Supporting disabled job seekers
Accenture Corporate Citizenship partnered with Leonard Cheshire Disability (LCD) to assist people with disabilities seeking employment.
Accenture Corporate Citizenship partnered with Leonard Cheshire Disability (LCD) to assist people with disabilities seeking employment.
Accenture Corporate Citizenship partnered with Leonard Cheshire Disability (LCD), one of UK’s oldest and largest disability-focused civil society organizations. LCD’s Access to Livelihoods (A2L) program assists people with disabilities seeking employment in Africa and Asia, and provides training and career guidance.
The current information retrieval process for the A2L program includes identification, registration, and assessments. The manual process is not an engaging experience for job seekers with disabilities, or an efficient process for LCD, and leads to beneficiaries dropping out of the process. While the work is relevant globally, our initial focus was on the A2L program in India.
Accenture worked with Leonard Cheshire Disability (LCD) in an iterative design thinking approach over two 4-week phases to build a virtual registration assistant named Nandini to support job seekers with varied disabilities to digitally register themselves in an easy, engaging, and accessible manner.
The team created a Persona and Empathy Map for their user named Lakshmi. These methods helped the project understand their user, and enabled the team to focus on a manageable and memorable cast of characters, and design for a specific somebody, rather than a generic everybody.
The ACIT Norway Cloud Studio team is a multi-disciplinary team with resources from Accenture Technology, Digital, and Security. The team's diversity is one of its strengths; working with people with different backgrounds and skills helps the team see the bigger picture and think outside the box.
This prototype, while primarily driven from Norway, was a real cross-studio initiative including key resources from the Spain, India and US Cloud Studios collaborating in a distributed manner – working together with key client stakeholders in the United Kingdom and India.
"When fully implemented, we expect the solution to significantly scale our reach and enable additional custom-tailored services to be offered."
– ALESSANDRA FURTADO, Assistant Director International Resourcing & Development at Leonard Cheshire Disability
The initial 4 weeks resulted in a high-fidelity prototype that covered aspects of the registration process where the focus was on creating an engaging experience, accessible for the target users.
Initial creative workshop in London, UK, to ideate on concept and define scope. Attendees from LCD UK and India, as well as Accenture Corporate Citizenship and ACIT Cloud Studio.
Connected to Watson Speech-to-Text, and did some preliminary testing. Design and flow decisions finalized. Usability testing at client site in India with real end users, providing real insights on how users interact with the solution.
Test with assistive devices, more testing with end users in India, and final improvements and fixes based on feedback from usability tests.
The expected results are happier, more engaged users with less drop-outs during and after registration, as well as reduced time spent by LCD staff, increased data quality, and the primary goal: getting more people into decent and relevant jobs.
Nandini leverages the IBM Bluemix Platform along with IBM Watson Conversation, Tone Analyzer, Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text services.