Field Notes from Participatory Research
We invited case managers, benefits applicants, and policy staff to co-design tools they all had to use. The workshops exposed misaligned incentives faster than any interview study.
Workshop structure
- Participants: 8-10 per session; mixed roles; stipends for lived-experience participants.
- Artifacts: journey maps, paper prototyping, and “day in the life” diaries.
- Goal: identify trust gaps and co-own fixes that fit within policy constraints.
Moments that changed the brief
- Proof burden surfaced visually. Applicants drew stacks of documents; staff admitted they often needed only two items. The team rewrote upload flows with defaults of “recommended” vs “optional.”
- “Silent” failure modes. We learned that case notes often lagged 48 hours. Applicants assumed they were ignored. A simple “last updated by” stamp and receipt numbers reduced panicked calls.
- Shared dashboards, different needs. Staff wanted workload triage; residents wanted clarity on status. The solution: a single queue UI with dual views — resident-facing plain language paired with staff-facing flags.
Principles that held up
- Work in the same room: co-locate the people who feel the pain and the people who can fix it.
- Prototype in policy: annotate flows with the regulation they depend on to keep ideas feasible.
- Make ownership explicit: every pain point gets a named steward and a timeline.
Facilitation tips
- Open with consent and data-use terms; close with a plan to destroy or anonymize artifacts.
- Use parallel sketching to avoid dominant voices; timebox shares to keep momentum.
- Map “hope vs fear”: what participants hope will change, and what they fear might break.
Participatory research is slower than a survey, but it creates durable alignment. When people co-own the prototype, they also co-own the rollout — and trust rises accordingly.