The Online Care Directory was one of SILK’s pilot projects. Between July 2007 and February 2008 a team at KCC ran a project to develop the existing Council’s online care services directory. This directory was launched in April 2006, and was designed to provide information to the public about social care services for adults in Kent. It also aimed to assist care managers to support people's decisions about care, as well as the contracting process with care providers.
Using a version of Diamond 2 (Service Re-design) of the SILK Methodology, the SILK team went through a process of gathering insights, developing concepts, prototyping and refining their ideas, and planning for delivery. With the support and guidance of service design company Live|Work, the team had conversations with over 40 people, identified over 100 needs and generated a host of ideas. During this time user testing of the online care directory was carried out with existing and potential users of the directory; including day care and residential care providers, nursing home staff and residents, KCC staff and members of the voluntary and community sector. We also worked alongside Kennington Women’s Institute to carry out web based user testing with them to see how they felt about accessing information online.
Staff responsible for the website found that working in this way and observing how users accessed information online gave them a new perspective on potential users needs. “Web observation gave me more food for though and insight than a month of meetings”.
Insights were gathered and presented back to the core team. The core team then identified a list of needs and developed over 50 ideas to ensure that these needs could be met. The ideas were voted on and eight ideas were selected to go through to testing. The ideas were taken back to the users of the care directory who gave feedback before the ideas were developed further and presented to the then Kent Adult Social Services (KASS) Senior Management Team. A report was written up which gave a summary of the whole process to inform future work and decisions on how the ideas could be taken forward.
KASS went on to invest in some of the recommendations that were highlighted in the report and some of the approaches used in this project were used by the web team in their day-to-day working practices. Observation was used in other service re-design projects and service user films were used in recruitment and training within KASS.
Where this project sits within the SILK framework
The Online Care Directory project sits within Diamond 2 of the SILK Methodology
