Family Time
North East Lincolnshire Council, UKThe number of cases demanding supervised contact between children in care and their parents is increasing. With reduced budgets available, this creates a number of challenges experienced by the families and service teams. For families, there wasn’t time and resource to adjust meetings to individual family needs, how they spend their meeting time together or where. For service teams, the high workload affected the staff wellbeing and to cover for sick leave comes at a high cost.
Providing tools for families and services to create meaningful time together
We undertook interviews with families and staff members to understand the current service and identify opportunities to improve it. We generated a full end-to-end service journey which focused on the main purpose that service staff are passionate to deliver: enabling family time between parents and their children in care. We developed early ideas with staff members and parents in workshops, used paper prototypes and live prototypes to test the impact on the service. Together with the service managers we developed a roadmap for implementing the changes over time.
Process
Set up and carry out user research
Data analysis
Journey mapping and ideation workshop with staff members
Service shadowing in the office
Site visits for contact supervision
Prototype and test service interventions with users and staff members
Create an insight report and a business plan
Discovery
Insight report
Future service vision
business plan with options for service savings
Roadmap and action plan for the service manager
Outcomes
Co-working on the project with the digital transformation team
Supporting team to set up and organise user research interviews
Design and test prototypes
Capability building
"I had never made a paper prototype before. Your support gave me confidence to put something on paper and test it with real users. I want to use this technique in my future projects, too."Digital designer