Samordningsförbundet
Swedish Welfare
About the Project
Organization
Linköping University
Role
Graduate Researcher
Duration
5 months (Jan - May 2024)
Cross-sector collaboration
Keywords
Stakeholder Mapping
Systems Map
Welfare system navigation
Human-centred design
Personalisation
Digital accessibility
Gamigication
Digital accessibility
Co-Creation
"Samordningsförbundet" in Swedish means "The Coordination Association". This was a service design project associated with Linköping University in collaboration with Samordningsförbundet Centrala Östergötland, focused on making Sweden’s complex welfare system easier to navigate.
The project explored how refugee women can better understand available services and find the right entry points when support is distributed across multiple public agencies.
The existing Welfare Guide was envisioned as a digital platform to simplify access to welfare services by directing users based on their needs. The research focused on improving its accessibility, clarity, and trust, particularly in the early stages of navigating the Swedish welfare system.
Glossary
Stakeholder map : A visual tool that identifies and organises the different actors, organisations, and individuals involved in or affected by a system.
System map: A visualisation showing how different actors, processes, and structures within a system interact, influence, and depend on one another.
Journey map : visual representation of a user's experience over time as they move through a service or process, highlighting touchpoints, pain points, and emotions.
Storybraid : A narrative-based research method that weaves together multiple individual stories or experiences to reveal shared patterns or themes.
Online ethnography : A qualitative research method that studies user behaviours, communities, or interactions in digital/online environments.
Co-creation : A collaborative design approach where users, professionals, and stakeholders jointly develop solutions rather than designers working alone.
Digital toolkit : A set of digital tools or resources designed to support users and professionals in completing a task or navigating a process together.
Tactile/physical toolkit : A set of hands-on, non-digital tools (e.g., worksheets, cards) designed to support communication and planning, particularly for users facing digital exclusion.
Gamification : The use of game-like elements (milestones, progress indicators, rewards) in non-game contexts to increase motivation and engagement.
4 Qudrants
Digital Navigation Quadrant
Co-creation–Digital
Digital Navigation Quadrant
Physical Navigation Quadrant
Samordningsförbundet brings together four actors - the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, Employment Service, regions, and municipalities, to coordinate services, set shared goals, and jointly finance initiatives based on local needs.
Overall, the system is built around cross-sector collaboration, with each actor contributing its own mandate, resources, and expertise to support individuals and address structural challenges in the local community.
The Actors
Stage 1: Engagements & Insights
The initial stakeholder meetings highlighted that the welfare system is fragmented across multiple specialised authorities, making it difficult for people with complex needs to navigate. Limited collaboration, information-sharing restrictions, and organisational silos can result in individuals being passed between services rather than receiving coordinated support.
Three approaches were highlighted:
-
Knowledge sharing: Collecting and sharing practical knowledge from professionals who have experience navigating complex cases.
-
Experience sharing: Using stories from people with similar experiences to help others understand possible pathways through the welfare system. Improving communication between welfare actors and citizens.
-
Creating accessible guidance: Developing a Welfare Guide that brings together information about services and possible pathways in one place. Exploring digital and AI-supported tools to help people navigate welfare services more easily.
The Welfare Guide could function as an open source of knowledge for both citizens and professionals, helping users understand what support exists and how to navigate it.
Screenshots of the existing welfare-guide
Methods: To visualize the current system, we chose to conduct a stakeholder map and a system map as well as a journey map in addition to the storybraid, and lastly also online ethnography. These methods give us insights from different perspectives.
Since this was primarily a group project, my main contribution focused on the upper-left quadrant: “Co-creating Systems Map.”
The system map visualised and co-created with the co-ordinator of Samordningsförbundet is a hypothetical journey of an immigrant mother with children, showing how she may interact with multiple welfare actors depending on her background and needs. While some actors have a direct role in her journey, others influence the system more indirectly through policies, structures, and changing political contexts.
The mapping revealed a key friction: organisations are not always synchronised, leaving users to navigate the gaps between them and move back and forth across services.
This pointed towards an opportunity to intervene at the entry point of the system, rather than adding another intervention between existing services. The Welfare Guide could help users understand the system before entering it, using visual or interactive formats to build confidence, trust, and a clearer sense of what to expect.
