Week Two (22nd-26th February): Hot Mugs and Zombie Gardens

Monday

Started the week by finalising a date for our internal consultation about the CABmoney website.  We've managed to get together a selection of advisers with a good range of experience using the site and their input will be valuable.  Amazingly, there was a time slot that everybody could make so we're just two weeks away from putting some of the methods learnt in our discovery phase in practice to "rediscover" against our new focus.

Tuesday

Zombie Garden by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND

Other than sounding like a Netflix TV series that I would definitely binge watch, Zombie Gadens are effectively a way to put ideas to one side until a better time.  Something we'll definitely be utilising!

The rest of Tuesday's session focussed on personas and persona spectrums.  Unfortunately, we didn't cover personas during our Discovery phase, so felt a little left behind.  Fortunately, the team at We Are Open (WAO) covered this by splitting the cohort into two groups to catch us up.  Being honest, it was the first time in the project that it felt like things were slipping as we were at a bit of a disadvantage due to different groups running the Discovery phase differently.  It's certainly salvageable though, with video guides offered by WAO and the open invite to Office Hours most likely being useful to us going forward.

We also started working on our Architecture of Participation, to lay out how people in our organisation can get involved and where they can find information about the project.  With the consultation group already set up, and this blog already available we have a good head start on this and we can continue promoting the work through our internal newsletters and meetings.

The work from Tuesday is all very much a work in progress, with the personas and architecture of participation working documents with a lot of refining to do.  They'll all be up on this blog when we're happier with them, but we are moving forward.  Back at the "office" (virtually) I asked some colleagues to put together some personas for our clients, and we will be looking at covering other user groups soon with people.  Not quite in the Zombie Garden, but at least on the borders!

Thursday

With a bit of a clash of sessions today, WAO swapped around the tech session and the office hours, so a few members of the cohort were able to attend "Designing Human Connection in Digital Services with Deepr".

A number of people didn't get the memo about bringing a hot drink, so didn't get involved with holding onto a hot mug and looking at everyone else in the meeting to create a sense of warmth!

There were a LOT of ideas in this 90 minutes, most of which I need time to digest and look through again.  While I can see the reasons behind a lot of them under the right circumstances, a number of charities were quick to dismiss "showing your room" or "lighting a candle" due to either a risk of confidentiality or burning the house down!

I did pick out a few ideas though that could be applied to the new CABmoney, particularly Lo-fi Hi and Mirroring which I think we can utilise to make a better human connection with people using the site.

That was soon followed by the WAO "Tech Session", much like last week's tech session there were a few things we already knew about as ways to acquire software and new technology but also a few others that sound like being well worth a look through.  

• AlternativeTo
• Open Design Kit
• Open Practice Library

Lots more to go through, so for now, they're in the Zombie Garden (just beside the tomato plants) but definitely useful resources.

Friday

Onto Friday, and it's blog writing (which if you're reading this was a success), another tweak of our personas (now with added wonky drawings) and an outline plan for the staff consultation session which is now just over a week away - how time flies!

Week One (15th-19th February): Definition

A whirlwind week of workshops, meetings, breakout rooms, icebreakers and notes.  Lots and lots of notes.

I was only briefly involved in our Discovery phase but now found myself fully immersed in the Definition phase after a change of tact (see our previous blog posts) and a better focus (hopefully!) on exactly what we were looking to achieve from this project.

Tuesday

The first port of call was a workshop on "Working in the Open" (which sounds like it would be much too cold to do in a frost-tinged February) but covered ways of sharing our work throughout this project.  One form of sharing our workings and process was to post to a blog, so if you're reading this now it's a proven method!

Tuesday afternoon moved to the first session with We Are Open for the Kickoff workshop and a chance to meet the other organisations in our cohort.  More icebreakers and introductions, a short break and then into getting something down on paper (or on screen), Stakeholder Mapping.

