Understanding digital exclusion with a design sprint
How we used a 2 day design sprint to better understand how to communicate with older people about using digital.
Design sprints are a great way to rapidly validate ideas and challenge your biggest assumptions. They’re a great tool for people who have an idea for a new product or service but here at Good Things Foundation, we want to see if they were also a good tool for researching and developing a comms strategy.
What question did you want to answer in your sprint?
At Good Things Foundation, our vision is a world where everyone benefits from digital.
When we talk about Digital Inclusion, we’re often met with “oh, so helping old people use the internet?”. We work with people from all areas of society but older people are often the stereotype for digital exclusion.
As part of our partnership with Centre for Ageing Better we wanted to better understand what it is that encourages older people to want to use digital and how we can change our comms strategy to ensure we’re using the right messaging and channels to reach them.
Who was on the sprint team?
Our sprint team was made up of 3 parts — our Marketing & Comms team, our Design & Innovation team and our partner, Centre for Ageing Better.
The sprint was facilitated by the Design & Innovation team and having our partner as part of the team meant we had a voice of authority for any decision making that was needed.
How did you make your prototype?
Once we’d developed and decided on which of our ideas to test, we set about prototyping.
Our ideas were mainly about messaging and getting a better understanding of how to engage people in a conversation about digital so our prototypes were very low fidelity. We were able to use paper prototypes for the messaging and created short scripts to start the conversations.
What did you learn from the test?
The sprint told us a lot and confirmed a lot of our assumptions. The 5 key things that we take away from the sprint are:
- Some older people really are ‘not interested’ and they’re proud of that.
We cannot and should not expect to win everyone over with the argument that they should be online. Our communications should encourage but not make people feel they have to get online. - The perceived risks of being online are not stopping older people from using the Internet but are limiting their use.
Focussing comms messages on the risks of being online (eg. identity theft, online bullying, fake news) was seen as a positive way to engage older people rather than using more positive messages that don’t explain the risk. - Targeting family as influencers can help to encourage older people to try using digital, however, family are not the right people to spend time showing older people how to use digital.
Targeting family to help them signpost their older relatives to support outside the family would be much more effective than expecting family members to have the time and patience to help them directly. - Older people who are online have often done it out of necessity rather than choice.
Big life changes can create the need for older people to get online. Accessing health and social support or managing household finances often require you to engage online. This can be a time of crisis where having to use digital for the first time is another thing to worry about. Communicating the value of digital and the support our centres can offer at this point would help reduce this worry. - Older people who are retired and who used the digital in their jobs don’t translate the value to their personal lives.
There are older people who have digital skills from their jobs but don’t see why they need to use them in their personal lives. Identifying how these skills are transferable to enriching their lives in retirement
What’s next for your project?
The insight we gathered and the validation we gained during our sprint is now shaping two things. It’s completely changed the direction of the research report that we’re writing for the Centre for Ageing Better and it’s now helping us to change our messaging for older people.
What worked/didn’t work about the sprint process?
What worked?
- Getting a cross functional team into a room to focus on one thing really helped us to make huge progress in a very short space of time.
- Having our partner as part of the sprint team helped us to remain focussed on the aim of the sprint and helped to build a stronger relationship with them.
- Being strict with our time forced us to be quick and open about our ideas.
What didn’t work?
- We didn’t pre-plan our testing and so we didn’t recruit users until the day which meant our on the street testing was rushed.
- Not recruiting users meant we were not targeting our testing with a wide enough representation of older people.
Did you make any modifications to the process?
Our main constraint — we had 2 days, not 5. That’s not a problem for a design sprint though — it’s about the 5 steps, not the 5 days right? With some strong facilitation, we were able to get through all 5 steps in 2 days.
That was the initial plan, but in fact we ended up planning to do the 5 steps in 1 day and then repeat steps 3–5 on day 2.
It looked like this:
Day 1:
- 10:00–11:15 Understand
- 11:15–14:00 Sketch, decide & prototype
- 14:00–16:00 Validate
- 16:00–17:00 Debrief
Day 2:
- 10:00–10:30 Retrospective
- 10:30–13:00 Sketch, decide & prototype iteration
- 13:00–15:00 Validate
- 15:00–16:30 Debrief & final retrospective
Will your team sprint again?
Yes. The progress we’ve made in just 2 days and the insight we were able to gather as a team has been invaluable so we’ll definitely be keeping Design Sprints in our toolbox.
