Human Centered Design Services
The Arch team will establish human centered design and design thinking practices that can be used at all networking levels, national to the community, and bring together stakeholders to discover, decide, make, and validate solutions for improving products and providing customer-centric solutions. The team will design, prototype, test and deploy a playbook of workshop and engagement activities that networks of stakeholders can use to deploy solutions quickly and effectively for agreed-upon problems. The collection of activities will include human-focused design methods like stakeholder analysis, problem framing, idea harvesting and brainstorming, patient journey analysis, solution casting, and evaluative assessment. The design methods will be put together into problem-solving recipes that can be taught and practiced by stakeholders in many different types of in-person and remote settings. The Arch team will further support the implementation of these collaborative practices with its iHCD platform that integrates design methods and tools for all stakeholders to use and capture the results and data. With the data, Arch will support the analysis and predictive assessment of solutions using their analytics, visualization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning tools. Taken together, the qualitative, human-focused design capabilities and the quantitative assessment and predictive tools will accelerate scalable and measurable solutions to improve customer (all users and stakeholders) experience.
We understand that federal agencies need to take an HCD approach to understand the people for whom they are writing policies and creating programs and services. The core goal of our HCD practice is to provide a unique environment that brings all project phases together, from Discovery to Design to Deliver to Measure. Our approach considers not only how our team delivers to application end users but also to other teammates, federal partners, and citizen stakeholders. We champion a “tools unlocked” approach that brings product owners, designers, and users together to discover, design, and implement useful and usable solutions. We design with users, not for them. We also see HCD as an effort to collect data to ascertain information and drive design decisions. We begin each effort to identify and understand who we’re helping by developing user personas. Once identified, we utilize journey mapping, stakeholder interviews, and various other HCD methods to establish a common understanding of pain points. Once established, these pain points are mapped back to each persona.
Team Arch is geared to work toward outcomes, not outputs, for the delivery of products and services. To do this, we will assist with developing Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) on a quarterly basis and monitor metrics to track progress toward those results on an ongoing basis. Thematic roadmaps will communicate the overall vision for how the team will deliver value to users and the organization. We will work with stakeholders to develop research questions and test hypotheses over time with real user insights and behavioral insights to provide ongoing prioritized recommendations to product owners and leadership. Since our HCD approach is based on Continuous Improvement and Iteration, it is more geared towards achieving Outcomes at the project level and not Output at the Task Level. By applying rigor to our research and decision-making, aligned with OKRs, we will effectively use data to drive decisions.
