AdventHealth x SCADpro
Designing a more dynamic way to understand the people government serves.
In collaboration with Deloitte’s Government & Public Services Futures team, we developed the Citizen’s Mindset Model: a research framework and toolkit that helps teams understand citizens through their values, motivations, behaviors, and changing contexts, beyond static demographic profiles.
My Role
I focused on the National Park Services research, designing the survey, recruiting participants, and leading our cultural probe. I also designed the framework worksheet and shaped the content, usability, and visual design of the final toolkit.
The Outcome
4
public-services used to explore and apply the model
9
phases guiding teams from research to action and reassessment
1
reusable framework and facilitation toolkit
The Problem
Public services need to understand people beyond a static snapshot.
Personas are useful for turning research into recognizable user profiles. But for government services, Deloitte wanted to explore what happens when fixed demographic profiles don’t fully capture the beliefs, motivations, and circumstances shaping someone’s experience.
A citizen’s needs can shift with their environment, life events, values, and the service they are interacting with. Yet traditional personas can become static or overly generalized, making it harder for teams to understand why people behave differently within the same system.
The challenge was not to replace personas entirely, but to create a more dynamic lens that could complement them by helping public-service teams understand the attitudes and motivations behind citizen behavior and translate that understanding into better engagement and services.
STATIC
Can freeze people into a single moment, even as their circumstances change.
OVERSIMPLIFIED
Demographic similarities can hide very different values and motivations.
DYNAMIC
The same citizen may think and act differently across services and situations.
The Research
Four public services became four ways to explore what shapes a citizen mindset.
Rather than defining a single approach upfront, our team explored mindsets through four different public-service contexts. Each case used a different lens to investigate how people's values, motivations, behaviors, and circumstances shape the way they engage with a service.
SNAP · Capabilities lens
How do freedom, agency, well-being, and achievement shape people's ability to benefit from a service?
Voting · Generational
What motivates or blocks younger citizens within this service?
DOT · Contextual
How does someone's situation shape their relationship with public transit?
National Parks — Behavioral
What makes engagement with national parks easier, more attractive, more social, or more timely?
My Research Focus · National Parks
I designed our survey, recruited research participants, and led our cultural probe to understand why people visit national parks, what shapes their experience, and what they value.
We combined those findings with interviews and secondary research, then affinity-mapped the data to uncover how practical barriers, emotional associations, social influence, and personal values intersected within the same park experience.
The experience was practical and emotional.
Planning, information, and crowding shaped access, while peace, memory, nature, and connection shaped what the experience meant to people.
Visitors carried overlapping motivations.
Individual experiences combined recreation, social connection, preparation, education, and stewardship, rather than fitting neatly into a single type.
From Research to Mindsets
We used behavioral principles to turn research patterns into preliminary mindsets.
Because National Parks was our behavioral case study, we used the EAST framework to interpret our research through a behavioral lens.
Developed by the Behavioural Insights Team for public policy, EAST examines how behaviors can be shaped by making actions Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely. It gave us a structured way to look beyond what visitors did and consider the conditions influencing their choices, motivations, and engagement with national parks.
We then used these behavioral patterns to develop four preliminary mindsets.
EASY
The Master Navigator
Planning · Logistics · Information
ATTRACTIVE
The Adventure Seeker
Adventure · Recreation · Exploration
SOCIAL
The Social Explorer
Groups · Shared experiences · Guided activities
TIMELY
The Nature Guardian
Conservation · Education · Stewardship
Our first mindsets made patterns visible, but they also flattened complexity.
This approach helped us translate research into recognizable mindsets, but fixed quadrants could overlook overlapping values, motivations, behaviors, and changing circumstances.
We needed a more consistent way to build mindsets without losing the complexity behind them
The Solution
The Citizen’s Mindset Model builds mindsets without putting people in boxes
The Citizen’s Mindset Model is a guided framework for moving from research to a more contextual understanding of citizens and then using that understanding to inform action.
Rather than placing people into fixed categories, the model builds a mindset through three connected dimensions: Knowing, Being, and Doing, then continues through prioritization, external influences, ideation, and reassessment as circumstances change.
Putting the model to work with National Park Services
Knowing
Gather characteristics
This citizen:
Visits parks regularly and independently
Plans ahead for outdoor activities
Prefers less crowded, well-marked experiences
Uses available information to prepare and navigate
Being
Determine values
They value:
Freedom & exploration
Safety & preparedness
Peace & connection with nature
Environmental stewardship
Doing
Understand motivations to act
They are motivated to:
Explore independently
Prepare before visiting
Seek reliable navigation and safety information
Avoid overcrowded experiences
Follow rules that protect themselves and the environment
Set action
How might NPS enable more independent exploration while supporting safety, confidence, and conservation?
My Design Focus
I turned our framework into tools teams could actually pick up and use.
Once the Citizen’s Mindset Model was defined, the next challenge was making the methodology understandable beyond the team that created it. I focused on translating the framework into a guided worksheet and supporting booklet that could help researchers move through the process.
Making a complex methodology visible and actionable
I designed the visual structure of the worksheet to turn the framework into a step-by-step working experience. The layout needed to show how each stage connects while giving teams enough space to document research, make decisions, and build toward a final mindset.
Guiding teams through the process without us in the room
I designed the booklet’s content, information hierarchy, and usability to explain each stage of the methodology and guide teams through the activities. The goal was to make the framework understandable and repeatable for someone encountering it for the first time.
Validation
Testing the framework helped us simplify the experience.
We tested an early version of the framework internally by working through the process ourselves. While it successfully led us to generate mindsets, the workshop revealed that some steps were too lengthy, instructions needed to be clearer, and the process needed to be easier for people outside the original team to follow.
Simplified
Consolidated lengthy steps.
Clarified
Added clearer guidance.
Transferable
Designed for teams
beyond our own.
Reflection
Designing the framework taught me that methods have users , too.
This project changed how I think about the relationship between research and design. Generating meaningful insights was only part of the challenge; those insights also had to be structured in a way that preserved their complexity while remaining understandable and actionable for others.
Designing the toolkit especially taught me to treat methodologies as experiences themselves. A framework can be thoughtful in theory, but if people cannot understand where they are, what to do next, or why a step matters, it becomes difficult to use.
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