Digitising Professional Development

Delivering quality experience to all users

ICE (Institution of Civil Engineers) are an organisation driven by improving their services and guidance to trainee engineers. ICE provide support and feedback on evidence submitted for levels needed to become a certified engineer. A process that usually requires 4 years to complete.

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The process of becoming a certified Engineer involves several different user groups. Trainees, Mentors, MDOs and company administrators. Trainees are engineering students or employees training to become as certified engineer and will submit evidence to prove they have achieved a particular level of engineering. This evidence is then reviewed and assessed by a mentor.

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“It was taking longer for trainees to become certified even though they may have achieved the technical level needed”

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There are a variety of mentors available, SCEs are company mentors, DEs work independently. In order for the trainee’s evidence to be officially approved it must be reviewed by an MDO. Lastly company administrators typically employees who work in HR, may want to review the trainees progress with the goal to more staff becoming certified engineers.

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Spotless was asked to develop a customer centric approach to redesigning the IPD portal for trainee’s mentors, MDOs and company administrators.

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Understanding user pain points and barriers

Initially we hosted workshops to talk through their existing system and understand the business dependencies. We wanted to know how users currently experienced the site: where things were working well and where there were barriers.

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Using insight from the ICE customer experience team, we mapped out the current user journey with pain points, opportunities and plus points. We then asked the team to imagine the ideal user journey without budget or time constraints and how this would differ to the existing processes.

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Through this process we were able to isolate the areas that were high priority for the users and the business. We found that trainee’s interaction with the portal was high in the beginning but often tailored off later as their use became more infrequent. This meant that it was taking longer for trainees to become certified even though they may have achieved the technical level needed.

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Utilising touchpoints to provide system feedback to users

The solution was to design a system that kept trainees engaged throughout the process. We used touchpoints as a mechanism, to communicate progress and achievement to show trainees they are reaching their goals to help them remain engaged.

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“Working closely with all the team members enabled the team to challenge existing processes to enhance the digital service.”

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Co-design workshops allowing the team to be immersed in the context

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We carried out immersive co-design workshops with the ICE customer experience team because the design and development were heavily dependent on the processes involved in becoming a certified engineer. Working closely with all the team members enabled the team to challenge existing processes to enhance the digital service.

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One of the goals of redesigning the portal was to reduce the need for a guidance manual, the new designs delivered the guidance not in a manual but with adaptive help; providing guidance to students as and when needed in bite sized chunks. This proved to be a success and ICE commissioned Spotless to work on other parts of the service. Including a new system for company Administrators to track trainees’ progress in which Spotless carried out discovery research and informal interviews with current Administrators in the service.

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