A messy systems map co-created with the co-ordinator
I also co-created the actor mapping using the Systems Innovation Network’s mapping guide, which informed both the systems map and the alignment map. The alignment map helped us understand the motivations, objectives, and goals of relevant actors and assess how aligned they were with the changes needed within the system.
Stage 2: Ideation and Conceptualization
Values and Key Insights
Building on the insights from the previous stage, we identified the following values and key insights to inform the mapping of the concept space:
-
Human connection – between actors and users, actors and actors, and users and users
-
Co-creation – enabling collaboration across all stakeholders
-
Motivation, independence, and empowerment – supporting users in taking an active role
-
Clear purpose and pathway – providing a goal-oriented approach and an overview of the system
-
Transparency – making processes and information more visible and understandable
-
Personalisation – adapting the service to individual needs and circumstances
I helped define the concept space by using insights and experiences from Stage 1. It is structured around four dimensions: digital, physical, co-creation, and navigation, which represent key aspects considered important for developing an effective service system.
By analysing the ideas and insights that emerged throughout the process, I identified common themes and translated them into values and organising principles. The digital and physical dimensions represent the different points of contact between users and the service system, influencing how the interface is designed and how value is created - either through a digital platform or through physical interaction. Co-creation and navigation represent the qualities needed to support collaborative value creation while enabling users to develop a clear overview and sense of direction within the system.
-
Digital Navigation Quadrant: Simplifies and personalises the Welfare Guide while incorporating user stories to strengthen human connection.
-
Co-creation–Digital + Digital Navigation Quadrants: Combines digital navigation with co-creation through a digital toolkit and gamification, helping users and social workers build a clearer journey together.
-
Physical Navigation Quadrant: Uses a tactile toolkit to support co-creation between users and social workers, particularly for people facing digital or accessibility barriers.
Stage 3: Prototypes and Prototyping
A team workshop brought these themes into the ideation process through 5W1H (Who, What, When, Where, Who, How), Worst Possible Idea, Brain Drawing/Writing, and Function Analysis. Together, these methods helped us explore the opportunity space from different perspectives defining the context and user needs, challenging assumptions, building on each other’s ideas, and breaking down key functions into potential solutions.
The Theory of Change helped narrow and refine the Gamification concept into a more focused concept for prototyping: Visual Overview of the Welfare Journey. The mapping element was prioritised for its potential to improve motivation, structure, navigation, and understanding of a complex welfare system.
The concept builds on Välfärdsguiden and its existing “Stories from Life” feature, using previous users’ journeys to provide relevant pathways and inspiration. The journey can be mapped independently by the user or co-created with a social worker, combining personalised goals, activities, and milestones into a clear visual overview.
Theory of Change → Prototyping
The Theory of Change helped translate the broad concept into a set of potential functions and prioritise those most closely linked to the intended outcomes. The functions explored included a playful island map, a co-creation map for welfare meetings, a community page, mapping overlapping services, a social media campaign, and a self-test (“What is your dream job?”) to assess users’ need for support.
Each of us in the team, voted for the four most important shifts, which were mapped into the Theory of Change. This helped narrow the scope and identify the functions with the strongest potential impact. Two were selected for prototyping: the playful island map and the co-creation map for welfare meetings.
Concept 1 (Redesign)
The first concept focused on redesigning the Welfare Guide to make it simpler, more accessible, and relevant to a broader audience. Building on stakeholder feedback, the concept addressed information overload and recognised that digital tools should complement, rather than replace, human connection.
The redesigned platform was envisioned as a resource for both users navigating the welfare system and social workers, supporting users in finding relevant pathways while enabling organisations to learn from previous cases.
-
Accessibility: Keyboard and voice navigation, screen-reader support, and descriptive alt text.
-
Multilingual support: Multiple language options with a clearly visible language switcher.
-
Universal & inclusive design: Ensure the platform is usable by people with diverse ages, abilities, and needs, with options to customise the experience.
-
Colour contrast: Meet WCAG contrast standards and use accessibility tools to improve readability.
-
Feedback mechanisms: Provide clear, accessible ways for users to report issues and suggest improvements through forms, email, or phone.
