Eesti Töötukassa

Step 1: Point to the elephant in the room aka determine underline the issue

Eesti Töötukassa (The Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund) was looking for a professional partner to boost their knowledge and skills of service design principles, methods and tools in order to solve an important challenge regarding their services. 

Namely: how to move from bureucratic and confusing fragmented services with duplicated processes and artifacts towards a simple, user-centered service package where clients need take as few steps as possible to receive necessary services and support. You see? Things like making these kinds of sentences digestable. Simple services, simple processes, understandable steps. 

Step 2: Enlist the champions

To address this challenge, they decided to build and strengthen their internal service design capacity and capabilities and design possible solutions themselves, not having somebody else coming and solve this problem for them.

Step 3: Find a savvy guide

Velvet teamed up with Eesti Töötukassa to guide them through our proven service design approach and our most used methodologies.

We created a thorough 8-day service design training and mentoring programme, that combined training days, mentoring sessions and independent team work, tailored specifically to the needs of Eesti Töötukassa and their range of services.

Step 4: Do the learning

Let’s get into it. What did we do together throughout those 8 training days?

• Day 1 was all about getting into the mindset of service design approach. What is a service anyway? What is service design and how to design the intangible? What are the core principles of service design? How does a service design process look like? What to terms like front end & back end, touchpoints, servicescapes, users and actors, service experience, As-Is & To-Be mean in service design? Yes, all that! 
• Day 2 was about discovering and understanding the big picture surrounding the service – the world, the local context, the organisation.
• Day 3 was focused on useful and valuable ways to discover and understand everything about the service and the people – the human and personal side of things. We discussed the importance of creating empathy in service design and learned different ways to carry out insightful user research.

After the first three training days we organised a mentoring session to all the participating teams. As they needed to carry our user research as a homework, we provided them some 1-1 time and space with our trainers to discuss research plans and ideas and to give the teams more confidence in going out on the field with their selected tools. 

• Day 4 was about analysing and making sense of all the findings from previous discovery activities.
• Day 5 was all about co-design. We discussed ways to organising co-design sessions with users and other stakeholders of the service to ideate different solutions to the defined problem statements. As a homework the participants of the training had to carry out their own co-design sessions with stakeholders using different ideation methods. 
• Day 6 focused on designing the service based on all the previously gathered insights and ideas.

Another mentoring round was needed at this point to support the participants in creating their service concepts in depth. So we provided again some 1-1 time and space with our trainers to discuss any questions, misunderstandings, insecurities and other issues the teams had at this point in their design process. 

• Day 7 we looked into prototyping service concepts – how to make the intangible tangible and test it out in the real world. We discussed the mindset shift needed when thinking about experimenting in the public sector and learnt about different ways and approaches to prototyping service concepts.
• Day 8 was about looking back and looking forward – recapping all the work already done in the service design process and discussing ways to implement the designed solutions.We used tools like service cards, service blueprints and roadmaps to define the implementation better and discussed the approaches of change management to support this journey. 

Step 5: Carry on and be consistent

During this process, the participants already started the creation and development of the new service package for the employment of people with decreased work abilities (and other improvements for the user journeys), putting the new skills to use right away. 

Implementing new approaches and bringing significant changes to life requires a dedication and perseverance. It may take time and patience to ensure consistency within the entire team, but the ultimate reward offers immense value both for the service provider as well as the end-user.

…and that’s it! If you’d like to try it out yourself, don’t hesitate to give our our designers a call.