Proyectos Productivos

  • CLIENTS

    Department of Innovation and Open Government and Department of Economic Development, City of Monterrey, Mexico

  • AREAS

    UX/UI, Service design

  • KEY ISSUES

    Designing for users with low digital literacy, forming trust in municipal technology, interoperability with existing systems and databases

  • SKILLS

    Systems mapping, ethnography, field studies, user interviews, literature review and synthesis, policy analysis, interoperability analysis, data review

  • TEAM

    Collaborators: ​​Samantha Alcaraz, Emmanuel García Castro, Silvia Hernández Garza, Andres Moreno Frese, Janeth Luna

    Mentor: Fernando Fernandez-Monge

    Sponsors: Harvard Bloomberg City Leadership Initiative, Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo

Summary

Proyectos Productivos is an economic support program run by the City of Monterrey, Mexico. It provides small businesses with grants and financial education in order to scale their operations. 

Problem

How can we improve the application process for the economic support program Proyectos Productivos to make it more efficient for coordinators and more transparent for applicants? 

Research Process

Given the cultural context of public mistrust in government initiatives, we sought to uncover the aspects of the existing process that build trust, in order to design a trustworthy digital process. This was done through interviews with applicants, observation of in-person meetings between coordinators and applicants, and site visits to applicants’ businesses. The most important trust relationship for the success of Proyectos Productivos is that of the applicant with the coordinator.

Application Process

The existing application process was not digitized, leading to various inefficiencies for the project team and entrepreneurs who apply, and making it difficult to collect data that can measure program outcomes and pinpoint necessary improvements. 

Manual Workload

In the present non-digital system, project coordinators support applicants through in-person meetings, and phone calls and instant messages from their personal cell phones. Through this communication, coordinators:

  • Guide the applicants through the entire application process

  • Remind entrepreneurs of deadlines and the application requirements they are missing 

  • Assist applicants in filling out the application and acquiring missing documents 

  •  Answer any questions or concerns of the applicant

In addition, business owners often have to travel to the office of the Department of Economic Development (Secretaría de Desarrollo Económico) for meetings and to turn in physical copies of documents. 

Applications and forms to track application progress are stored exclusively in paper folders. Manually filling out spreadsheets leads to the loss of important information and sometimes information is not entered fully or correctly.

User Insights

“We serve entrepreneurs mostly through them coming to the office...we help everyone...but it is time consuming. It takes me about 21 hours per week to meet with everyone.”

Coordinator

Lack of efficiency 

  • The majority of their time (21 hours a week) is spent in communication of basic application information to the applicants. This builds relationships with applicants, which is key for creating trust in the program, but is repetitive and time-consuming. 

  • Physically printing and gathering documents in folders to send to the review committee is time consuming.

“They gave me all of the information and told me about all of the requirements. It was super quick and very transparent and accessible”

Entrepreneur

Digital literacy

  • The majority of applicants use instant messaging as their primary method of communication. 

  • Not all applicants have access to a computer and/or internet.

Trust

Trust in the coordinators is key to converting interested entrepreneurs into applicants. Trust in the process, the team, and Proyectos Productivos is created through frequent (2+ times per week) communication with coordinators.

Design Process

Strategy

Points of Intervention

We intervened at two points in the process: the revision of applicant eligibility and the communication between applicants and coordinators once the application is started. These are the areas where there is tension between communication creating trust and inefficiency in the application process.

New Application Process

The new process integrates 3 elements

  • Registration

  • Application portal 

  • Notification system

System Design

Interoperability 

With the data science and development teams we designed the backend to integrate into existing city databases and citizen identification systems.

Phased integration

In collaboration with the Department of Economic Development, we created a phased process to shift users from the manual to the digital process if applicable. The digital tools exist in parallel with existing processes, as a way to include all applicants regardless of digital education. For example, an applicant can go physically to the Department of Economic Development to meet with a coordinator, who will help them register and start their application.

Design: Key Features

Registration

The digital registration includes

  • Questions, developed with coordinators, that allow them to determine whether someone can apply

  • Option for applicant to choose through what mode they want to receive communication for the remainder of the application process: email, text, call

Application Portal 

Allows the applicants to track the process of their application and their communication with the Proyectos Productivos team. The goal is to provide a clear and transparent method for applicants to access information, while also cutting down on coordinator time in updating applicants. In a future phase of the project, this feature would become an online application portal.

Notification system 

Notifications alert the applicant 

  • Once a week of their progress with their application

  • When the team submits their application

  • When application results are available 

The weekly messages contain the same information as the requirements section of the portal. The goal of the notifications is to replace the work of coordinators in relaying basic information about progress to the applicants. Notifications are received via the mode that the applicant selected in their registration.

Learnings

  • Incrementally integrate the digital with the non-digital: In contexts with low digital literacy and inconsistent access to the internet, both digital and non-digital methods of applying must exist. In order to test the adoption of a digital process by a user group accustomed to non-digital processes, it is important to incrementally introduce the digital and measure the use and effects on the application process of each new digital tool. 

  • A process can be trustworthy and inefficient simultaneously: Through first understanding what trust means in the context, seek to design something that remains trustworthy while also becoming more efficient. 

  • Consider interoperability with existing systems from the beginning: Doing this in our project allowed us to integrate the city databases and digital ID into our system, which influenced our design.