Exploring a Digital Format

We were working with a government ministry to envision and design a new way of delivering a service which was traditionally paper-based. As part of this process, they wanted to demonstrate all of the advantages a digital format could bring to the service and approached us to help refine that vision into something tangible (namely a prototype) to present to their stakeholders.

Sketching early versions of the prototype

In a previous project we completed for our client, we had completed a service blueprint of the current process in place that produced this paper-based format. Because of this, there was a large body of research already created about the process and access to the team that created the service blueprint. Our project team set out to review this research, conduct our own research into the problem space, and collaborate with the service blueprint team and our client.

Once we had a good understanding of the problem space, we set out to sketch and design the flow and functionality for the new digital format of the service. We realized that for this digital format, static wireframes wouldn't be the most effective way to give our users a full feeling of what this new digital format would be like, so we set out to create a prototype that could be used on a tablet (which was the overwhelmingly preferred device for the future users of this format).

Prototype was built to be used on a tablet, which was a primary device use case

We originally wanted to create the prototype using one of the great prototyping tools out there, but with the interactions we wanted to portray, we found these tools were too limiting. As a result, we decided that creating a hand-coded prototype was going to be the most efficient and effective way of demonstrating the flow and the functionality that was possible. We created the prototype using HTML/CSS/JS/jQuery and presented the final concept to our stakeholders who could evaluate our prototype more effectively with it in their hands.

Our prototype was well received by our stakeholders and further demonstrated the power of what a digital format could provide to their users over their traditional paper based format. Currently, the ministry is in the process of planning their digitization of this service.