Practical case#1: Improving and updating the Carte Max (Mulhouse youth card)

The first working topic for La Transfo Mulhouse was youth and early childhood, and the first operational challenge was the “Carte Max”, a package of services for young people from 12 to 18 years of age. The programme was stopped in 2013, as young people in Mulhouse were increasingly losing interest in the offer. A first attempt to overhaul the Carte Max had been initiated in 2015 by the Sport and Youth department.  The challenge was to redesign the service taking into account the expectations and uses of youth population in Mulhouse, and to switch from a paper cheque book to an online application.

Like in Paris, each session allowed La Transfo ambassadors to experiment a variety of service design methodologies, and to practice a set of soft skills (risk taking, curiosity, ability to consider the user as contributor, etc.). It impacts the way the agents work at the individual level, but also sets a context to imagine the Innovation lab. The ambassadors conducted a fieldwork involving about 70 stakeholders from the Youth field, gathering a variety of knowledge derived from their usage and experience. It allowed them to draft a set of recommendations:

• Change the partnerships in the Card offers;
• Develop offers that are more open and diverse;
• Develop the citizen aspect of the offer;
• Propose a greater variety of offer, based the diversity of the youth population (age class, interests, etc.)
• Open up to a wider type of audience, and limit difficulties in subscribing to the card.

… and to imagine main features for the new Card offer:

• 3 types  of target audiences (10-15, 15-18 and 18-25 years old) with variations in the offer, and difference of involvement from the parents depending on the age-class;
• A mixed service offer, addressing one main question ‘How may Young people from Mulhouse use their free time?’;
• Discounts on services, leisure and goods when relevant;
• Civic and personal/individual commitment proposals, based on partnerships with local NGOs.

Mains deliveries of their work were :

• a research on Youth user-experience in Mulhouse;
• detailed specifications for a future Youth service (Carte Max – next generation): main features of the service + possible additional functionalities + step by step guide of the service and of its functioning + some elements of implementation feasibility (budget, human resources, political backing, planning)
• a forum gathering experts within the municipality and external partners on the subject (to be implemented in February)
• main principles of transmission of the project to the Youth department of the municipality.