Project Type: Service Design

How might we create a service that better welcomes new residents with disabilities to the city of Chicago?

Jason’s Challenge

Jason Kunesh and the Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) came to our class and tasked us designing a welcome service for the city of Chicago. Jason and DoIT had just finished revamping Chicago 311, releasing an app that allowed Chicago residents to request city services from street light repair to graffiti removal. However, even with the introduction of the 311 app, Jason and DoIT found that the 2 million residents of Chicago often still struggle to determine which of the hundreds of available city resources they need. The city of Chicago is home to home to an incredibly diverse population. Sixty-five percent of residents are non-white, thirty percent of residents speak a language other than English, and twenty-three percent of population has a disability. Subsequently, it can be incredibly challenging for the Chicago government to determine how to best present services to its residents. The residents on the other hand, are often faced with a multitude of confusing city websites that are organized according to government structure and not their own needs. It is with these challenges in mind that Jason brought our team the following opportunity: how might we create a service that better welcomes new residents with disabilities to the city of Chicago?

Narrowing the Scope

Even with the our scope narrowed to new residents with disabilities, our team quickly found ourselves faced with an overwhelming amount of information. As we attempted to develop a stakeholder map, we quickly found just how difficult it was to accurately map the dozens and city services, to the multitude of user needs they addressed all while giving the unique experiences of people with various disabilities the credence they deserved.

To quickly gain insight into how to further narrow our scope, our team did some preliminary research into how people with various disabilities used city services to help address their core needs. We considered how people in wheelchairs interacted with public transportation, how parents of students with disabilities navigated Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and how people with autism found affordable and accessible housing.

Public TRANSPORTATION for people in WHEELCHAIRS

• when planning any outing, people in wheelchairs need to research the accessibility of both the destination and the transportation needed to get there. Due to all the advanced planning required to ensure a smooth trip, people in wheelchairs often feel that they cannot be spontaneous

• despite all the efforts to plan, people in wheelchairs often encounter obstacles to getting to their destination (an elevator is out, there’s construction on the sidewalk etc). Users feel left out when they cannot overcome the obstacles that arise. Knowing that there may be challenges regardless of how well they plan cause users in wheelchairs to consider not going out and having fun at all

CPS Special Education

• parents of students with disabilities often have trouble determining which resources are available at which schools. Users feel as though the process isn’t transparent

• the process of getting an individual education plan (IEP) contains a lot of paperwork and deadlines.

• Despite the deadlines that schools must follow, parents often feel that the process is too slow. Parents have also described being repeatedly denied evaluations due to missing paperwork, and miscommunications at expense of their child’s education. Users feel as though they must fight against CPS instead of work with them to get their children the resources and education that they need

• children with severe disabilities are often bussed across the city for school. As a result parents are rarely at the schools, and miss the opportunity to connect with each other and share experiences and knowledge

HOusing for people with Autism

• the accessible housing journey can be divided into three phases: awareness, research and action

• Awareness: people with autism decide that they are ready to live independently

• Research: people begin to consider the all of the grants, resources, and programs available to them as a person with a disability. They also begin to consider the and medical, social and finical concerns typical of moving into a new home. Users struggle to figure out what questions to ask and how/where to find the answers

• Action: people with autism decide between residential supported and independent living. Users struggle to determine which option is best for them, and with the limitations and wait times associated with federal and state funding assistance

After conducting this initial research, the team ultimately the decided to narrow the scope of our project down to parents of children with disabilities. This area in particular was intriguing to us because we felt it was a well defined problem space, that unlike transportation, did not already have a significant number of services already addressing it. We also felt that this particular area would allow us to gain insights and create a service that could later be expanded to help all new residents with disabilities.

Diving Deep

Once we’d narrowed our scope down to parents of children with disabilities navigation CPS, we began conducting user interviews. To gain a full understanding of the problem, we interviewed not just our end users, but also school administrators and the commissioner Mayors Office for People with Disabilities (MOPD). While the process of getting the proper education can be long complicated we were able to identify a few experiences that are particularly emotional challenging for the user: finding the correct programs before moving to Chicago, getting en IEP, making adjustments to the curriculum, and becoming so frustrated that they wished to leave CPS.

This experience with the CPS was almost the exact opposite of the experience that one parent had at the Park School, a school in Evanston that exclusively educates students with disabilities. Ultimately the Park School experienced served as a model for the ideal user experience for a parent of a student with a disability.

Through our interviews and journey mapping, we ultimately crafted the following point of view:

From this point of view we generated the following opportunity areas:

These opportunity areas inspired us to create and test a number of low fidelity prototypes and wireframes. These prototypes ranged from a physical welcome gift containing information about the CPS special education program (Diverse Learners), to a gofundme inspired platform where parents could post about their struggles and ask other experienced parents for help. As we showed these prototypes to users and to our client, came away with 3 core learnings. The first was that many of the resources we wanted to provide already existed in some form across a range government and advocacy websites. Secondly, we learned that it might be a challenge to get parents to seek out and engage in purely community driven prototypes like the gofundme inspired platform. Finally, we learned that to give our ideas the best chance of being implements, we should work the MOPD given that our client Jason and DoIT had the strong relationship with them. These learnings inspired us to create MOPD Hub.

MOPD Hub is a platform that has two primary features. The first is to leverage the MOPD’s existing connections with advocacy groups and government websites to source and organize useful information in one central location. The second feature is to allow parents of students with disabilities to crowdsource additional information, resources and experiences that are not currently captured in the government websites. Through the crowdsourcing of information, sharing of experiences and discussion of common challenges, parents who are not often at their schools can learn gain valuable information and form communities to support each other.