Concept 2 (Gamification)
I contributed in developing this secondary concept, which enhanced the Välfärdsguiden by integrating structural clarity, community engagement, and gamified elements to guide individuals through their welfare process.
The concept introduced a personal account/avatar as an entry point, where users could answer questions to identify relevant pathways and easily connect with a social worker when needed. A digital toolkit would allow users and social workers to co-create a visual journey plan, mapping the user’s current situation, upcoming activities, meetings, and accomplishments. This would give users a clearer sense of direction while helping social workers understand each user’s journey and learn from previous interactions.
Another key direction was creating a community space for sharing experiences and stories. Users could choose to share their stories, accomplishments, or experiences and engage with those of others. This was intended to create hope, recognition, and motivation, while also allowing social workers to learn from previous cases.
To support motivation, the concept explored light-touch gamification, including milestones, goals, progress indicators, affirmations, and reactions to shared stories. The intention was not to turn the welfare journey into a game, but to make progress more visible and give users a sense of accomplishment and encouragement, particularly when navigating complex systems or multiple actors.
The concept also explored personalisation and user choice, recognising that gamification would not suit everyone. Users could potentially choose whether to use a gamified interface and customise elements such as colours and backgrounds. Overall, the concept aimed to create a more structured, participatory, motivating, and transparent journey, while remaining sensitive to accessibility and different levels of digital familiarity.
Concept 3 (Physical Toolkit)
I also co-designed a tactile toolkit aimed at bridging communication gaps during initial face-to-face consultations. This included reflective worksheets to help users articulate their needs before meetings, alongside physical journey maps to plot out resources and next steps.
Designed to tackle digital exclusion, this physical set works in tandem with the Välfärdsguiden. By using QR codes to link paper plans to digital records, we created a seamless hybrid experience that makes complex planning more interactive and accessible for both the individual and the social worker.
Revisiting the Concept Space
I considered revisiting the earlier, more concrete concept space developed from stakeholder insights. It mapped concepts across two dimensions - Humanized ↔ Dehumanized and Momentum ↔ Stagnancy - to explore the balance between human interaction and technology, while considering both progress and accessibility.
-
Humanized–Momentum: Personal, active interactions that support progress, such as physical co-creation with a social worker.
-
Humanized–Stagnancy: Personal interactions that may lack progress or create inefficiencies.
-
Dehumanized–Stagnancy: Less personal, passive digital interactions with limited momentum.
-
Dehumanized–Momentum: Efficient digital or automated interactions that enable progress but may reduce human connection.
An Overview of all the Prototypes
Static Prototype (Expereince Map)
I developed and tested an experience map using an island analogy with immigrant women attending SFI to learn Swedish, many of whom were pregnant or caring for young children. The map explored their experiences navigating the welfare system across language barriers, employment, education, and family support, including access to healthcare and financial or emotional support.
Testing showed that the island metaphor was not intuitive; participants found it confusing and preferred simpler formats such as paper or Post-its. This highlighted the importance of designing from the users’ perspective, with clearer instructions and formats suited to their context and available time.
The testing surfaced four key design insights for the Welfare Guide:
-
Complexity & clutter: The guide felt overwhelming, making it difficult to find relevant information. The interface needed simpler layouts and clearer prioritisation.
-
Human interaction: Participants valued face-to-face interaction and the comfort of speaking with someone directly while navigating an unfamiliar welfare system.
-
Personalisation: Participants had different circumstances, responsibilities, and goals, requiring tailored content, recommendations, and pathways.
-
Language barriers: Learning Swedish while managing childcare and other responsibilities made access to information and services particularly challenging. Multilingual support and an accessible language-selection interface were therefore important.
These insights were then clustered within the experience map to identify recurring pain points and inform the design direction of the Welfare Guide.
The insights were then clustered within the experience map by identifying recurring themes and grouping related findings. This provided a structured overview of the participants’ key pain points and needs, helping translate the research findings into design directions for the digital interface.
Dynamic Prototyping
(Cardboard Prototyping & LEGO)
During the prototyping phase, we attempted to simulate the co-creation map concept using a cardboard computer for role-playing. However, the prototype did not provide sufficient depth or insight to support meaningful experimentation. We therefore decided to discontinue this approach rather than invest further time and resources in a method that offered limited potential for generating actionable insights.
