“Live Learning” Service Design for Cork County Council
Category: Service Design
Client: Cork City Council
Cork County Council is the second largest local authority in Ireland, and the largest, based on its geographical area. The council was the first local authority in Ireland to establish an internal Service Design capability in 2016. That capability became known as “Service RePublic”.
Since then, the team has grown, and some team members have moved on to other roles. Context Studio worked with Service RePublic in early 2021 with two goals:
- Use a service design approach in the redesign of the intranet presence for the Corporate Services directorate of Cork County Council, providing insights to maximise the impact of the final design for internal customers.
- Through a “Live Learning” process, refresh the skills of team members and provide a valuable “hands on” learning experience to new team members with service design tools, methods, principles, and practice.
Context Discovery
Our extensive service design process included a “North Star” workshop to set the vision for the project with internal stakeholders. This was followed by 11 internal customer interviews, gathering insights as to the challenges faced across council sections.
Armed with those insights we hosted 2 discovery workshops within the corporate Services directorate to understand the goals of those teams with regard to their own intranet presence.
That work allowed the combined team of Service RePublic and Context Studio to create an insights report and define design challenges for the future of the Corporate Services intranet within the council.
Internal co-creation workshop with the Service RePublic team.
Co-Creating the Solution
And so we moved on to define what that might look like, involving stakeholders, customers and teams all the way.
We held two co-creation workshops, one which was in-person with the Service RePublic team, and another which was held online and included 30 representatives from 24 functions across Cork County Council.
These generated a volume of ideas and use cases for the new intranet.
Testing Ideas through Prototyping
We’re lucky to have strong technical skills in-house and this made it possible for us to conduct research into the technical capabilities of the Cork County Council intranet platform. We built prototypes as feasibility tests, and documented potential technical approaches to implementation.
But technology is only part of the picture, so we were sure to create clickable digital prototypes of what the future intranet resource might look like before bringing them to 8 users in hour-long online user testing sessions.
These sessions allowed the team to learn from user feedback, and to iterate solutions accordingly
Low fidelity prototype of the Corporate Services Intranet page – used in user testing.
Delivering the Recommendation
The final step was the documentation not just of the outcome – with detailed wireframes, clickable prototypes, and a video walkthrough, but also the process and the insights. These provide a strong rationale for design decisions, but also further opportunities which may add value for Cork County Council in the future.
High fidelity, clickable prototype of the corporate services intranet homepage.