Stakeholder Maps by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND

Plotting various stakeholders along two axes (one for "interested" they are in a project, and one for how "involved" they are) helps show how these various groups should be dealt with through the project's life.

Adding a few extra stakeholders that fit into our project I was able to fairly quickly create a map thanks to the techniques used in the session.  The first bit of "homework" done!

Wednesday

No sessions today, but I realised we needed to think more about our project, especially with us changing focus relatively late on.  Our Discovery phase was still important, but with moving away from looking at video advice and onto redeveloping our CABmoney website, I felt we needed to re-Discover.

Fortunately, we had a staff meeting planned for the afternoon, so I was able to secure a spot to talk to people about the project.  Still formulating what it is we need, I explained why we were doing this and that I'd like to get a group together to do a consultation on what people want CABmoney to actually be.  One positive response from a colleague before the end of the day, made it seem all worthwhile!

Thursday

The afternoon session covered "Audience Analysis".  Well presented, but having worked with our websites for some years I was already familiar with Google Analytics and I just discovered Google Data Studio a month ago.  We don't have a "Data Model" though... hmm, one more for the list!

Session over and if nothing else, I learnt how difficult it is to come up with a three word "how are you feeling" at short notice!

I spent the remainder of the afternoon starting this blog and going back through our client consultation data now that we had a few extra month's worth to pore over.  A few extra thoughts on how and where we can gather data for CABmoney, but that can wait until Friday.

Friday

Using our Google Analytics stats plus information from the CABmoney database, I was able to put together some more data and post up in the blog about what CABmoney is, and the first steps into looking at what we need to do with it.

To get further data, I added a Google Form survey to CABmoney and posted about it on our social media channels. Hopefully, we get enough engagement to discover some more about user experience with the website that will help us get a clearer course of action.

Week one is over, and in some ways it feels like starting over from scratch but at least we have a plan!

What is CABmoney?

In our first blog post, we talked about how our initial thoughts had changed from finding different ways to offer advice and had we were now looking at how we can best revitalise our CABmoney website.

But what is CABmoney?

CABmoney is a debt advice information guide and resource developed and maintained by Citizens Advice North East Derbyshire.

The content was developed by utilising the many years of experience and knowledge of our debt team, other bureau advisers and external advice specialists.  The coding of the website was all written in-house by the bureau I.T co-ordinator.

CABmoney incorporates a unique online assisted self-help Debt Management Plan (DMP) that automatically generates letters / financial statements, does calculations and is all saved securely online. You can access and update your personal Debt Management Plan whenever you want and you are in control.

Based on an established, award winning system

Citizens Advice North East Derbyshire launched the "mymoney" debt resource in January 2012 and were awarded the IMA Money Advice Performance Award for Best New Initiative shortly afterwards.  The site has evolved since (including input from Citizens Advice Specialist Support), and "mymoney" has become "CABmoney" as we have made it available to all local offices in England and Wales.

As more local offices use CABmoney, it will continue improving through their feedback and we always look forward to hearing about innovative uses of the system. It has already been used to secure funding to launch new projects, giving more people free access across their community.

Why might it need changing?

CABmoney's current form was written in 2014, which in website terms is extremely old!  Technology has moved on so much in that time that there are better ways of doing things.  Back then, designing for mobile devices was less important and so CABmoney today can seem "fiddly" on a smaller screen.

We designed CABmoney with both our clients and our advisers in mind, what we don't know is whether this resulted in a website with "too much information", or was too "technical".  Do we need more information, or less?  Can it be streamlined and made easier for those who used it independently without ever contacting us directly for advice?

These are the questions that we will try to answer through this current stage.

CABmoney by the numbers

We are able to ascertain a lot of information about the current usage of CABmoney, both from Google Analytics and its own "back end" database.

Even though we are a regional Citizens Advice office (covering the Local Authorities of North East Derbyshire and Bolsover) CABmoney has been used all over the country. We can see this on Google Analytics (though this isn't an exact science due to how the location of a user is collected).

