You Said, We Did

Working as a group, collaborate with Belfast City Council to design or improve a service that supports their commitment to creating a sustainable and climate-resilient city, as outlined in the "Our Planet" section of the Belfast Agenda.

How Might We create an opportunity for existing sustainability solutions to be seen, and for new ideas to be heard?

This was a group project in which I completed the following:

• Assisted in desk-based research

• First-hand research - public surveys, interviews with the council/business experts, exploring other European cities (Bremen, Rotterdam and Amsterdam)

• Persona creation

• User journey mapping

• Empathy mapping

• Group ideation

• Wireframes

• Assisting with the Figma prototyping

• Mock-ups and imagery

• The presentation slides

• The pitch to Belfast City Council

1. Discover - After extensive desk-based and firsthand research, we found that information on the council’s sustainability plans and events was very difficult to find. The council would make decisions without fully consulting all members of the public, and the public struggled to have their voices heard and valued.

2. Define - Based on the research, We summarised our research into one main problem statement to help us define what we needed to solve:

   Belfast residents are often unaware of and disconnected from local green initiatives and council actions, resulting in low participation and mistrust in sustainability efforts.

   We created a persona, a user journey map, empathy map, and explored stakeholders. The key stakeholders were the residents of Belfast and the City Council.

3. Develop - We completed brainstorming sessions, mind-mapping, six thinking hats and crazy eights. We wanted our service to make sustainability efforts visible and local, so people can see what is happening in Belfast and feel invited to take part.

4. Deliver - We created mock-ups for how this service could look throughout different areas in Belfast. We also made a social media mock-up and a website prototype to show how it could be updated to be more user-friendly. We then presented our idea to the City Council.

For a more in-depth look at the process, please take a nosy at my Notion.

During our research, we discovered ‘Your Say’, an already established council platform. Users can explore events, initiatives, and plans that the council is endorsing. Users can provide feedback through surveys and share ideas in the "Ideas Bank." It is a platform that has great potential and, in theory, should address many of the pain points we identified through our primary research. But people are not aware of the service, and the council underutilises it. Instead of creating an entirely new service that would get lost among the numerous others, we decided to enhance this existing idea.

The solution was to reimagine the existing platform, ‘Your Say’, to grow engagement with Belfast residents and improve relations between the council and communities. This will be achieved through a feedback loop of ‘You Said, We Did’, focusing not only on gathering feedback but also on promoting ongoing projects, local sustainability events, and volunteering sessions. Then, we can reach marginalised voices through physical feedback elements, such as partnering with Belfast Stories, cafés, and institutions.

We presented our solution to members of Belfast City Council and they are eager to work together and adopt our changes.