As a crucial component of the final interface prototype, we used LEGO bricks to symbolize the perceived journey in a highly meaningful manner. This innovative approach allowed us to visually represent how transitioning from one "island" to another could symbolize progress or achievement within a welfare case. By leveraging LEGO, we aimed to create a clear and intuitive representation of the user's path, highlighting the necessary steps or milestones required to advance. This not only serves to motivate the user but also empowers them with a deeper understanding of their journey, fostering a sense of preparedness and control over the process. Ultimately, this visual aid seeks to enhance user engagement and comprehension, facilitating a more effective and empowering user experience within the welfare context.
Based on the LEGO prototyping, we further explored how the user’s journey could be represented digitally by developing a Figma prototype closer to the existing Welfare Guide interface. The user starts on one island, while other islands representing different goals appear as they answer questions provided by the system. This allowed us to experiment with how information could be presented in context and how the journey could be visually represented, and the prototype was subsequently developed further into the final prototype.
The Quadrants
Abstract : Represents ideas, concepts, or futures in a symbolic, conceptual, or non-literal way, focusing on meaning rather than physical detail or plausibility.
Realistic : Represents ideas or futures in a tangible, believable, and detailed way, closely resembling real-world objects, contexts, or experiences.
Synchronic : Focuses on a single moment or snapshot in time, examining how a system, object, or scenario exists or functions at one specific point.
Diachronic : Focuses on change over time, examining how a system, object, or scenario evolves, develops, or transforms across a sequence of events.
Project Stages
Engagements & Insights
Ideation and Conceptualization
Prototypes & Prototyping
The Digital Prototype (Final prototype)
Based on the LEGO prototyping, we further explored how the user’s journey could be represented digitally by developing a Figma prototype closer to the existing Welfare Guide interface. The user starts on one island, while other islands representing different goals appear as they answer questions provided by the system. This allowed us to experiment with how information could be presented in context and how the journey could be visually represented, and the prototype was subsequently developed further into the final prototype.
At the same time, we recognised that digital self-service cannot replace human communication and interaction. This raised the question of how the mapping could instead augment meetings between users and social workers, helping both parties leave the planning meeting with a shared understanding of where the user is and what they can do next.
We therefore developed a collaborative digital whiteboard where social workers/co-ordinators and users could co-create their journey with AI support. To explore this scenario, we used Antonia, a user featured in the Welfare Guide’s “Stories from Life”, and built the prototype around her existing story and recommended pathway. Her completed SFI studies and work-permit process formed the starting point, while her goal of finding work in real estate management became the endpoint. The social worker could then map key steps between these points, add information, and attach relevant resources for Antonia to access later.
This co-created map provided both the user and social worker with a shared visual overview of the journey and next steps. We also explored how data from successful journeys could eventually be used to train AI to recommend potential pathways for users with similar goals and circumstances.
By combining feedback from the previous prototypes, contributed to creating the architecture and digital clickable interface that visualises the intended platform and its central features. The prototype was developed in Figma to explore the interaction flow for creating a personalised path proposal:
-
Answering initial questions: The user begins by answering a set of basic questions.
-
Defining a goal: The user identifies what they need help with, such as finding employment, which generates an “island” representing the goal.
-
Understanding the user’s situation: Follow-up questions help the system understand the user’s specific circumstances.
-
Receiving a path proposal: The system suggests a potential path towards the user’s goal, with sub-goals and concrete steps that users can click to access relevant information.
-
Adding multiple goals: Users can add additional goals, such as learning Swedish, generating another “island” and showing how different goals and pathways relate to one another.
-
Exploring others’ experiences: Users can click on other people represented within the map to explore experiences from similar journeys, building on the existing Stories from Life feature in Välfärdsguiden.
The concept creates an accessible entry point by allowing users to identify their own goals and receive a tailored path with concrete activities and sub-goals. These recommendations build on previous successful journeys from Stories from Life, making existing user experiences a resource for navigating the system.
The visual mapping also provides a structural overview of the welfare journey, replacing the need to navigate through large amounts of information to identify relevant options. By making goals, pathways, and progress visible, the concept aims to increase motivation and understanding, while the stories of people with similar backgrounds can provide additional encouragement.
