A digital welcome service for people moving into a London borough, tested with real residents.
New residents had to piece together moving tasks across separate council services.
Mapped the moving journey and tested a prototype welcome service.
Gave the council a clearer direction for supporting new residents.
Helped turn research into a practical prototype and recommendations.
A borough council wanted to understand how people experienced moving into the area and using council services for the first time.
Internally, services were organised by department: council tax, waste, parking, housing, schools, benefits, libraries, and community services. But residents didn't experience the move that way. They experienced it as one life event: "I've just moved here. What do I need to do?"
My role was to help research that experience, map the journey, create service concepts, and prototype a clearer welcome service that could be tested with users.
The information existed. The council had pages and services for everything a new resident might need, council tax registration, parking permits, waste collection, school admissions, benefits, library access. The problem wasn't that the content was missing.
The problem was that residents had to do the joining-up themselves. They had to know which services applied to them, find the right page, interpret what was being asked, and work out what came next. All while also dealing with housing, bills, children, address changes, and settling into a new area.
For the council, services were organised by department. For the resident, moving in was a single life event with overlapping practical tasks. The mismatch was where friction lived.
The work combined stakeholder interviews, resident research, journey mapping, personas, service blueprinting, wireframes, clickable prototypes, usability testing, and iteration. Rather than only producing insight, the team turned the research into a practical prototype that residents could react to. Testing helped show what worked, where users still struggled, and what needed to be improved before the idea moved further. The discipline of moving from research into prototype-and-test is what made the work useful to the council, not just a discovery report, but a tested service direction.
People had several practical tasks to complete after moving, but they didn't always know which council services mattered first or where to find them. The first decision, where do I begin?, was already friction.
Internally, services were split across departments. Residents experienced them as one connected life event. The structure that worked for the organisation didn't match the structure of the user need.
The council already had useful information across its services. The problem wasn't missing content, it was that residents had to search, interpret, and connect it themselves to figure out what applied to their situation.
Residents were often dealing with housing, bills, children, parking, rubbish, address changes, and settling into a new area at the same time. They didn't have spare attention for poorly-signposted services, they needed simple, practical guidance.
Mapping the problem was useful, but the prototype helped the council see what a more joined-up welcome service could actually look like. Concrete beats abstract when teams are trying to make decisions.
The work helped the council move from a departmental view of services to a resident-centred view of moving into the borough. The team produced personas, journey maps, service blueprints, wireframes, clickable prototypes, usability testing findings, and a recommendations backlog. This meant the work didn't stop at research, it turned insight into a tested service direction.
The main value was giving the council a clearer, more practical way to support new residents: not just "here are our services," but "here is what you need to do when you move here, and how we can help."
The recommendations backlog gave the council practical next steps to take after the engagement ended, meaning the prototype was the start of the work, not the end.