Designing For Better Investments: Applying Human-Centered Service Mapping for Cost-Benefit Analysis

The Blind Spots of Cost-Benefit Analysis 

Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is the main tool governments and international organizations use to decide where public funds should be invested. It is widely adopted because it offers a clear and structured way to compare options: how much something costs versus how much value it produces. In simple terms, it asks one core question: what is the return on investment?

What makes CBA effective for straightforward projects becomes a limitation in more complex ones. When multiple services, institutions, and social issues interact, there is rarely a clear line that shows exactly where value is created or where costs are reduced. Benefits often build gradually, overlap across different actors, and appear as changes in behavior, provider trust and access to services. These types of outcomes are real, but they are difficult to capture using standard monetary metrics. As a result, much of the system-level impact experienced by people and communities is left out of traditional CBA calculations.

To help address this gap, human-centered methods, especially service mapping, offer a practical complement to economic analysis. By documenting how services actually work from the perspective of users and frontline staff, service mapping makes visible the hidden costs, operational friction, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities for value creation. It helps show how systems perform in real life, not just on spreadsheets, creating a stronger foundation for more informed and people-centered investment decisions.

We applied this approach through a multidisciplinary team of economists, researchers, and designers from DASA and HumanXDesign, in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to assess the cost and value of its multi-million-dollar investment in CEDI Mujer, an integrated public service center in the Dominican Republic providing coordinated support for women and adolescents across sexual and reproductive health, gender-based violence response, and financial autonomy.

Service Mapping Workshop with Multidisciplinary Team & CEDI Mujer Leadership

How We Applied Human-Center Design To Enrich Cost- Benefit Analysis for IDB Reporting

Mapping the Full System, Not Just Individual Services

For CEDI Mujer, we used service mapping and journey mapping to understand how multiple institutions interact in practice, not just on paper. Instead of evaluating each service separately, we mapped the full end-to-end experience of women navigating the system, from first contact to service completion across health, legal, psychosocial, and economic support pathways. This allowed us to capture how different services connect, overlap, and depend on one another in real-world conditions.

Identifying Critical System Dependencies

Through mapping, we identified key points where institutional coordination directly affects outcomes. These included information handoffs between agencies, service bottlenecks, duplication of steps, and delays introduced by fragmented processes.By visualizing these dependencies, we were able to see how performance in one part of the system influences efficiency, continuity of care, and overall service quality in another.

Grounding the Analysis in Verifiable Data

Our evaluation was intentionally grounded in what could be measured or safely projected using historical and operational data. We focused on variables such as service volumes, average processing times, repeat visits, staffing workloads, and user flow patterns. Rather than relying on hypothetical future impact, we prioritized conservative estimates and sensibility scenarios based on observed system behavior.

Using Lived Experience to Tell the Impact Story

Service mapping also allowed us to translate system performance into human terms. By documenting real user journeys and frontline workflows, we captured how integrated services reduce friction, shorten pathways, and improve service continuity. These lived experiences were not treated as anecdotal evidence alone. Instead, they provided context that helped explain why certain efficiency gains and cost savings occurred, strengthening both the credibility and clarity of the evaluation.

Why This Matters for The Future Of Public Investment Decisions

1 | Better Targeting of Resources

When evaluation methods reflect how systems actually operate, decision-makers gain a clearer picture of where investments generate the greatest impact. Service mapping helps identify high-leverage points, such as intake processes, coordination mechanisms, or case management functions,  where relatively small improvements can unlock significant system-wide benefits. This enables public funders to move beyond funding isolated services and toward investing in the parts of the system that improve overall performance.

2 | More Accurate Valuation of Impact

By grounding cost-benefit analysis in real service flows and operational data, evaluations become more precise. Hidden costs, duplicated efforts, and inefficiencies that are often missed in traditional models can be accounted for, while system-level benefits can be more realistically estimated.This leads to impact assessments that are not only more complete, but also more credible for budget planning, accountability, and long-term investment decisions.

3 | Improved Future Program Design

Beyond measurement, this approach directly informs program design. Understanding how users experience services and how institutions interact reveals where policies create friction, where implementation breaks down, and where redesign can improve access and outcomes.In practice, this means evaluations can feed directly into service improvements, operational reforms, and policy adjustments, not just reporting requirements.

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In Conclusion

Improving how we evaluate public investments does not mean abandoning traditional economic tools. It means strengthening them. Cost-benefit analysis provides structure, comparability, and financial discipline. Human-centered methods add system-level insight and real-world context. Together, they create a more complete evaluation model: one that captures both financial efficiency and lived experience.

As public programs become more integrated and cross-sector in nature, evaluation approaches must evolve accordingly. Methods designed for simple, linear projects are no longer sufficient for assessing complex service ecosystems. When these tools are applied without adaptation, they risk underestimating true impact and misdirecting public resources.

By combining economic analysis with service mapping, institutions can adopt a stronger standard for evaluating modern public systems. One that reflects how services actually function, how people experience them, and where value is truly created. This shift is already happening, and aiding decision makers to choose smarter, more human-centered investment decisions in increasingly complex social environments.