Public sector and GovTechProduct design

Social services redesigned for the people who serve families

IDS Systems provides municipal governments with a social services management system. Tog Lab went into the field with the people who use the system every day and redesigned the experience. The new interface reduced usage questions and made it possible to bring new municipalities onto the system without on-site rollout.

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Laptop with the social services system open

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The challenge

In social services, the person using the system is serving a family, often in a hurry and with little familiarity with technology. When the interface does not keep up with that work, it shows in support and in rollout.

For IDS, that meant many support tickets about how to use the system and a migration of new municipalities that depended on people on site to train the teams.

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What we did

From the field to the interface, always starting from the frontline staff.

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Mauri Dengo
CTO, IDS Systems

What this case study shows

User-centered design also lowers operating costs and speeds up sales.

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Does your system work for your frontline staff?

We start with a conversation and, if it makes sense, with field research alongside the people who use the system.

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More on this page

30% fewer — support tickets after the redesign
of clients migrated remotely, with no on-site rollout

Questions that became tickets — Screens designed around the system rather than the service interaction caused recurring usage questions.
On-site rollout — Each new municipality required on-site training, which made migration slow and expensive.
Limited digital familiarity — Some teams had little experience with software systems, and lengthy training did not scale.

Field — Research with frontline staff — Visits and conversations with social services teams, observing how they actually serve families.
Map — Service flow — The path of each case, the points of confusion and what each role needs to see at each moment.
Interface — Screen redesign — New screens organized around the frontline staff’s tasks, in the everyday language of the teams.
Migration — Remote rollout — With a self-explanatory system, IDS began onboarding new municipalities without needing people on site.

Tickets showed what to change — Every how-to ticket pointed to a screen to revisit. The drop in support came from designing based on them.
Ease of use changed the rollout — A system that is easy to learn changes the business model: migration no longer depends on travel.
The field showed the real pace — Field research surfaced what never comes up in meetings: the pace and pressure of real casework.

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