Marc Hebert, Director, Innovation Office, San Francisco Human Services Agency

Marc’s team is designing better government services and systems with clients, employees and community partners. They help San Francisco residents who are experiencing poverty and abuse, and may be cognitively or physically impaired. The Innovation Office serves as an internal consultancy, working across digital and non-digital touchpoints. This involves leading teams for a day to a year+, depending on the problem and future state they’re trying to create. The Agency has 2,400+ employees serving 200,000+ people.

The Strategy—Understanding the problem-space, historical context and assumptions, gathering data humbly and inclusively, analyzing for equity, prototyping quickly and cheaply, testing and iterating rapidly.

Tools—Markers, whiteboards & sticky notes, ethnographic interviews, service blueprints, experience & process maps, analytics and other statistical data, UX & usability research, diary studies, personas, profiles, surveys, improv, information architecture, etc.

Projects (“we” not “me” work) |
• Managing the design research of the Agency’s website and currently being rebuilt intranet.
• Texting clients who receive services in one program to apply for another, and to nudge them towards meeting appointments.
• Redesigning paper forms and digital communication to improve how the public and employees experience service delivery.
• Wayfinding in our lobbies and in front of our buildings to assist clients better navigate to and within our physical spaces.
• Co-creating better client and employee feedback loops about their experiences with services.
• Institutionalizing service design practices as part of performance evaluations.
• Facilitating service design workshops to 200+ government employees in dozens of departments who’ve applied learnings to reduce wait times in a lobby by 70+% and on the phones in another program by 60+%, among 220+ other improvements.
• Blogging about civic design, systems design, and service design

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-hebert-0662bb1