Taradhi: We want all Saudi citizens to have access to a simple and relatable online service to resolve their disputes.
Client: Alwasaet Saudi Arabian Consulting Agency working for The Ministry of Justice of Saudi Arabia.
Project Outputs: Current & Ideal Service Blueprint and Gaps & Opportunities Deck.
The Challenge:
The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020, forcing businesses, governments, and institutions to pivot and adapt to online environments. Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Justice was not exempt from this change. Taradhi, an online platform to resolve disputes online, existed before the pandemic. However, when the lockdown started, the use of Taradhi increased exponentially, uncovering opportunities for improvement in terms of usability and interface design.
The project:
The Ministry of Justice decided to hire Alwasaet to improve the user interface of the platform. Alwasaet’s team performed user interviews, personas, and journey maps as part of their UX process. However, Alwasaet’s team quickly discovered that this was an opportunity to actually rethink and validate the service itself, and not only the interface.
My Role:
I was hired by Alwasaet as a Service Designer to translate the research completed by the team into a Service Blueprint that Alwasaet could use to obtain approval from The Ministry of Justice for a further redesign. As a service designer, I was responsible for rethinking the service as a whole and making sure the redesign of the platform was actually addressing citizen needs, and not just building a nicer website.
Therefore, my goal was to make sure we had interviewed a diverse group of citizens and government service providers and captured the right insights, without dismissing the work completed by the team so far.
Design Process:
The Alwasaet team performed user interviews, personas, and journey maps as part of their UX process. The content and the platform mockups were in Arabic, which represented a challenge for me as Arabic is not a language I understand. Also, as I was brought in during the later stages of the project, I had to work closely with the UX designer to understand and map out the platform, familiarize myself with the project, and be able to build the required deliverable.
Determining ways of working
It was crucial to focus on building upon the existing work, therefore, the first thing I did was to set up a way of working asynchronously with the team. I set up a Trello board to project manage tasks, a Miro board for collaborative mapping, and Slack channels for regular communications and updates. In addition to these tools, we also established preferred times to be reached and how to collaborate effectively between the Arabic and English languages.
Building on teammates’ work: what has been done so far?
As part of the research process was already completed, I started by analyzing existing research to Identify gaps in the methods, opportunities to see information from another angle, and any other aspects that the team might not have considered.
I also interviewed the UX designer as I was interested in things she might have noticed while interviewing users that were not included in the report.
Finally, I explored the current platform, as well as the mock-ups already built by the team. This was particularly difficult because the platform was in Arabic, forcing me to rely on google translate and team members’ translation abilities. All the insights gathered throughout this process were mapped in a collaborative Miro board by the type of user.
Team’s Miro Board
Interview report
Mapping the system, user needs, and pain points:
As this service was transitioning online at an accelerated pace due to COVID-19, It was important that we understand how the service worked offline and if we could find ways to provide citizens & service providers with a similar, or at least less disruptive, online experience. We asked ourselves:
How is a dispute solved offline? What are the citizen and the government official used to doing? We conducted further interviews and proceeded to map, at a granular level, the entire service. We overlapped the insights collected during the interviews with steps in the journey, helping us to identify the critical areas of the service and proposed features that could address the pain points identified. Also, this exercise allowed us to connect and make sure all features proposed had a purpose and were not designed in silo.
One of the biggest challenges for citizens was to be able to clearly understand the steps of the reconciliation process and the multiple name changes the dispute resolution document had throughout. Therefore we decided to map stages of the process vs names, but also how users describe the process stages, so we could make the language in the platform relatable to them.
Taradhi Granular View -
Key Insights
Language & Communication: Claimants were struggling to understand the step-by-step reconciliation process. Also, they felt the language of the platform was confusing, which prevented them from trusting and understanding the reconciliation process.
Process flow: The back end was managed by three stakeholders: the mediator, manager, and reviewer. The way the flow between these stakeholders was designed was slowing reconciliation processing times and affecting the overall claimant experience.
Accessibility: Users categorized by the team as Tech savvy were struggling to perform simple tasks according to the user shadowing done early by the Alwasaet team. This put a focus on accessibility and making Taradhi inclusive and accessible for all citizens.
Project Outputs
Current & Ideal Service Blueprint:
My job was to fundamentally rethink the service and deliver an ideal service blueprint that the rest of the team could follow when redesigning the platform. However, I felt I had to map the current service to be able to identify gaps. Taradhi was built quickly in the middle of the pandemic as a website to enable online dispute resolution. However, the mapping of the current service allowed everyone to have a holistic understanding of the service for future projects.
“The service was never mapped. This is something that not even the Ministry of Justice did when designing Taradhi. This definitely provides an end-to-end understanding of the platform not only for us but for the client.”
Gaps & opportunities presentation:
As the mapping process unveiled gaps and areas of improvement, I got assigned to prepare a presentation and a two-phase implementation plan based on a prioritization matrix of features. The goal was to help Alwasaet showcase meaningful progress in the short term, but also show what else could be done to elevate the service in the long term. The storytelling and the presentation moved the needle to elevate the project from the redesign of a website to the redesign of a holistic service.
-Illustration made by Alwasaet team.
Self Reflection & Learning Outcomes
Teamwork: The expectation to quickly absorb what had been done and set up a relationship with team members while making sure you are not overstepping makes being hired in the middle of the project very hard. I learned how to take my time & build on other people’s work, unlocking collaboration from the rest of the team, which in the end helped us to progress more rapidly.
Communication: When you join a team already working, and It is normal for you to be left out of updates, decision-making processes, or sudden approach changes. For me it was important to make the extra effort to follow up and inform myself so I could deliver, as well as setting a common language. This was especially helpful when discussing the step-by-step process and language of the platform. It saved us hours of discussing the same things but with different words.
Client goals: When clients hire, they hire with an outcome in mind, and usually that outcome is not their real need. How do you explain that? Being able to show with words, the value of our proposed solution or approach tends to be very difficult. However, by visually showing the features and aligning your narrative to the client's goals, you can demonstrate the added value of a feature or direction.
Cross-cultural collaboration: It is important to understand that the way people think is greatly shaped by their culture and customs. Therefore understanding the ways of working of my colleagues and why they think and act in certain ways was crucial to the success of this project. Thanks to this project I now have two new friends in Saudi Arabia and I found out how much they like Spanish!