Talk: Re-designing a service for vulnerable users in a digital age
Speakers directory
Speaker:
Andy Kemp
Talk description
Title:
Re-designing a service for vulnerable users in a digital age
Short synopsis:
Healthy Start is a Government scheme that helps eligible families on low incomes to eat healthily, by providing vouchers to buy vegetables, fruit, milk and infant formula. A small team is redesigning the service from the ground up by digitising the service and changing policy, legislation, operations and how the service interacts with multiple stakeholders. Our talk will cover how we are designing for the unique needs of our (often extremely vulnerable) users, as well as those of retailers.
Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):
We want to tell you a story about how a small team, of geographically distributed, civil servants and consultants are putting vulnerable users at the heart of a redesigned service. A digital focussed service, which has many touchpoints across the physical world. Healthy Start is an existing Government scheme that helps eligible families on low incomes to eat healthily, by providing vouchers every week to buy vegetables, fruit, milk and infant formula. In the context of the Government’s drive to make services ‘digital by default’, Ministers at the Department of Health and Social Care asked the team to explore the possibility of digitising Healthy Start to improve it. Our vision is. A digitally enabled Healthy Start Scheme which helps more disadvantaged families eat healthily by providing support that’s simpler to access, easier and more flexible to use, and more cost effective to deliver. A small team is redesigning the service from the ground up by digitising the service and changing Government policy, legislation, operations and designing how the service interacts with multiple stakeholders. In the summer of 2016, we ran a discovery phase to examine the feasibility of digitising the process of people applying for, receiving and spending Healthy Start vouchers. During the discovery we spoke to health professionals and service users to understand their needs. The discovery phase made it clear that there are multiple opportunities to better meet user needs. These included the provision of the Healthy Start benefit via a pre-paid card, which would give users more control over their spending in a form that is more convenient and roust than paper vouchers, and enabling users to apply online without approval from health professionals. During the alpha, users tested out payment cards in practice and completed several tasks to ensure that the cards provided users with the flexibility and convenience desired and that all of the actions we would expect users to take were tested. This talk will be a joint talk from the Department of Health and Social Care with Equal Experts covering the real world challenges we have faced in the beta so far, how we approached them and what we learned along the way. You will hear about: Finding and creating safe spaces that enable us to carry out research with extremely vulnerable users. Balancing the needs of our users with the needs of Retailers, Government and Health Care Professionals. Traveling the country to ensure we are testing with a range of users across cities, towns and rural locations. Going on a journey with our users and retailers, moving from paper vouchers to prepaid cards. Understanding spending behaviour across the gamut of retailers, from market stalls to local stores to supermarkets, independents to multinationals. How we use dual track agile approaches to build feedback loops between research and our continuous delivery approach to software development. How we aligned our iterative approach to research and delivery with changing actual legislation through Parliament Using metrics to keep us honest and focused on the vision we set out to achieve, including increasing uptake.
Max size: 5000 chars
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