Also in Google Analytics, we can see that device usage has changed over the last seven years.  As a percentage, desktop computer usage is declining and mobile phone usage is increasing.  Surprisingly, tablet use is also in decline, meaning that the current trend is for more people to be using their mobile phones than more traditional larger screens.

In the CABmoney database, we can see more details on how people use the Debt Management Plan (DMP) area of the website.  This is the only part that somebody would need to set up a (free) account to use as it stores budgeting and debt details in order to generate budget plans and letters to help deal with their debts.

As of February 2021, just under 10,000 people have signed into CABmoney.  As these will only be the people signing up to use the DMP it is only a fraction of total users, but it is a good indication of engagement.

The rate of users signing up to use the DMP, has increased over time with a noticeable increase across 2020 (though the largest spike was in November 2019).  This shows that there is more demand than ever for people to manage their debts with an online system such as CABmoney.

Do new signed in users actually equate to more people completing the Debt Management Plan?

In order to allow people to pick up where they left off, the system tracks how far through the DMP they have progressed.  In analysing this, we can see that a high percentage of people (78%) sign up for an account but then go no further.

This is an important area to look at, as we cannot say why people are signing up for an account but then seemingly not using it.

Whether it is because they are signing up when they don't need to, or once they sign up they are having difficulties in using the system we will need to make the user journey as straightforward as possible. 

Our following research and consultations will focus on these areas as we aim to improve CABmoney, not just technically in the coding, but more importantly the user interfaces and clarity of information for users.

Update (24/02/2021): We have removed a number of obvious "bot" accounts from these graphs, though there may be many more.  This would at least partially explain the number of people signing up for an account but not using the resources.

A Statistical Interlude

 In our initial Discovery phase, we added some questions to our case recording system (Casebook) so that we could gather data on our client's internet usage.  As the discovery stage was quite a short process, we were only able to get a handful of results which could have meant that any outliers would have a bigger skew on our data.

With that in mind, we have continued to ask these questions to clients ringing our telephone adviceline over a period of months (October 2020 - February 2021), and now have a dataset of 568 entries from different clients.

The questions we asked were:

Do you have regular use of the internet?

and 

If so, what do you use it for?

In addition to these extra questions, we always record client profile information when advising somebody for our own records and to satisfy our funders.  As the internet questions were recorded alongside the client profiles, we are able to cross reference this data to gain a better understanding of how internet usage differs across our client base.

As we don't always record every category in a client profile (as some people may have declined to answer), the totals for each category are different.  As these results are displayed as percentages, we have also removed or combined any answers with very small numbers so as not to wrongly represent any outliers.

Do you have regular use of the internet?

Without any breakdown of client profile, we can see that regular usage of the internet seems quite high (74%) amongst our clients, but is considerably lower than the Internet User Penetration Rate in the UK (2020) of 95.53%.  This may partly be explained by our use of the words "regular usage" in our question which may eliminate some people who have internet access but use it infrequently.

Broken down by age range, we can see a clear decline in regular internet usage as people get older.

Clients with a disability or long-term limiting illness are considerably less likely to be regular internet users.

Regular internet usage is considerably lower for clients with no children, than those with children (particularly those with dependant children).

Interestingly, regular internet usage was higher at both ends of the scale for income per calendar month, with the dip in usage for people with an income of £600-£799 pcm.

Finally, we looked to see if regular internet usage changed based on client's location.  The darker areas show where a higher percentage of clients regularly used the internet.

If so, what do you use it for?

Our second question was left open-ended, so attracted a range of replies. The word cloud below showsthe wider range of responses (the bigger words were used more to describe internet usage).

To make this data more manageable, we have grouped it together into various areas of internet usage.  The graph below shows each area, and the number of clients who identified it as something they use the internet for.

Although general, there are some areas clearly ahead of the others, Communication, Shopping, Social Media and Information.  Although communication included emails and webchat, nobody specifically mentioned video calls, further showing that it may not be as popular channel as we were originally expecting.

