Bixal wins SSA Design Challenge, Prototypes solution for the Seattle Public Library
By: Will Weems
Tags: Cx, Design Process, UX, Design Challenge, Customer Experience

At the end of 2019, the Social Security Administration (SSA) invited Bixal and a few other small businesses to participate in a 48-hour design challenge with the goal of identifying a partner to evaluate and improve methods in which the public completes three of SSA’s most common transactions, ultimately aiming to optimize an online, self-service model and reduce traffic to call and service centers.

Bixal’s performance in the design challenge led to us being selected to help the SSA tackle this significant challenge and ultimately to positively impact the lives of the people that the SSA serves.

The SSA used an innovative approach – “show” versus “tell”– to quickly assess vendor capabilities, prompting challenge participants with a problem statement to conduct research and deliver a prototype for the Seattle Public Library (SPL), providing a comparable design task to complete within the limited timeframe:

“The City of Seattle has seen rapid growth in the last ten years, with a combined population increase of 22% since 2010. The Seattle Public Library is looking to engage these thousands of new residents at a rate relative to the yearly growth of the city. To start, the Library want[ed] to understand the existing pain points for signing up for a library card and hopes that improving the process can kickstart increased engagement.”

We assembled a cross-functional team of user experience (UX) researchers and designers, content strategists, data analysts, visual designers, and customer experience (CX) experts to illustrate the wide range of skills Bixal brings to our projects. We had two days to understand the problem, define the audience, synthesize our research, come up with approaches to solve the problem, and identify and prototype a solution!

Discovery and Research

Following our team brief, we collectively defined a research plan and then split up into several concurrent research efforts. Some of our group embarked on a series of analogous interviews of Bixal team members with relevant experiences (e.g., having moved from one city to another recently), local librarians, and librarians from the SPL. Some in the group reviewed heuristics on the current SPL site, while others conducted user testing on the site.

We also studied analytics from the SPL website to develop an initial picture of audience demographics and better understand the issues relating to usability, customer experience, and engagement for new Seattle residents. Through this process, we discovered common pain points, as well as gained a deeper understanding of how people currently interact with the library.

Our research efforts centered around the primary needs and end goals for the intended audience, which we broke down into six (6) primary personas:

Job-seekers,

Retirees,

Families with children,

People with unique needs,

Financially challenged individuals, and

Lifelong learners.

We then challenged ourselves to think more holistically about how we could address these audience groups to help them realize the opportunities and benefits that are available through the library. The team identified four (4) key insights or areas of opportunity:

Libraries require some basic accountability by being able to contact people who are borrowing items, but in general, they are very open about making their services and materials available to the public and do not want to put bureaucratic hurdles in their way;

People who are not already avid readers may not think of the library as the place to go for all the other programs and services they offer;

For new residents, there are several common touchpoints they go through that provide opportunities for raising awareness about what the library has to offer; and

The digital experience of signing up for an SPL card is not consistent with the openness and flexibility of the in-person experience and numerous usability issues cause confusion and prevent access.

Defining the User Needs

Building on our list of primary personas, we fleshed out an audience analysis that hypothesized what each persona might want or need from the library, how the library might want to interact with that persona or what service would be relevant to them, and how might the library better address the needs of each persona.

From this analysis we defined a series of user stories that could drive our ideation and prototyping efforts:

I am a retiree that has moved to Seattle to be closer to my daughter and her family, and I’d like to find activities to take my grandchildren to.

I am a young professional that has moved to Seattle with my family for my partner’s new job. I want to find tools and services to connect me with viable jobs.

I am homeless and need a place to access the internet, so I can take advantage of state and local social services.

I am a recent immigrant and need assistance to navigate complex forms.

The retiree persona made a good candidate for this exercise because they had the potential for a broad set of interactions with the library. This enabled us to explore a storyline that included engagement with the library through multiple channels, including traditional mail, e-mail, online media, and eventually in-person.

To better understand this persona, the team went through an empathy mapping exercise to develop a better sense of the motivating factors behind key decision points. From there we mapped out the current state customer journey to better define points of interaction with a retiree moving into the city to be near their grandkids, as well as pain points along that journey that could identify potential opportunities to better engage them.

Designing the Prototype

Once our research was complete, we explored possible scenarios to address the challenges of connecting with retirees and bringing them into the SPL ecosystem. Ultimately, we honed in on a key insight from our research — that a common touchpoint shared across all people who move is the U.S. Postal Service when they must register their new address — and defined a potential engagement strategy. To test our hypotheses the team started with a storyboard to envision a complete experience from beginning to end.

Initial Story Board

Finalized Story Board

To create that initial connection with this audience, the team prototyped a welcome packet for new residents, informing them about the library and all it has to offer. The packet provided a new resident with a unique code and personalized, easy to remember URL to streamline the registration process with an effortless digital sign-up experience giving them immediate access to the library’s online catalog and range of services.

Our findings also indicated that new residents who become library patrons often lose interest and reduce their participation in library activities over time. During a future initiative, we recommended developing engagement campaigns to generate excitement around events to entice new residents.

Future prototype suggestions included targeted social media engagement, ongoing and personalized messaging, and events targeted towards specific groups. We also suggested a mindset of continuous discovery to further understand and engage key audiences.

Our goal was to showcase our human-centered design research process — which is supported through understanding human needs, strong data, and holistic research — to the SSA, demonstrating how we arrived at the proposed solution, and show why this approach was the best option to engage our selected audience.

Through these efforts, Bixal was selected as the winner of the design challenge and will continue working with the SSA on some new and exciting challenges! This was an amazing team effort and a fantastic display of our research process, and we look forward to working with SSA in the future.

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Authors Note: I’d like to give a shout out to the amazing team who made this all possible! Many thanks to Philip Levy, Emilia Nardi, Tia Calloway, Andrew Parrucci, Debra Martin, and Brandon Grimes for their brilliant work and tight turnaround.

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You can view the Final Project Report for a summary of all activities and findings from the design challenge.