For what seemed an endless five minutes, we stared at the screen, trying to read the faces of the Boston city employees on the other end of the video call. Had they understood our detailed instructions? Were they on board with our brainstorming? Did they think we were crazy?
For the past two months, our team of five graduate students has been working with the City of Boston’s Inspectional Services Department (ISD) to improve the experience of restaurant owners opening a new establishment in Boston. The project, part of a Harvard Kennedy School class on innovation in government, has relied heavily on user research; we’ve spent two months meeting face-to-face with restaurant owners and City staff to understand their experiences with the current process. The next milestone for us was to get all our stakeholders in a room together to brainstorm ideas for improving the process, but then our project ran up against an unexpected barrier: the COVID-19 pandemic.
On March 10th, Harvard announced that the campus would be closing due to risks posed by the coronavirus, and our own group’s work sessions moved online. On March 14th, Governor Baker banned food service in Massachusetts restaurants, causing many to close their doors. And in the middle of March, most ISD employees were instructed to start working from home.
Without the ability to meet in person, we set about adapting our project. We had planned to generate ideas by having restaurant owners and City employees write proposed process improvements on sticky notes and thematically arrange the ideas on a whiteboard, a time-tested brainstorming technique that is interactive, tactile, and fun.
Now, we needed to figure out how to moderate a session that inspired creativity, but this time over Zoom and with fewer participants.
We started our meeting with the ISD team over video chat, with a slide deck to structure the process and a virtual whiteboard to jot ideas. We were nervous and uncertain of how effective our new remote process would be. As they explained their new and increased workload, we wondered if our project was even relevant anymore. Was the City still interested in our insights from talking with restaurant owners about the mundane process of securing restaurant permits?
As we shared what restaurant owners had told us about their challenges with the current permitting process—a lack of clarity over requirements and timelines for permitting, the need to jump from city department to city department in different physical locations, and the inability to communicate their frustrations— we were reminded how hard it is to read people’s reactions over video conference. Were our clients bored? Offended? Confused? We explained the remote brainstorming exercise we had designed–“Grab a sheet of paper and come up with as many possible solutions to the restaurant owners’ issues as you can in the next five minutes”–and waited to see what would happen.
After five minutes, everyone began to share their ideas out loud and two of our team members wrote them down on “sticky notes” on a virtual white board. Then, we quickly grouped the sticky notes into similar clusters. We were pleasantly surprised to discover significant overlap, agreement, and excitement over potential solutions—such as creating a starting guide that covers the whole process, or digitizing the uploading of documents. As we began to discuss each potential solution, the energy in the hangout room went up. We were seeing virtual eye to virtual eye and getting excited about what we could do.
Sticky notes have become the iconic medium of technologist design sessions because they are big enough to write one, and only one, idea, and their weak adhesive backing allows them to be placed on a wall and easily rearranged. Our experience wasn’t quite the immersively tactile experience we had initially hoped for, but the end result was remarkably similar.
The outputs of two “ideation sessions.” On the left, a window covered in sticky notes after an in-person brainstorming session our team conducted before the outbreak of COVID-19. On the right, a virtual board with virtual notes, conducted remotely with City of Boston employees over Google Hangout.
Digital sticky notes on a virtual whiteboard, collaboratively arranged to identify high value, low investment solutions for prioritization.
We settled on three areas to prioritize for prototyping, that would provide the most value for restaurant owners while also being realistic to implement:
A starter guide for new restaurant owners beginning the permitting process. There was widespread agreement by Harvard students and City officials alike that the most effective way to get restaurant owners the information they need would be to consolidate information currently siloed among different City departments and provide an easy-to-understand overview of the entire permitting process from the user’s perspective.
A feedback mechanism so the City can continually adapt to user needs. ISD doesn’t currently have any reliable method of hearing from their clients. To ensure ISD continues to hear this valuable feedback and can continue to adapt to meet the needs of restaurant owners, we decided to prioritize designing a mechanism for users to provide direct feedback to ISD.
A post-COVID reopening and communications strategy that incorporates the two previous ideas. The challenge our project seeks to solve—improving the experience of restaurant owners opening a restaurant in Boston—was defined before covid-19.. However, many of the challenges that were identified in the normal permitting process, such as the limited communication between restaurant owners and City officials, are equally or more relevant during the current pandemic. We therefore decided to develop a user guide and a feedback mechanism specifically for the eventual process restaurants will need to go through after the crisis has subsided. This will help the City as it seeks to support local businesses at this trying time.
Overall, our initial virtual co-creation session was a success. We’ve figured out how to digitally collaborate with stakeholders in a way that feels organic and interactive and, while it’s not quite the same as being together in the same room, it gives us an acceptable path forward..
The next step will be for us to start prototyping these three ideas and testing them with restaurant owners. Buoyed by the success of this first virtual session, we are already starting to think of creative ways to conduct these user testing sessions remotely. With just a few weeks left in the semester, we will rapidly try to learn what works and what doesn’t with our proposed solutions. We are looking forward to this final sprint with renewed morale.
- Ian Cutler, Gavin Jiao, Amy Villasenor, Nicolas Diaz, Emily Chi