Assistance Dogs Australia
Service design project
The project
Founded in 1996, Assistance Dogs Australia trains and places unique dogs with Australians in unique situations. They train dogs that specialise in support for people with a physical disability, autism or PTSD. As well as providing a range of services to these individuals and their families.
Business objectives
Research and understand the value exchange of becoming a volunteer puppy educator, in order to improve the application experience and retain the current educators.
Puppy educators volunteers are crucial for training service dogs, this directly impacts the amount of recipients that will get a service dog. The waitlist to receive a service dog at the moment is 2 years.
In over 10 weeks we explored how we might improve the amount of applications and retention of volunteers in order for ADA to meet their service demands.
Role:
- Service Designer
Company:
Assistance Dogs Australia – Academy Xi
Date:
2019 – 10w project
The Problem
We explored the situation, problem, considerations and assumptions. This helped us build further context with early hypotheses to reframe the problem and guide the project scope. Based on research and conversations with ADA supervisor Fran Digo we found two main pain points to start our research and hypothesis.
There are not enough suitable applicants
How might we improve the application so that we attract suitable applicants and better manage their expectations?
ADA finds it hard to retain the existing Puppy educators.
How might we improve the exit experience for volunteers so that we are able to retain PEs whilst building a strong sense of Community?
Research
We first met with Fran and mapped the customer journey of an applicant to understand their frustrations and gains.
We collected data with interviews to ADA staff, active and ex-volunteers (Puppy educators & puppy carers) and a quantitative research by sending 50 surveys. At the end of our research phase, we mapped our findings and identified key insights to guide our How Might We Statements (HMWs)
How Might we…
How might we improve the relationship with new and pending applicants so they stay motivated?
How might we prepare PEs so that they feel more supported and less burdened during handover?
How might we improve the training experience of volunteers so that resources are better utilised?
How might we create a sense of achievement following handover so that PEs continue volunteering?
Discovery
With a focus on the applicant and volunteer experience, we were able to establish trends by mapping our personas and building a journey map, helping us find to the opportunities for design.
Personas
Ideation
The following step was a workshop with ADA staff, the objectives were to narrow the scope and share insights. Using the Crazy-8 we rapidly prototyped ideas and pitched our concepts based on our initial HMWs. From 21 potential concepts we prioritized and selected according to customer value feasibility and viability.
We agreed to focus on the following concepts:
Anti-Ad Marketing Campaign
- Re-design of applicant Screening and Branched Online Application Form
- Puppy Picnics
- Volunteer Support Documents
- Puppy Paw-Tal (online portal for PE)
This concepts were prototyped and tested with a total of 14 users including puppy educators, general public and supervisors.
Future Roadmap
Phase One (1-6 months)
- Business as usual for communications and Community outreach via Social Media.
- Complete digitising content and collection of all artefacts for easy transition.
- Investigate further design iterations and testing.
- Elevate Training Material and timeline to EDMs (automated marketing emails).
Phase Two (6-18months)
- Business as usual for communications, Community outreach via Social Media, Timeline and Training Material.
- Begin building Base portal to include Profile, Training content and Timeline.
- Further testing and review.
Phase Three (18+ months)
- Business as usual for communications/EDMs
- Paw-Tal used for networking, profile and timeline tracking, acess to digitised training content.
- Explore next phase of design to incorporate all elements of the Puppy Paw-Tal.
- Further testing and review.
Project Overview
- This was the first time I had the opportunity to use design thinking into a project which was not attached to a digital product. It was very interesting applying previous knowledge and ideating different solutions that what I am used to.
- We had an extensive research phase of 4 weeks which was very useful to get insights and understand the project, but that let us with only 4 weeks to ideate, prototype test and present our concepts to the client.
- Overall the client was very happy with the solutions proposed and all the insights we were able to provide them, I would loved to be able to provide them with more high-fidelity solutions and felt that we missed a second iteration phase.