Jonathan K. Loeb
Research/Design/Prototyping
Serebral, Inc.
A startup building a unified referral system for social service organizations, their employees, and their clients. We built our designs from insights pulled from contextual research we conducted with our clients. Designs were then tested with our clients and further iterated upon.
In collaboration with Tess Bailie, Matthew Kessinger, Walt Grata, Tom Kierzkowski, and Nicholas Roth
Client
Social Service Organizations and the people they serve
My Roles
User Research Manager
UX Designer
Time Frame
9 Months:
February - October 2015
Approaching Human Service Design
The Problem
Serebral was an attempt to build a unified platform for social services. Many services, such as homeless shelters, employment centers, or free clinics rely on paper referrals for their clients' needs. Serebral would have been an integrated platform and database allowing social service organizations to fluidly interact with each other. It would also empower the individuals dependent on social services to help manage their own care.
Contextual Inquiry
My involvement with Serebral began with user research. A number of Contextual Inquiry sessions were conducted with social service workers in their day-to-day work with special attention paid to the pain points related to the referral process. This yielded a tremendous amount of insights.
Affinity Diagraming
All of the data from the Contextual Inquiries were collected and collated before the whole team built them out into an Affinity Diagram. From the insights gathered through Affinity Diagraming, design ideas were generated and the basic contours of the initial Serebral prototype began to take shape.
Prototyping
After paper prototypes were worked out, functional prototypes were built with a number of prototyping tools. The side of Serebral that could be accessed by social service workers was built out using InVision. The client facing side, intended for use on phones, was built out on POP (Prototyping on Paper), an application that replicates paper prototypes on a phone. (It's a bit like stop-motion animation.)
Iteration
We took these prototypes out into the field and tested with the appropriate users, including many of the same people we interviewed during our preliminary research stage. Feedback was mostly positive, in fact quite enthusiastic, but there were still a lot of issues to be refined and worked out. With each iteration, more user tests were conducted to inform the process and so forth.
Shifting Gears
A New Direction
Further along in development, more and more of Serebral's funding came from veteran's charities and organizations. To this end, user interviews and tests were conducted at VFW posts. While verifying much of what we had already accomplished, the users interviewed also suggested an additional design idea to pursue.
Kiosk Development
Ideas and early designs for a kiosk were pursued at the suggestion of the veterans we interviewed. The kiosk was to be available for use in veteran organizations. Users could make appointments and manage their accounts while they visited the VFW, for example. The kiosk could also be exhibited at veterans affairs conferences as well as health trade shows.
Closing Serebral
Unfortunately, Serebral was never able to move forward beyond first stage prototyping for the kiosk. The code in development for the social service application also had to be abandoned, as it became increasingly difficult to secure the necessary funding to move forward. Securing the capital as well as any buy-in for a social service application is very difficult. While many great ideas were generated, a service dependent in its revenue model on NGO and government subscriptions is a difficult to sell to investors without having some guaranteed early buy-in from potential customers.