Our Portfolio of Work
The Innovation Office in San Francisco’s Human Services Agency serves the over 200,000 clients and hundreds of community partners with our colleagues in the Department of Benefits and Family Support, the Department of Disability and Aging Services and the Office of Early Care and Education.
We are a service and system design team with four streams of work:
- Research: Providing insights into the public’s and employees’ experiences with digital and non-digital service delivery.
- Strategy and Implementation: Working with diverse teams to define the problems then experiment towards improvements in 30, 60, and 90 days.
- Visual Design: Crafting clearer and more usable information, including forms, outreach materials, signs and infographics.
- Grow Capacity: Hosting talks on service and system design methods, teaching workshops, and helping those across the city and beyond.
What follows are some brief and detailed examples of what we’ve been doing since our founding in 2014.
Snapshot
Text Message Nudges: Texting reminders to providers of home care services that boosted attendance by 11% at their orientation session.
Analytics: Designed helpful dashboards of website and intranet usage that includes qualitative data.
Service Improvement Project: 38 employees from 12 programs learned service design tools, created 96 improvement plans, implementing 83% in six months.
Digital Experiences: Improved accessibility and usability of the website and intranet through design research.
Lobby Wayfinding: Researched and implemented improvements to lobby navigation, including disability and non-English assistance.
Service Design Sprints: Mapping service journeys and prototyping changes in a week; then making measurable improvements in a month.
Deeper Focus
SFHSA.org Analytics Dashboard
Challenge: Agency executives, managers and the Communications team did not have accessible, current data about how people were interacting with the website.
Process: We spoke with them to understand their needs and then connected the agency’s Google Analytics account to its AdWords platform. We then used Google Data Studio to iterate with them on the data they required to answer their questions.
Equity Considerations: The IT and Communications teams translated the entire site, allowing us to measure how people navigate through it by language.
Outputs: Six data dashboards. One is site-wide and five others for separate programs within the agency.
Impact: Our agency coworkers now access our website’s analytics. It helped the COVID-19 response and recovery because we showed how texting campaigns to clients about critical changes to services drive them to the website for more information. We also adapted our dashboard to SF.gov for our colleagues in San Francisco Digital Services.
Intranet Redesign
Challenge: The intranet was not user friendly, and employees have long asked for it to better meet their needs (e.g., find coworkers through the phone directory, locate important policies and procedures, and request IT support or office equipment, among other uses.)
Process: We planned and conducted design research through interviews with more than 30 employees across the agency. The insights were then shared with the rest of the product team, put into user stories and prioritized in product development.
Equity Considerations: Involved coworkers from varying levels of seniority, age, ethnicities, and degrees of comfort with technology.
Outputs: Produced presentations, personas, use cases and wireframes. An analytics dashboard and a feedback option on each page.
Impact: Insights produced a new page design layout, content strategy, search, and staff directory. Feedback loops help to improve usability.
In-Home Support Services (IHSS) Text Message Nudges
Challenge: Providers of home care services for older adults and those with disabilities had lots of questions and would try to answer them through the agency website, calling or coming to the lobby.
Process: We led a product discovery workshop to understand the needs of providers of home care services, developed personas, brainstormed features, and created preliminary product planning. A survey to collect baseline data on providers’ satisfaction was then put in the lobby. Their feedback pointed to a preference for text messaging. We built a prototype, and tested it through six interviews with care providers and social workers in three languages.
Equity Considerations: Conducted multilingual interviews with providers of home care services, applying equity-centered design practices.
Outputs: A presentation of research insights, including multiple paths forward to apply the learnings.
Impact: The immediate next step became text message reminders for providers of home care services to attend the orientation session to the IHSS program. This touchpoint in their service is critical to reduce some of the most common questions. Attendance increased by 11%.
Service Design Sprints
Challenges: Multiple programs and a sister city office struggled with the design of their internal process or a particular strategy, and were willing to experiment towards improvements, including: (1) Medi-Cal, (2) Welfare-to-Work, (3) the County Adult Assistance Program, (4) Intake services for the Department of Disability and Aging Services, and (5) the former Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation.
Process: The first four projects included two- to four-day sprints. For each, we led project teams to map the client and employee service journey, tease out root causes of challenges, and develop a 90-day implementation plan to build, test, and iterate towards measurable change. The former Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation project was different. We helped their broadband connectivity strategy by facilitating an idea, generation session with more than two-dozen community partners.
Equity Considerations: Collaborated with diverse coworkers and other stakeholders to have a more holistic understanding of the problem and ways to make improvements.
Outputs: Medi-Cal: Redesigned the process to share policy changes with frontline teams.
Welfare-to-Work: Hired two employees to greet and guide clients through the JobsNOW! lobby.
County Adult Assistance Program: Enabled the lobby flow database to page clients in Tagalog and Cantonese.
Department of Disability and Aging Services: Created a centralized place for employees who onboard clients to the department to learn about ongoing policy changes.
Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation: Gathered written feedback from more than two-dozen community partners.
Impact: Medi-Cal: Employees reported clearer internal communication and with the public.
Welfare-to-Work: The show rate of clients at the JobsNOW! program went from below 50% to 70%.
County Adult Assistance Program: Better serve clients in their preferred language.
Department of Disability and Aging Services: Helped coworkers stay current and more easily find policy changes.
Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation: Feedback informed the prioritization of goals for the citywide, broadband strategy.
Service Center Improvement Project (SCIP)
Challenge: Frontline teams who serve the public often have great ideas about how to improve the way clients and coworkers experience service delivery, but they did not have a formal process for sharing, testing and iterating on their improvement ideas.
Process: 38 colleagues across a dozen agency programs and seven different job classifications participated in this six-month project. We designed a framework for the project plan and the group completed it in an inclusive and transparent way. We then developed and shared a service design toolkit. This included a presentation that participants gave to peers as an invitation to co-produce change with them. Collectively, they created 96 plans to make bite-sized improvements (taking minutes, hours or a full day’s worth of time), and implemented 83% of them.
Equity Considerations: Gathered frontline teams together from diverse backgrounds and across different positions and levels.
Impact: Among the many accomplishments a few involve:
Reduced wait times on the phones (by 66%) and in the lobby (by 25%) at 170 Otis St.
Lowered lobby wait times by 71% at 1440 Harrison St.
Cut two days from the paperwork process in the In-Home Support Services program.
Created Kudos Boards where employees write appreciation for one another and post thank you notes from clients.
In-Home Support Services (IHSS) Provider Service Journey
Challenge: IHSS employees requested a simple way to help providers of home care services to understand their service journey with IHSS from onboarding to completing an online time sheet.
Process: We worked with IHSS employees and the internal Communications team to clarify the content. We designed the website components and the IT division placed them on our website. Providers then provided us feedback on whether their needs were being met.
Equity Considerations: We used simple, clear language and tested it with the diverse providers of home care services as well as IHSS employees.
Outputs: The step-by-step guide is on the agency’s website and printed for IHSS employees to share in lobbies. The Communications team uses the step-by-step format for other programs on the agency’s website as well.
Impact: Employees reported the guide helps them explain the process to clients in the lobby. We also measured clicks on links through the website and analyze people’s feedback that can be left on the bottom of each webpage.
Lobby Wayfinding
Challenge: Clients can struggle to navigate one of the lobbies, and use its ticketing (queuing) system. Managers of the programs wanted to understand how to help clients consistently: (1) navigate the space without frustration, (2) be aware of the available services, (3) find and use kiosks and tickets correctly, and (4) more recently do so in a COVID-19 world.
Process: We interviewed clients and frontline employees, including those specially trained to help clients with disabilities. We also learned from security personnel. Our research included observing how these lobby users navigate their space and interact with each other. We analyzed lobby ticketing data and application data.
Equity Considerations: We gathered insights from the public and internally from those with different ethnicities, abilities, and language preferences.
Outputs: We shared our insights with managers about clients’ experiences through the space. Their feedback prioritized our next steps, including getting prototype signage for outside and within the lobby.
Impact: While employee feedback has been positive, we have yet to assess the impact on clients because of the pandemic response. Our work leads to us to join the lobby redesign team to help with COVID-19 safety considerations.
Public Guardian Referral for Conservatorship
Challenge: When hospital patients are unable to make their own health care decisions, their health care providers report them to the Public Guardian program to legally make such decisions, but the official form and process was challenging.
Process: We redesigned the form with the Public Guardian, then provided it to IT to put into DocuSign. (Unfortunately, we couldn’t create an online form that integrated with this program’s database.) We prototyped and tested the new process and form with a handful of health care partners, made improvements, and then launched it program-wide.
Equity Considerations: Form design included accessibility and usability practices for a diverse, non-native, English-speaking population.
Outputs: Redesigned digital form, and a presentation Identifying bright spots, next steps, and opportunities for future improvements.
Impact: Overall responses to the new form were positive. DocuSign reduced the time health care providers edit, format and send the form to the Public Guardian. The digitized form had high marks for usability.
What’s Missing?
Portfolios of work often show the glory of a person or team. That’s often their purpose, right? That means there’s a lot missing: The names of thousands of people who came before us to do this work, inspire our thinking or joined us to do better for the public, our community partners and coworkers.
What’s missing are also stalled projects or those that didn’t deliver enough or what was intended; moments where we could have been better allies, and times where we unabashedly lived our values to produce unexpectedly positive changes.
There are also many, tiny ways we help that didn’t make it in: citywide projects where we facilitated a conversation or session to transform digital services, public broadband access, and juvenile justice or spending a couple hours to produce infographics that help people understand complex information easier.
What would an “unportfolio” look like of the gristle and nubs that get left out? That may be part of a future, reflective piece in doing this work for over seven years.
