Since March 2020, Australia’s had 30 community Covid case that can be traced back to someone in hotel quarantine. Twenty of these have been in 2021 - so the situation is getting worse, not better. The initial leaks were largely traced back to contact through security guards and hotel staff, but more recently guests have been infected by other guests on the same floor, highlighting the airborne nature of the virus.
So what's gone wrong?
To a service designer, it seems like a classic case of not placing the customer at the heart of an experience and failing to consider end-to-end journeys.
The first thing to understand is that the guest in isolation is not the only ‘customer’ in the hotel quarantine ‘experience’.
Let’s think about the situation of the casual security guards as an example: how well did state governments understand their goals, motivations, needs and behaviours before deciding to use this workforce over the police or Australian Defence Force personnel? If they had, they might have foreseen that a casual security guard, lacking job security and proper training, could respond very differently to a crisis situation than a fully qualified professional.
Service design techniques, such as attribution of personas to key groups involved in the delivery and receipt of a service, could have shed light on their behavioural drivers and helped mitigate potential shortcomings.
In human-centred design (HCD), a ‘persona’ represents the shared behavioural drivers of a group of people. During the service design process, we create a persona for each key behavioural group based on qualitative, and to a lesser degree quantitative, research. Personas are sometimes created for specific roles as well. In this case, there might have been personas created for an untrained security guard, a positive COVID case in quarantine, a hotel cleaner and a health department official. Knowing the goals, motivations and needs of the various 'actors' involved in hotel quarantine helps pre-empt likely problems and define key roles and responsibilities: a 2020 report commissioned into the use of hotel quarantine found that unclear roles and responsibilities contributed to service failure.
A designer would then map each persona’s journey through hotel quarantine. Like the application of personas, ‘journey mapping’ is a key service design tool. It can be easy to concentrate on the central aspects of a customer experience, neglecting some of the details. Critically, journey mapping traces someone’s experience ‘end-to-end’ – that is, from start to finish.
Let’s take the arriving international traveller as our persona.
The traveller disembarks, collects luggage and moves through the airport. Then they take transportation from the airport to the hotel, check in, go into their room, go out for fresh air with a security guard in tow and meet healthcare providers. After 14 days of quarantine, they leave the hotel, get a taxi - you get the drift.
At each stage, a journey map details all the 'touchpoints' and actors involved in the delivery of a service, making visible the invisible dots that join disparate companies, government agencies, technologies, processes, data points and people. Mapping end-to-end journeys is important for a number of reasons.
Chief amongst them is the identification of risk. For example, mapping a security guard's end-to-end journey (which we would define as the workday, starting and ending at home) would have alerted officials to the fact that after interacting with highly contagious hotel guests, a guard might often go to a second job in a factory or warehouse to make ends meet. After that shift ended, a journey map would have then taken us to the high-density apartment block where our security guard lives within a large, extended family. Vulnerable points along a security guard's journey could have been identified before COVID found its way into the community, perhaps bringing into question the decision to use security guards with journeys such as this.
Importantly, because mapping end-to-end is a comprehensive process, it tends to bring together key decision-makers from different departments or organisations. This ensures a shared understanding of all the moving parts of a service, facilitating collective rather than siloed decision-making. Suddenly the ramifications of one agency’s decision become clear to all. Finally, prototyping and stress-testing a journey allow for course correction before funds are committed – a considerable economic benefit.
A thorough HCD process can take a little time, and is best done with a cool head – two things the pandemic has rendered in short supply. But as governments still struggle to provide safe quarantine services – and suffer the enormous financial consequences of this failure - a cost-effective approach that takes account of how people actually behave is long past due.
Sources
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them
https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/seven-tenets-human-centred-design