Making Zero Count – User-Centred Design & Strengthening Buy-in for Greater Coordination Handbook

Abstract

We have developed this toolkit to engage communities in an experiential way and to help communities understand the challenges and opportunities for ending homelessness through greater service coordination. We utilized user-centred design in order to support communities with strengthening systems integration and coordination.

This handbook outlines 10 steps to designing a user-centred, large-scale experiential exercise. User-centred design is about understanding the user experience at every interaction a user may have with a product. In this case, the “product” is service provision and/or resources within the homeless-serving sector. We further evolved the process by building the user-centred design experience into a large-scale experiential exercise for service providers to role-play a person experiencing homelessness who needs to access resources and services.

This role-play experience is intended to be tailored to your local community context, including the provincial and municipal policies specific to your community. We have found that the value of this process is in the way it
shows, not tells, the inconsistencies of the series of services that people experiencing homelessness must navigate.

Purpose:
To support change management for systems planning
To raise awareness and build public will for ending homelessness

Target Audiences:
Homelessness System
Service Providers & Public
System Service Providers
General Public