The citizen services of tomorrow

– Personal, mobile and meaningful

I built four services in an afternoon with the excellent solution Hello Future created.

Per Dinborn, Municipality of Skellefteå

One of the big challenges for public sector is delivering meaningful e-services in our increasingly mobile world. The smartphone is a very personal device, so that’s something to take into consideration when designing mobile services. Citizens are looking for personalized experiences tailored to their specific needs. Another concern is of course the cost of building and updating native applications for multiple platforms.

Public sector websites have a wealth of information, but are often hard to navigate. When we helped some Swedish cities design a mobile platform for citizen services, we wanted them to rethink how citizens interact with municipalities and regions.

What you need from a city or municipality differs a lot depending on your current life situation: Young people want to know what's going on, parents need to know about school information and as you get older things like healthcare gets more important.

In-App Services

Based on those insights, we helped design a concept called “In-App Services” centered around a customizable home screen where you add relevant services you’re interested in, thus creating your own individual and mobile version of city hall.

Services can range from opening hours at your local library to bigger things like voting and democracy projects. It was also built around the idea that services are created using standard web technology and then delivered into the native mobile application, which creates a flexible and low cost way of using strengths from native mobile applications in combination with a developer framework in HTML5 and a developer portal with instructions how to develop new services. That combined with open data from public sector enables the citizens to become the drivers behind smarter cities and regions.

The smartphone is the most personal technology we have. Mobile services need to reflect that and deliver a personalised experience.

Jonas Persson, Interaction Designer at Hello Future

Based on user needs

The methods and tools used to design this solution come straight from the Service Design toolbox. Insights were captured with in-depth interviews and data from customer service, concepts were developed with the help of service blueprints, customer journey maps and interactive prototypes.

The In-App Services platform won the Swedish eGovernment award 2013 and is used by more and more regions in Sweden.

How Service Design can create better marketing

"The product is the service is the marketing"

Companies spend, on average, 20 times as much money on marketing their services as on designing them. This creates a gap between what they promise and what they deliver to customers, which is not a great start if you want to work with the most powerful marketing tool out there – word of mouth.

Brand Utilities is the concept of providing meaningful marketing that improves people's lives and adds value to the user.

Tobias Eklund, Client Director at Hello Future

Keeping customers happy after a sale is just as important as getting them to buy in the first place. This is called relationship marketing and recognizes the long term value of customer relationships beyond intrusive advertising and sales promotions.

We use service design methods and tools, which is a great way of approaching modern, multi-channel marketing. It creates a shared language for marketing, IT, customer service etc, so we can create more coherent experiences for people that ultimately will lead to more satisfied customers and that leads to better business. For us, that’s marketing.

Creating value with Brand Utlities

Brand Utilities is the concept of providing meaningful marketing that improves people's lives and adds value to the user. It’s more about creating platforms than temporary campaigns and more about interaction and co-creation than traditional marketing communication.

Bufferbusters

Together with North Kingdom we helped Vodafone in Germany create a mobile platform game to communicate their speed in mobile data networks. This helped keep their customers happy by proving a point rather than just talking about it, but also drove tens of thousands of prospective customers into their shops. It was more than a marketing gimmick - it was fun, it was exciting, it engaged people and it also helped bring marketing and sales departments closer. That’s one important aspect of Service Design - it is holistic and looks at both end users and internal support systems.

Brand Touchpoint Matrix

The Brand Touchpoint Matrix is a planning tool developed by Hello Future in order to create a more understandable view of how to think and act as a brand today. It provides a visual way of planning your touchpoints and is used by agencies worldwide.

Spiderdash – measuring your brand

Another important aspect of a service design approach is that it’s all about the ecosystem, not about single activities.

Developed by Hello Future, Spiderdash is a visualization tool showing you the status of your brand, campaigns and competitors on a daily basis. Compare online and offline activities with your campaign activities in a visually compelling way. It helps organizations better understand relationships between social media, site visitors, sales statistics, share of voice and other important KPI:s.