A proof of concept has been created to incorporate design techniques in many elements of a PoD's life cycle, planning for future demands and overcoming existing hurdles. The proposed strategy prioritizes the needs of persons with disabilities and helps them acquire the resources and services they need. It also helps families gain confidence in caring for a disabled kid. This helps POD engage, lead, create, and sustain life.
Innovation Summary
Innovation Overview
The POD experience is an often-overlooked component. As the Digital Government Authority in Saudi Arabia, we have an excellent opportunity to focus on innovative choices in this sector as part of the digital transformation for the public's benefit. The purpose is to develop future-ready digital experiences for persons with disabilities, showcase KSA as a leader, and provide a centralized experience to support people with disabilities across their varied needs.
As a proponent of e-participation in the Kingdom, we aim to produce ideas, solutions, and systems that fit the people who depend on us for a sustainable, inclusive, and prosperous environment. To construct a Proof of Concept for determined people, we had to identify the project's scope. We knew about current aid and options for determined people, but we wanted to evaluate our assumptions and user perception to develop the Proof of Concept's problem statement. The problem statement created a core notion driving the project's creativity via research and design.
By 2025-2027, we will build proactive, inclusive, intuitive experiences for persons with impairments (focused on visual and mobility problems) and link key entities to enhance their quality of life and allow them to live independently. Primary aims are:
- Aligning with Goal 2030's vision of an ambitious country, flourishing economy, and lively society - The following PoD experience matches with a vision realization aim of integrating persons with disabilities into the workforce, promoting tenacity and persistence, and providing access to healthcare and education.
- Few governments in the region engage in developing PoD, enabling KSA to pioneer inclusive government initiatives and empower under-represented groups.
- Give people with disabilities centralized access to information, proactive services, and a supportive community. Supporting milestones.
The answer was to enable the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's digital transition and provide the People of Determination a better, happier, more appealing lifestyle. We wanted to understand the current status of People of Determination to learn about the lives of people with disabilities and their needs and experiences at a specific time. Desk research, interviews, social media listening, heuristic analysis of present services and products, and international benchmarking were used.
Diverse research programs strive to raise awareness of the myriad challenges, pain spots, and legislation that restrict the daily experience of people with disabilities. These data allowed us to design three key personas and How Might We Questions to assist generate solutions for the personas and individuals of determination.
The solutions were set out in a service blueprint, which was then translated into screen flows to explain the information architecture before moving on to the solution's real prototype phase and usability testing with actual users. Based on our segmentations and personalities, we produced two prototypes: one for the handicapped person and one for his/her guardian.
The technique recognized the multiple life periods of a person with disability and emphasized crucial touchpoints. These range from having their handicap recognized at birth (or later in life) through retirement and developing an active community that enables them get peer support. At each touchpoint, the user is informed of available services, products, and support systems and their important life information is digitally preserved, including their digital ID, handicap card, and more.
Innovation Description
What Makes Your Project Innovative?
- The Proof of Notion focuses on benchmarking and using future trends to examine unknowable solutions.
- We create a digital profile to make customized services available. We discover proactive government loan and aid options based on qualifying conditions.
- It employs digital immersion, new technology, and other solutions to enhance the lives of industrious Saudis as the kingdom moves to a digital transformation phase. All while addressing accessibility considerations like sign language, voice-overs, and speech-to-text recognition.
What is the current status of your innovation?
The project has been passed over to the development team with the relevant entities and is now in the implementation roadmap stage.
Innovation Development
Collaborations & Partnerships
An interdisciplinary team comprised of researchers, developers, service and experience designers, disability experts, and sociologists, with collaborative government work. We included citizens at many phases of the design process, from research to concept validation to usability testing. Because this initiative was created for the benefit of real users, the first sort of partnership was formed.
Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries
The real beneficiaries, who are separated into two categories: persons with disabilities and guardians of those with impairments, were among the stakeholders. Other stakeholders included the various bodies involved and NGOs that attended to offer meaningful information on how they are presently working to enhance the living situations of individuals with disabilities. People with Disabilities Authority (APD) :Gain a better understanding of current efforts to empower people with disabilities.
Innovation Reflections
Results, Outcomes & Impacts
Specific success indicators have been implemented for the project's output to measure and quantify the overall project's success truly. We specified these KPIs to be monitored after project completion.
- High satisfaction/relevance rating for recommendations provided.
- Increased ratio of solved complaints through bot, community and counselors vs. in-person.
- Reduced time/effort/level of difficulty of the system.
- Increased percentage of used services that matched with the PoD disability.
- Increased percentage of trained guardians and parents.
- Increased ratio of proactive vs. reactive services.
- Increased percentage of PoD-dedicated schools coverage within Saudi.
- Increased number of schools added to the system.
- Increased percentage of highly skilled and trained PoD.
- Increased ratio of successful vs. unsuccessful job interviews.
- Increased percentage of PoD employment rates.
- Increased number of PoD involved in developing a regulation/law.
Challenges and Failures
- Given the project's complexity and the many categories of PoDs (visual, physical disability, etc.), creating a prototype that considers design for all circumstances and handles varied scenarios was difficult throughout the design process.
- Changing the way the services are currently being delivered. Digital services are delivered in scatter way losing the chance to provide the intended valuable benefit
Conditions for Success
It was good to know that the entity was more than willing to be a part of the digital transformation process and more interested in providing a solution for people with disabilities, a community that had been missed out for quite some time. Getting the buy-in is usually the hard part from higher management, but this project had a huge potential impact on not only the lives of people with disabilities but also for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and so it was easier to get a buy-in from relevant entities to get their support, expertise and guidance.
Replication
This Proof of Concept led to the discovery of further services and systems that can be enhanced, as well as new support systems that can be built, to benefit Saudi nationals and residents, as well as investors, immigrants, refugees, and others. This project encompassed the whole life cycle of a challenged person and was thorough; thus, it is utilized as a template and case study for choosing and creating additional Proof of Concepts.
- We used the lessons gained from this PoC to other experiences with the observed patterns that might be of value to other entities such as Service Proactiveness and other experience components such as Instant Consultancy and Eligibility Engines.
- The participation of entities and stakeholders in service delivery, which resulted in the development of trust.
Lessons Learned
Once we realized they hadn't been listened to in a while, people with disabilities were ready to contribute. There are services and features for persons with disabilities, but they're not concentrated on them. We concluded that in order to design for this project, we required feedback from actual people with impairments.
In our experience, including area professionals from the start makes the project more well-founded. To be efficient, parties and organizations must join in from the outset to prevent project delays and maintain a steady pace.
Status:
- Identifying or Discovering Problems or Opportunities - learning where and how an innovative response is needed
- Generating Ideas or Designing Solutions - finding and filtering ideas to respond to the problem or opportunity
- Developing Proposals - turning ideas into business cases that can be assessed and acted on
- Evaluation - understanding whether the innovative initiative has delivered what was needed
- Diffusing Lessons - using what was learnt to inform other projects and understanding how the innovation can be applied in other ways
Innovation provided by:
Date Published:
24 January 2023