Breaking these areas down by the client's age, we can see that those four are still the most used regardless of age range.  What can be seen clearly though, is that older age ranges have a smaller breadth of internet usage.

The table below shows the areas of usage, broken down by age range.  The numbers are the percentage of usage within each age range.  The heatmap shows a higher percentage of usage in green, and a lower percentage of usage in red. This clearly shows how different age groups interact with the internet.

How It Started... How It’s Going

We started this project in 2020, a year of lockdowns, social distancing, change and toilet roll shortages, but for us a year of "discovery".

As lockdowns closed offices, cutting off our main points of contact, we had moved our focus to what we could still offer, namely telephone advice.  We were able to increase the coverage and operational hours of our adviceline to meet a shifting demand but we wanted to know if we could do more.

We revived a webchat feature to our website, increased our social media output, installed a freephone telephone outside our office and even erected a gazebo in Tesco's car park for the hardy souls still venturing outdoors.

The world seemed to have adapted to video calling in such a short time, with internal video calls replacing poking your head through the office door to chat to a colleague (albeit with the reduced chance of being able to swipe a biscuit from their desk).  Judging by the media, everybody seemed to be constantly in Zoom meetings, whether for work, connecting with family, taking part in an exercise class or a TV broadcast. But were they really, and was this something we could utilise for advice?

Our discovery phase started with a problem, or more specifically, a "problem statement", an issue we wanted to address.

Maximising access to and the services we offer for potential and current clients in order to improve more people's lives

We spoke directly to the people that matter most to us, our clients. Our consultation consisted of calling a small number of clients and asking them about using technology to expand our reach.

• Most of the clients (7/9) had regular access to the internet and used a range of devices for information finding, communicating with family, email, social media, online banking etc.  
• The majority of clients who used devices other than a landline said that their preference was to use a smartphone for internet access.
• Clients described a good service as one that was ‘responsive’, ‘individualised’ and where they were treated with ‘empathy and care’. 
• It was important for people that Citizens Advice was able to give them correct and up to date information and advice that they could be confident of plus a way forward with their issue.  Having a caring, patient and kind adviser was critical to the client’s experience.

One of the main points that came from this consultation was that our clients mainly used the internet for more general purposes (browsing, searching for information, form filling, social media) and most would not have been happy to get advice over video.

We also added a number of questions to our Case Recording system (Casebook) to help us capture more information about our client's internet usage.  At this stage of the discovery phase, we only had a handful of results to analyse.  Since then, we have continued to ask this question over a period of months and will share these enhanced findings in a later blog post.

We then spoke to the group of people who know our clients best, our advisers.  This survey also highlighted potential issues with video advice.

A lot of clients would struggle with the technology. Privacy for some clients may be an issue. Also if they are not used to video calling they may feel uncomfortable with it.

I feel that the boundary between work and home is already blurred. My feeling is that having a face to face consultation with a client in my home would feel intrusive to me. I am not clear what benefit the video call would bring as accessing paperwork and supporting documents would still not be possible.

I hate being seen on video calls. 

It became clear to us that although there would be a few people interested in using a video advice line, the costs and technological hurdles wouldn't be worth investigating when it could cause issues for people.  We take privacy and security very seriously and wouldn't want our advisers feeling uncomfortable video calling from their own homes or for anybody to feel uneasy handling technology that wasn't adding much to what we can achieve in a phone call.

Whilst we didn't discover what we expected to, it was still an important discovery.  We stopped heading down a route that may not have been a benefit to clients, and may have been a detriment to our advisers.  We had moved on from "we don't know what we don't know" and onto "we know what we don't need".

Before moving into the second phase of this project (Definition), we shifted our focus onto an online tool we already had.  This was already a "minimum viable product" in that we already had it, and it worked.  But it was something that we wanted to update, expand upon and improve.  Learning from the lessons of the Discovery phase, we knew we needed to talk to people first and so we entered a new consultation phase on our money advice and budgeting online tool, CABmoney.