| Service Design | Customer Journey | Insights Lead
City of Sydney manages the strategic development and delivery of all services for residents within the City of Sydney. Their vision is to acheive zero waste landfill by 2030.
The Brief
To magnify users’ behaviours, attitudes, barriers and values to understand what motivations are explicit and implicit – but nonetheless critical.
To understand the context in which customers use, mis-use and understand the City’s services, and environmental concerns broadly as they pertain to waste management.
To set the research findings up so that a service designer can build service mapping and future state model.
Research
| 12 face to face interviews
| 4 contextual enquiries
Customer Journey map articulating what an ideal approach to waste management could look like.
Insights
City of Sydney presented us with a unique opportunity to work on a project that could impact the lives of 100s of thousands Sydney residents on a service that is largely taken for granted.
The first challenge that we overcame was to reduce the scope of a huge, ambiguous brief. In consultation with key stakeholders at City of Sydney we reduced this down to:
To deep dive into the existing personas and explore how we may expand the knowledge on them
To understand motivations and behaviours around waste disposal and understand how the personas habits are formed
To help inform the business case on waste disposal process and the work of the (future) service design team.
We recruited 15 interviewees who fit the 3 existing personsas and using open questions explored their behaviours and needs around waste management.
This data was synthesised into 8 key insights
4. Products still hold value even if/when they are unwanted
5. People act based on ‘higher purpose’
6. Learning is part of the process
7. There are varying levels of advocacy (and advocacy is fluid)
1. Personas are useful but people are still people.
2. Community: “it only works if everyone does it”.
3. When people see value, they make an effort (the circular economy is growing)
4. Society’s expectation of correct waste disposal is overwhelming
Insight 1 - Personas are useful but people are still people
Our research validated the existing personas but elaborated on them to find:
Users are subject to change the way they use or interpret a service
Peronas are fluid
There are archetypes within each of the personas
Opportunities:
Continue to evolve the personas; exploring archetypes under the existing personas
Research further into how the personas manifest in different services
Use the Journey map as a template to consider the user in the role out of new services
Insight 2 - Community is key; it [the service] only works if we all do it
The idea of community was recurring across all of the personas
Community validates the users learning process
Over time the user begins to input into the community
Community validates that users are doing the right thing
Opportunities:
Establish City of Sydney owned community groups to influence goals
Research what community looks like within the waste disposal space and how this is evolving.
Explore and understand what micro-communities exist; eg building managers; bokashi bin owners
Insight 3 - Waste has an intrinsic value; the circular economy continues to grow.
While seemingly obvious, our interviews had artiulated that the idea of an object having an intrinsic value, even after they had finished with them. This could be a broken coffee machine to the nutrients produced by a bokashi bin.
There is a perceived value of worth to items and even waste
Users feel they are losing money if the value is not passed on
Users will go out of their way (distance and cost) to pass this value on
Opportunities
Engage communities to drive education
Leverage building managers to create micro communities
Partner with speciality businesses to create new services.
Building for the future
With one of our goals being to help inform the work of the future service design team, we felt the best way to articulate our findings was a future state customer journey map. The goal of the map is to show what the ideal journey of a service-enabled user could look like. It is persona-agnostic, with different people joining the journey at different points.
This journey could be applied to varying services for City of Sydney.
How might we give users the confidence that they are making the right recycling decisions so that they continue to recycle correctly?
Through the interview process and development of the customer journey map, we realised that the way users of the service (both new and those who had changed behaviours) found and interpreted information varied. I embarked on a process to blueprint their current state to see where breaks in the service may occur and through which channels information is accessed. We realised during this process that there was an opportunity to improve the experience at the start of the journey and influence behaviours in a positive way early on that, inline with our research findings, would have lasting effects.
The blueprint served to:
Establish a service blueprint for continous in house improvement as the City of Sydney team built out their Human Centred Design Process
Hypothesise that a chatbot could be used to help answer questions on recyclable waste and a way to enage the millenial audience, creating lasting behavioural change
Showcase Design Principles that could be applied at each stage of the users journey through the service to guide future design work.
SUMMARY
Waste management for City of Sydney is an expansive subject for which we barely scraped the surface but the themes and insights form the core of futre work for City of Sydney.
As part of the deliverables for this project we produced a 25 page report which expanded on the 8 original insights.
City of Sydney are currently working with Academy XI to explore what the next phase of the project could look like.
EDIT: The work has now been outsourced to an agency to continue evolving.
Project Team
Robert Leaver - Service Design
Jamie Hallam - Service Design
Elena Scott - Service Design