ProjectsSEND: the new government service for legal notices
Designing and testing the concept platform of SEND - the brand new service that allows citizens and Public Administrations to digitally receive and manage documents with legal value.
How to conceive a service model to digitize the sending and receiving of acts with legal value, that takes into consideration citizens’ needs and diverse levels of adoption of digital tools?
We explored different user scenarios and used them to shape a detailed blueprint of the new communication system, in a collaborative process that involved all the main public sectors’ institutions. The blueprint became the starting point to then build the first low-fi prototype of the future platform, showing the experience for citizens, public administrations, system administrators and third parties.
A detailed description of functional and experience requirements to develop and deploy the new platform, with specifications related to supporting back-end processes as well as front-end features.
The process of delivering legal documents to citizens represents both a huge cost for the State (for printing and mailing, potentially multiple times), and a painful experience for citizens (who may not be able to access their physical mailbox all the time).
In order to encourage the adoption of a digital-based delivering system of documents with legal value, the government introduced the idea of a new platform able to execute a safe and certified digital delivery from Public Administrations to citizens, initially called Piattaforma Notifiche (ref. Decreto Semplificazione, 2020). In this context, together with a broader team involving external stakeholders, engineers, legal experts and designers, we conducted a detailed functional analysis of the future platform, defining roles, actors and processes needed to execute the new service - and so contribute to consolidate the related policy. The blueprint map has been an essential tool in that phase of work: it helped explore different scenarios, iterate and co-design with various stakeholders, and align decision-makers on the proposed solution and workflow.
Once the process was clearer, we translated all the requirements described in the functional analysis into a low-fidelity interactive prototype, able to show the key functionalities of the future platform and encourage further reflections on the experience itself. The prototype simulated the experience of sending a document with legal value and checking costs, timings and status of delivery (for Public Administration users), and the experience of receiving a document in the personal inbox, checking the details and performing a related payment (for citizens). Both experiences were completed by the mock-up of onboarding, set-up and management aspects - such as registering in the system, modifying addresses or other preferences, defining deputy roles.
The role of the prototypes was to help refining the overall service model and functional analysis, as well as to enable user testing sessions that helped better understanding the perspective of individual citizens and legal entities while interacting with the platform.
Thanks to the user testing, we were able to better understand users’ expectations, and transfer the insights to the broader team of decision-makers. The input gathered during the test informed both strategic directions (e.g. how to conceive deputy roles, how to communicate the service to the citizens, etc.) and specific refinements aimed at improving the whole user experience (e.g. how to convey the delivery timeline, how to label the specific status of the act communicated, etc.). Overall, a great interest emerged from citizens of all age ranges and backgrounds towards this kind of platform, to be finally able to receive prompt communications from the Public Administration - without being forced to go to the Post Office to retrieve important acts after the failure of a home delivery.
