CASE STUDY
Engaging Citizens with Governments
DECEMBER 2015 - MAY 2016
BACKGROUND
As part of Accela’s mission to put the citizens and their relationship with the government, we started investigating what this relationship looks like today? With the advent of social media and the proliferation of mobile devices, citizen expectations of their governments have heightened and put pressure on government leaders to innovate and "keep up.” We learned early on that citizens expect to interface with their governments in the same way they interface with leading technology platforms.
CHALLENGE
How might we help enhance a citizen’s relationship with their local government?
OUTCOME
A research white paper outlining the future direction of Accela's citizen-facing products
APPROACH
Before we talked to the end-users (citizens and their local agencies), we decided to gather an internal understanding of the current landscape and Accela's involvement in the space. We talked to a few product managers and product marketing managers; also facilitated a workshop with the product stakeholders to understand the ecosystem of Accela's current offerings.
We designed and launched a survey to gather basic behavioral information and screen interview candidates as a next step. Collected 280 survey responses led us to build a persona hypothesis for citizens.
We also conducted more than 50 interviews with the citizens from targeted areas across the country, where Accela citizen-facing products have a presence. We also targeted tiers of government to include citizens from small, medium, and larger local governments. Meanwhile, we talked to 3 different city agencies to learn their interactions, struggles, and goals with their citizens.
It was crucial to communicate the ongoing progress to the stakeholders to impact Accela's product strategy for the citizen-facing products. As we started combing through the pile of data we collected in the last three months, it was evident that we needed a systemic approach to synthesize and present to the bigger audience. Instead of analyzing each research data point individually, we started creating a visual map of organizing the data. We ended up with a visual map of the system, called Citizen Ecosystem.
When we shared our end users' stories using the system map, it created empathy and curiosity in our audience. But the following steps were still not clear! We took it further and defined a strategic framework for the Citizen Engagement products. This framework helped them understand how to approach a product strategy in a Citizen Ecosystem of vast possibilities.
OUTCOMES
After the company-wide presentation of research and strategic framework, a strategic conversation was initiated to update the citizen-facing products to meet user needs and goals. As a result, we started working with individual product stakeholders to update their strategies based on our research.