Improving a mental health support service through service design
Background
Frazzled Cafe is a charity which facilitates meetings where people who are feeling frazzled can meet to talk and share their stories. The meetings aren’t therapy sessions - they are run by volunteer facilitators who create a supportive and non-judgemental environment for people to talk about how they’re feeling.
Challenge
The team at Frazzled are doing an amazing job and like all ambitious teams are looking to improve and grow.
Thanks for reading Harness Innovation! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
They highlighted two challenges to address with this project:
Creating a seamless and consistent experience for service users
Growing the service: removing barriers to increase the number of service users
What we did
Discovery Session
The first thing we did was run a discovery session with the team to uncover all the incredible knowledge in the teams’ heads and improve our understanding of the challenges.
A snapshot from the Discovery Session
After this session, we gathered and ‘made-sense’ of or ‘synthesised’ data from existing research the team at Frazzled had conducted. This helped us understand service users’ needs, pain points (specific issues they encountered) and desires throughout the whole of their journey: from when they first became aware of Frazzled Cafe to becoming a regular user.
Service blueprint and journey mapping
After synthesising this research and extracting key insights, we mapped out a service blueprint. A service blueprint visually maps out the steps in a service process, making it easier to design a new process or improve an existing one. Developing this service blueprint allowed the team, for the very first time, to visualise the whole journey from a user perspective.
A snapshot of the service blueprint
From Insight to Action
Insights > Opportunities > Ideas
Once we had the service blueprint mapped out, we turned the insights uncovered in the research into opportunities and ideas. Let’s take an example.The research identified that a barrier to signing up was not knowing what to expect from a session.
Before generating ideas to solve this challenge, it was important to frame the insight as an opportunity first so that it was clearly defined and any ideas generated met the users’ needs.
To do this, we created a User Story which was: ‘As a new user, I want to understand what to expect from a session so that I feel less anxious about taking part’.
The idea which is being taken forwards to address this (which came from a service user) was to create a short video to explain more about the session and how they work. This will feature a facilitator which will really help to get across the welcoming and inclusive atmosphere that facilitators foster in the sessions.
The research revealed that service users found it frustrating when others didn’t understand or adhere to the guidelines, so having this resource will help to improve the overall experience of the sessions as well.
Mapping the volunteer journey
To gain a holistic overview of the service, it was also important to map out the volunteer experience. The user need we uncovered from the volunteers’ point of view was that they needed to alleviate their own nervousness before and during sessions. This was important to address as solutions could help the volunteer facilitators create a more supportive and relaxed atmosphere in the session and improve outcomes. We showed the team an example of a workaround which was being used to meet this need. This was a printout of the Volunteers’ Handbook and also a makeshift ‘timesheet’ which was being used to keep track of time and act as a reminder when certain activities needed to take place.
Simple printouts of the handbook sent by Frazzled Cafe could help with this and be part of the volunteer’s onboarding journey. Although a very simple solution, without a human centred approach to this challenge, this may not have been uncovered and actioned.
Impact
This human-centred approach enabled the team at Frazzled Cafe to proceed with evidence and confidence and implement solutions which will make a big impact.Overall, the project:Identified barriers to joining Frazzled Cafe sessions and practical solutions to overcome these barriersIdentified the biggest pain points for users and opportunities to improve the experienceIdentified pain points for volunteers and recommended low effort, high impact practical solutions
Feedback
“Louis ran a series of workshops with our team to identify ways that we could improve our overall service user experience, as well as opportunities to enhance the Volunteer experience and potential corporate offerings.The thing that really stood out for us was the huge amount of effort that Louis put into the presentations and research into our processes. The video, board and summaries were highly detailed and went through every single aspect of our work and service user's experience. Being able to see the whole journey of our service in this way was really useful.Louis really helped us to take a step back and look at some elements of the user journey that were causing frustration and how we could alleviate that. Our aim is to grow the charity in the coming years, so hearing Louis' recommendations around better explaining our work to newcomers (especially with videos and website content) is something we are now working on. Louis also made some great suggestions on how we can better run our focus groups, and we had a brilliant discussion in our session on how best to approach this.We have been left with lots of practical solutions to take our work forward, as well as new areas to explore as a charity. We would absolutely recommend Louis and his work to any organisation, thank you so much!” Alasdair, Project Support, Frazzled Cafe
What’s next?
We’re looking forward to continuing to work with this amazing organisation. The next project we’ll be supporting is looking at commercialising the assets and capabilities of Frazzled Cafe in order to diversify income streams so that this wonderful service can continue to deliver incredible outcomes for its users.If you’d like to talk about how we can help improve your service or develop a new one - do drop me a DM!