the forefront of product and service development.
This description highlights a welcome departure from systems-focused service design, wherein a service is largely structured on restrictive or inflexible tooling and software (i.e. putting systems before people).
User-centred design is contributed to by a range of skillsets but we want to focus on four that we think are particularly relevant to delivering services in social housing. We’ve chosen these four because they have a direct impact on the usability and suitability of a service and, crucially, don’t appear to be widely used in the social housing sector.
User researchers
User researchers (UR) work with service users to agree a validated set of ‘user needs’ that describe what people expect and need from the service.
UR practitioners are trained to look for and understand behaviours and motivations that get to the root of what someone needs from a service. The role is investigative in nature and can serve to augment more traditional user (or tenant) engagement methodologies by improving accessibility and producing a deeper understanding of the real-world context in which users access services.
The user needs produced by UR serve to provide service designers, interaction designers and content writers with an accurate and context-driven understanding of what users actually need (more on this later…).
Content designers
Best described by Content Design London as, “Content design is the discipline of finding what your audience wants and giving it to them where and when they want it, in a way they can digest it.
Content designers won’t publish whatever the organisation wants; it’s about having the research to make sure that everything published is entirely user-centred.”
Service designers
Service designers focus on the complete journey that a person goes through to accomplish a task. This role considers the overall structure of services and their surrounding ecosystem.
Service blueprints and stakeholder maps are two common tools used by service designers. However, these are just outcomes of their main objective which is to help teams collaboratively visualise, understand and create effective services.
Interaction designers
An interaction designer produces designs for individual and service-wide user touchpoints.
They focus on creating easy to use, simple to navigate and consistent user experiences by employing a design language that accounts for what the service users need at each stage. Naturally, a key component of their work is considering and accounting for accessibility needs.
How they work together
These roles collaborate with each other and the wider delivery team to inform what the service will provide and how it will provide it. This is an example of what the iterations for a new service can look like:
- User researchers will perform the initial task of identifying what people expect and need within a given service domain, such as housing repairs.
- Service designers will facilitate the prototyping of the service in collaboration with the design team.
- Content and interaction designers collaborate to produce testable iterations.
- User researchers test the designs with users of the proposed service.
- Repeat steps 2-4 until a functional and user-validated service design is produced (this can either be for a component part of the service or the whole service).
- Work with the wider delivery team to build and deliver the service design (iteratively testing with users to improve service design and user experience at each step).
There is more complexity involved in the real-world but the example is intended to give you a view into the way UCD practices put the user at the centre of defining and guiding what and how the service will deliver for them.
Proceeding this way also reduces the risk that your organisation will misunderstand what people need or your organisation will understand what people need but design something that doesn’t deliver it for them.
More on user research
Establishing a validated set of user needs (i.e. what people who use your service will need from it) isn’t as simple as sitting around a table and discussing what you all think would work well. This can give you a good approximation but it does leave you vulnerable to a range of pitfalls.
The items on the list below can significantly impact the accuracy of the user needs you establish if you aren’t trained to be aware of and account for them:
- Language barriers;
- Digital literacy;
- Researcher bias (e.g. thinking you already know what users will want);
- Power dynamics (particularly important for housing providers hosting sessions with their tenants);
- Accessibility needs.
To further underline the difficulty faced by organisations of understanding what people need from a service, research in 2021 found that from a sample of 111 failed start-ups, 42 per cent of them failed because they misread market demand and hadn’t properly understood what their customers actually needed.
It’s an exercise in humility to be open to the idea that getting to the root of what people need isn’t easy. If you get it wrong, the best delivery teams in the world will still deliver the wrong thing.
Tenant satisfaction measures (TSM) reflect people’s experiences with your service; to enhance your TSM performance, it’s essential to understand users and their problems before devising solutions.
Parting thoughts
We’d like to acknowledge that technology providers play a significant role (disproportionally so, we would suggest) in determining how your services are structured and delivered. This phenomenon appears to be more acute in the housing sector than many others. We talk more about this and other housing- and technology-related topics on our Substack (substack.com/@broadleafprofessional).
If you are interested in the applied practice of service design, please check out the Service and Design Patterns for Social Housing page (www.designpatternsforsocialhousing.co.uk). This was set up by Dave Skinner and is a fantastic resource for understanding more about service design as well as being an open-source design pattern library for social housing.
Oliver Florence is the product director and Dave Skinner is the service designer at Broadleaf Professional.
