At this stage in the project we had a clear problem statement, a defined direction and a service blueprint beginning to take shape. Before moving into building anything however I felt strongly that we needed to pause and make sure the group had properly considered the person at the centre of all of this. It is easy in a project like this to get caught up in the technical and systemic dimensions of the problem and lose sight of the human experience behind it. Service design is ultimately about people, and I wanted to make sure that our understanding of the user was as developed as our understanding of the system before we went any further.
I raised this with the group and suggested we each produce a set of design research deliverables before moving on. The goal was not to generate more research for its own sake but to translate everything we had learned so far into tools that would actively inform the design decisions ahead of us. A journey map, a stakeholder map and an empathy map each serve a different purpose in that process and together they give a much fuller picture of the problem from the user's perspective than any single output could on its own.
Everyone in the group created their own versions of these deliverables. What follows is my own set.
A journey map is a tool for visualising the full experience of a user across time, tracing not just what happens to them at each stage but what they think, feel and do along the way. I chose to create one here because the problem we are designing for is inherently a journey problem. The debt does not appear at one single moment, it accumulates gradually and invisibly across an entire sentence, and the damage is only revealed at the very end. A journey map is one of the best tools available for making that kind of slow moving, systemic failure visible.
The map traces five stages, arrest, sentencing, intake, during sentence and pre release, with release sitting as the destination everything feeds into. For each stage I mapped the actions being taken, the financial reality playing out in the background, the thoughts the prisoner is likely having, the pain points where the system is actively failing them, and the opportunities where our intervention could make a difference.
What the journey map made clearest was the gap between what the prisoner thinks is happening and what is actually happening. At every stage Dean assumes someone somewhere is dealing with his financial obligations. Nobody is. That false sense of reassurance is what allows the debt to build completely unchecked until release day. The map also surfaced the critical window between sentencing and intake as the most important moment in the entire journey. That 72 hour period is where everything should be caught and where currently nothing is.
A stakeholder map is a tool for understanding the full landscape of people and organisations with a stake in a problem or solution. In service design it is particularly important because services rarely involve just one user and one provider. They exist within ecosystems of organisations, responsibilities and power dynamics, and designing without understanding that ecosystem is how solutions end up creating new problems elsewhere.
I produced the stakeholder map as a power and interest matrix, plotting each stakeholder according to how much influence they have over whether the system gets built and adopted, and how much personal stake they have in the outcome. This format is useful because it tells you not just who is involved but how to engage with each group differently.
The map revealed that the prison service and government sit in the manage closely quadrant, high power and high interest, meaning they are the stakeholders that need to be brought along most carefully if the system is ever going to be implemented. The prisoner sits in the keep informed quadrant, high interest but low power, which is a telling reflection of their position in the wider system. Service providers sit in the monitor quadrant, which aligns with our approach of framing their participation as a social incentive rather than a requirement.
An empathy map is a tool for getting inside the head of a specific user and understanding their experience not just functionally but emotionally. Where a journey map tells you what happens, an empathy map tells you what it feels like. In service design the two are most powerful when used together, as they ensure that the emotional reality of the experience is built into the design from the start rather than considered as an afterthought.