Notify me: Improving Access to Housing Benefits in Bolton

Design research, Service design and UX

Notify Me is a bespoke email and SMS messaging product designed for Bolton Council to enable fast, easy communication between a benefits assessment team and their customers. It is designed to provide reassurance and clarity to customers when they apply to get housing benefits for the first time. 

A project in collaboration with Bolton Council, they wanted to move customers online, but found most would prefer to phone or call for real, human contact.  

The project involved a research and discovery phase with customers, staff and management to get an in-depth understanding of the system and challenges the council were facing. We looked to examples of excellent customer services elsewhere, before working with stakeholders to come up with a number of potential solutions to the issues we had found. Finally, we settled on and produced a prototype product - Notify Me - along with an impact testing plan to measure it's success or failures. See samples from the research report below.