As is common in many technologically-driven start-ups, the success of service delivery tends to focus primarily on the speed of delivery and how rapid software can be built.

This criteria for function is effective in the beginning to prove that a service is deliverable, but it also has some risks in sacrificing flexibility when the service needs to change.

Initially, the systems and workflows were erected, but the challenge was now in enabling services at scale as it rolled out of Queensland to other states in Australia.

This rapid deployment of technology meant, in this particular case, that delivery was prioritised over the usability and the impact this had on the utility of the operators and experience of customers at the recycling points.

Validation of utility was determined by UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and the number of containers that are being recycled as key success criteria. There did not seem to be any success criteria based on the customer or operator experience of the service.

The first part of any strategic design exercise is to understand what an organisation’s aims are. Sometimes, there is a clear brief but often, there needs to be an internal discovery exercise to uncover individual stakeholders goals and why they matter to both them and the organisation as a whole. It is not uncommon to find that different stakeholders may have competing interests.

In this particular case, it seemed to be a very straightforward exercise of improving the front stage systems that recycling operators used to identify, count and recycle the containers that were coming in from citizens in different states. The systems were called POS (Point Of Sale) systems on iPads and the CRP (Container Refund Portal).

After speaking with individual stakeholders to determine what they would like to see as success criteria, I also spoke to some of their team members closer to the products about how they might like to see these systems develop.

User Experience and Usability were the key indicators to be enhanced. It was therefore crucial to set a baseline for the current states to measure if and how any improvements might be made in any future states.

Service Design Blueprint – Current State

Service Design involves researching how a service, if existing, will meet the needs of the end user, customer, citizen. This service can expand across a variety of contexts and systems.

In this case, it started in the broadcast media, where people visited a website, downloaded an app and then interfaced with a staff member using a POS iPad.

This is called the “Front stage” of services as it’s where the interactions take place with the public. The service continued in the back-office administration or “Back stage” to ensure that the service continued to meet the needs of the public and the supplier organisations. In this case it was the CRPOs.

In order to understand the service from beginning to end, it is useful to map the customers and operators perspective of where they are involved with different people, systems, procedures and policies.

This is where a current-state service blueprint comes in handy. It illustrates a story of the customer journey before, during and after their experience with the service.

It allows for where they come into contact with the ‘front stage’ touch-points as well as the ‘back-stage’ processes, systems and workflows supporting the services at different points in time.

In order to verify the internal findings, I decided to take an excursion to the far northern reaches of Queensland to Townsville where I could conduct some contextual enquiry studies.

The aim of this type of research was to gain an understanding of the user types, the contexts of their workplaces, their cognitive states when they were using Point Of Sale devices in iPads with customers as well as any administrative problems regarding the Container Refund Point portal.

The first place to start contextual enquiries was at the touch-point of where the customers encountered the service. This was to get an understanding of the customer journey from the point they arrived at the container recycling collection point. It was immediately apparent to observe the contexts of the customer waiting in their vehicles to pull into a recycling plant and be directed to the counting stations.

Here, they would unload their containers from the vehicles to a counting/sorting table manned by an employee who identified, sorted and counted the different types of containers. Sometimes, critters like Green Tree Frogs and snakes were found living in the containers (Yikes!).

Once the counting was completed, the attendant would confirm the units and the refund amount on a whiteboard in front of the customer. If agreed, the customer would then receive a receipt which they would then drive to the cashier to receive their refund either as cash or as a bank transfer.

The scope, in this project, was mostly to improve the internal systems being used by the operators. The customer experience was part of another project but it was still useful to determine where the service directly or indirectly impacted the customer experience through the operators’ usability of the systems.

In order to understand the context of the workers, I requested if they could train me as a “first-timer” so I could get a better idea of how the service was situated in terms of procedures, tools and environments. This also allowed me to build a rapport with the other workers which helped me to approach them, ask questions and build an empathetic understanding from their perspectives.