A tube map for the apprenticeship service

Dept of EDUCATION, 2022

Here’s how I developed a ‘service tube map’ and overall ‘mapping framework’ to help the apprenticeship service tell their story and plan future work.

#Background

Before COVID, one of the apprenticeship service’s most successful artefacts was a ‘tube map’ of the service. It worked well at telling the high-level story of how the service works, with each ‘line’ on the map representing one of the main users: apprentices; employers; providers; and assessors.

#The brief

For over two years, including the whole of COVID, this view of the service has changed, so I was asked to update it.

The new map would be extended into an overall mapping framework — describing various layers of detail for different audiences and purposes.

It would also be used as the key strategic artefact for the service to locate current painpoints and plan the roadmap of future work.

← BACK TO WORK

The new Apprenticeship Service Tube Map, July 2022

#Developing a mapping framework

Previously, the tube map was a single artefact, which struggled to align itself with other mapping work going on in the service.

Furthermore, it did a great job of describing the high-level user experience, but suffered when other layers of meaning we added, e.g. the services we manage to support the user experience.

To address this, I developed the following framework:

Tube map

A high-level view for a high-level audience – telling the story of the apprenticeship user experience.

Product-level view

A non-technical picture of the technical layer – showing the products we design, build and maintain to support the user experience.

Painpoints

All the current issues and opportunities, collated and tagged — ready for prioritisation and roadmapping.

#Drawing the map(s)

The mapping tool of choice in our area of DfE is Lucid Spark. So, to optimise visibility, sharing and collaboration, I kept the entire framework on a single board. The link to the map got shared well beyond sessions I ran, which really helped spread the word and encourage engagement.

A screengrab from the live map on Lucidspark

#Establishing a common service language

The current digital service is over seven years old now and, as such has developed an overly elaborate glossary of terms to describe its constituent parts and processes.

I worked with product owners and solutions architects to establish a more streamlined, common language we could use across the service.

The product-level view within our framework was the perfect place to define this. For the first time, the whole service could agree on the name (and number) of each of the products within the service, and which team owned them.

#Layers of meaning

The previous map used stations to represent a mixture of things: user actions; service actions; milestones and product names.

I applied a tad more informational rigour and structure to the map, introducing ‘zones’ to show the overarching stages that all users go through, and ‘milestones’ to to highlight goal-based events (w/ entry/exit criteria).

Detail showing stages (zones), milestones and user actions (stations).

This allowed the stations on the map to exclusively describe our users actions – both individually and when they came together on a task, like when employers and providers and an apprentice to the service.

Detail showing ‘interchange stations’, where multiple users engaged in the same activity.

#Reaching our goals

Ultimately, the map was needed to help locate painpoints and prioritise a roadmap of work. I worked with user research and others within the team to map all known pinpoints onto the map. To help us prioritise this work, we also developed a set of strategic goals and design principles (more on this in a future case study).

An A0 printed version of the map is on the wall in the DfE offices in Coventry. Senior colleagues use this to tell the apprenticeship story when policy and ministerial stakeholders are brought in to ‘walk the walls’.

Both versions of the map and framework are maintained by the service design and interaction design clan going forward.