Understanding the essence of policy documents
Policy Platform
Ministery of Infrastructure and Water Management, FeedbackFruits
Reading policy documents is essential to understand everything within the Ministry. It enables people to know more about the ambitions, the goals, and the policy in general. In addition, it allows people to get into conversations and discussions more and helps to get the best results. During this project, Kickoff Lab helped the Ministry generate new ideas to give employees more knowledge of documents, stimulate mutual discussion, and introduce them to technology. During a fast but effective one-month design sprint, we were able to define how we envision that the Ministry can work with these documents within a unique platform. The result: an experienceable, clickable prototype in which employees can become acquainted with the defined concept. In the follow-up pilot, we validated the concept and realized a prototype through FeedBackFruits.
Challenge
How can we activate and support the Ministry of I&W employees in understanding documents?
The main features
Employees can use the policy platform to read through policy documents. They can use different annotations to enrich the document and give it more depth. Annotations can be comments, questions, and statements, but also pieces of the Ministry's podcast or automated summary.
When the employee finishes the document, the view will change to the "Team view." In this view, the annotations will be more prominent, forming an extra layer on top of the content. Team members can use this space to enrich the policy document and better understand the material.
A gamification element was designed to show activity with each policy document. Each document will be represented as a growing city with houses, streets, and cars (Ministry of Infrastructure, you get it?). This city will grow the more employees work with the document. If there is not enough activity or the overall knowledge of subjects is not sufficient, the city will start falling apart, hinting to the team to get working on the document.
The process
1. Understanding the context
We began this project by analyzing the context and the design brief. We dove into the current process of handling policy documents. Through several interviews with employees of different levels, we found that it takes a lot of time to read all the documents and that it is hard to summarize them. Next, most people annotated the documents but didn't share those annotations with others.
2. Policy Platform
To solve these problems, the Ministerie invited us to think outside the box and devise a prototype for a platform that could solve these issues. Kickoff quickly came up with some critical features that the platform should have. We designed a clickable prototype to convey our idea. This platform was then validated again through interviews with different employees. The clickable prototype helped create traction and enthusiasm within the department.
3. User research
After delivering our first findings and prototype, the employees of the Ministry were so enthusiastic that a second pilot was set up to bring the platform to life. Through a partnership with FeedBackFruits, we could quickly set up a first MVP. In the following three-month pilot, several hypotheses about the platform were validated. With these insights, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management could make an educated decision on the future of this platform.
Conclusion
This project showed the power of design sprints. In just two weeks, Kickoff Lab was able to prototype a design of a platform that created traction in the Ministry. The user research afterward gave valuable information about the next steps.
