MAHKU - service platform concept
Design lead in the digital service design project for the Ministry of the Interior
The challenge presented by the Ministry of the Interior was ‘enhancing safety and security together’ mostly through citizen reporting of crime. Our team realized that there were people that were not being considered users or even citizen: The people who were ending up committing crimes. As we thought that the client would benefit from very different approaches, we flipped the brief around and asked how do people turn to a bad path in their life. We took the to be criminals to our users and took a more systemic perspective.
We interviewed an ex-con and a social workers to understand a typical path into crime. Our analysis of the financial side of the current situation exposed that the costs to the society of a career criminal, person who goes in and out of jail, can exceed 1 million euros. We aimed to help these people to get a hold of their lives and to stay away from prison, that way also generating significant savings to the society.
Our research showed that there are already plenty of public, private and voluntary organizations doing valuable preventive work in different fields, e.g. substance abuse, coaching, aggression issues and mental health, but all the organizations concentrate solely on their distinct field and for a person seeking help the right place may be hard to find, or there might be too many doors. Users get easily frustrated, when they have to deal with multiple services, whose logic, customer service and open hours might be all different and thus difficult to deal with. We created the persona Jari, based on a few real life examples, and used Jari’s story in communicating the value of the platform to him and to the society.
MAHKU brings all the public, voluntary and private services on the same online platform that directs the users to the right organizations for them by asking them questions about their situation. The service includes a live chat for easy, low barrier, first contact with the helpers, a calendar view in which users can book meetings or enroll on peer discussions and inspiring stories of people who have managed to get away from the criminal life.
For users MAHKU provides an easy access online solution where they can find support and guidance in their problems, whereas for the society Mahku generates monetary savings in the form of reduction of crimes committed and decrease in imprisonment costs. Even by not taking into account the costs of the justice system, a year in prison costs nearly 80.000 euros, which would already be more than the estimated operating costs of MAHKU. We made a service blueprint of MAHKU to fully understand also the technical requirements and required off-stage operations of the platform, that combines many services.
“Your approach is different, even unique, compared to others, in good way. Your delivery is engaging and you capture the audience and maintain attention. Great job!”
My responsibilities in the project included all visuals: presentations, report, service mock-ups and also pitching in the competition. This project had a very strong focus on digital service solutions and though we could not win since our solution was not literally addressing the brief, the clients were very happy with our work. The Police board and Ministry of the Interior have considered many of our findings in their work, as they have started creating a similar service recently. Find our report here.