Office of Head Start, Service Design
Summary
Client
U.S. Health & Human Services, Office of Head Start
Project
Service design to improve efficiency and accountability for major program servicing economically disadvantaged children and families.
My Roles
Service design lead; conducted most research and analysis; developed key deliverable
Impact
The client loved results of initial discovery work and engaged us in follow-on prioritization efforts. The prioritized list provided what they needed to address the issues.
When
Jan 2020-Jun 2020
Background
Program Goals
The Office of Head Start is a U.S. government program that funds and oversees early childhood programs around the nation. Since 1965, it has served 38 million young children and their families.
Project Context and Objective
Head Start has a complaints service that allows families, community members, and facility employees to report issues of concern with Head Start grantee programs. It is a critical, fundamental tool of child safety. The service had identified and addressed many important issues, but had become a point of pain.
Many spurious issues enter the system, making the volume hard to manage.
The organization was missing opportunities to learn from issues and improve its operations.
There was inconsistent handling of issues across Head Start offices, with concerns not always being resolved quickly or correctly.
The organization made it a high-priority to address these points.
Approach & Activities
Analysis of Digital Touchpoints
The preferred way to submit complaints was through one of two forms on the organization website. Through a brief heuristic review of this interface, I identified multiple potential points of failure. To validate and refine these findings, I then conducted a usability test to confirm assumptions and learn more about how potential Head Start clients viewed the forms and the information they required.
I recruited six potential Head Start clients: low-income parents of preschool-aged children. I also recruited two new teachers at Head Start facilities. UserInterviews.com, my go-to for recruiting, worked well here.
Encoding notes and organizing them on a Mural board allowed me to quickly see patterns. As I suspected, the findability of the forms was an enormous issue.
Once participants found the forms, their reaction was mixed. To better tell the client the story of these issues, I captured clips of these reactions and incorporated them into the findings presentation.
I also used the testing time to explore mental models participants had around the act of submitting a complaint.
Process Research Interviews
The testing provided good initial insights, but sitting down with actual participants in the process was the critical discovery step. We conducted 19 remote interviews.
Seven senior Head Start leaders, including the Director
Nine Head Start regional process leaders
Three Head Start facility leaders
These sessions provided a sufficient diversity of perspectives to form a picture of where the complaints service was working and where it was falling short of its goals. We not only collected facts, but also meaningful quotes to better tell the client the stories within the service.
Challenges
It would have been most valuable to hear from people who actually had submitted complaints and seen, or not seen, results. In the end, though, Head Start determined it could not feasibly share this information with us.
We would have liked to have made the interviews more observational, watching complaints processing in real-time. This phase of the work began just as the pandemic was beginning, so they became remote interviews.
The Service Flow-print
With findings across the spectrum of the complaints service, I wanted to develop an as-is service blueprint to set the stage for further work. The concepts of front-stage / back-stage and the levels within were a great fit. I soon discovered, though, that the complaints process had a number of forks and potential loops. Its nonlinearity broke the service blueprint structure. A flow diagram that would better account for the complex paths, lacked the depth of the service blueprint. What to do?
As a solution, I created a novel marriage of the two forms: the service flow-print. It retains the multiple layers of a service blueprint, but grafts them onto a flow diagram, making each node a richer piece of information.
The service flow-print formed a foundation onto which I could then note areas that needed addressing and areas needing further study.
If you have an additional 6 minutes and 40 seconds, I gave a pecha kucha at the June 2020 Service Design DC meet-up.
Complaints Form Redesign
I used the usability test findings to create a new, more effective Contact Us page that better presented the Complaints form. I attempted to make the contact options stand out better, organize required information for improved scanability, and make the form itself simpler and clearer.
Challenge
Head Start wanted to maintain much of the introductory text, either to direct people to better first options or for legal reasons.
Complaints Form Redesign
I presented the findings to the Head Start executive team, using the service flow-print above as the structure for storytelling. As is often the case, some findings were new and illuminating, and some were not surprising, but were further clarified. I left the team with 16 recommendations to improve the complaints service.
With the stories and recommendations fresh before the executive team, I brought them back together to prioritize the work to be done.
We discussed and voted on recommendations, which I grouped into three major areas of focus.
With this input, the Head Start executive team then concluded they had what they needed to move forward successfully.