The Flemish child benefit system has been recently reformed, and was introduced in 2019 in Flanders as Groeipakket. As a result, the focus on study allowances from AHOVOKS (Agency for Higher Education, Adult Education, Qualifications and Study allowances) shifted from all educations towards higher education only.

Within this changed context, AHOVOKS is already working on improved digitalisation and automation of their internal processes and they decided to further optimise their services towards this target audience.

AHOVOKS wishes to fully take into account the various needs of all the stakeholders involved in the application process. The emphasis of this project was placed on optimising the communication and information flow on study allowances towards potential and current applicants, while staying aligned with other different interest groups.

We supported them in the process and were responsible for user research, creative facilitation, exploring opportunities and developing brand-new concepts.

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Working in close collaboration with the client we created an elaborate stakeholder overview to clearly indicate which organisations and people played an important role in the application process. In-depth interviews then allowed us to discover some key problems for the various applicant profiles. Afterwards, focus groups with different civilian profiles were organised to thoroughly comprehend the existing pain-points and diverse needs and to discover potential opportunities.

This exhaustive qualitative research resulted in various persona profiles and customer journeys of applicant students and parents aiding in the process.

A later ideation workshop with AHOVOKS based on all this information resulted in the realisation of over 50 prioritised opportunities. In a final phase, we selected some of the prioritised opportunities and translated them into concrete concepts. We introduced a smart system on the website to guide students through a set of tailored questions based on their specific answers. Furthermore, we created a series of simple visuals to communicate complex family situations and what their impact could be on allowances. Lastly we adjusted some key terminology that had been confusing for applicants.