The freedom of an open brief: why speaking to your users is never a waste of time

When I started my user research role for Parent Talk in 2021, I wanted to get a better understanding of the problems parents and carers were facing in their daily lives. A lot was changing in short periods of time, and many parents were living in an entirely different world as we entered the second year of the pandemic.

Learning about a broad range of parent’s needs and barriers to support was my main aim in this discovery period. That objective easily lent itself to a series of semi-structured interviews, where I used a funnel technique in my approach to the questions.

The freedom of an open brief

An open brief outlines a problem, without any expectation of what the solution might be. A closed brief, on the other hand, directs the researcher/designer in a very specific direction by what the stakeholder, funder, or commissioner want.

Technically, I started with my own, open brief — I wanted to do this research as part of my entry to the role, and there were no expectations of developing something new based on that research. I wanted to know what was making parent’s lives more difficult, and if there was a gap for us to do something to make their lives easier. I was thinking a lot about Jared Spool’s advice of shifting from goals to UX outcomes.

As the interviews progressed, the insights I gathered took on distinct, thematic areas. One of those themes brought to life a complex journey of parents and carers dealing with multiple agencies, professionals, and appointments in trying to find and fight for the right support for their families — made even worse if they faced other barriers like being a single parent, being disabled or neurodivergent, having little or no income, or living far away from any professional or personal support network.

Parents made it clear that they felt a lot of anxiety around making and managing all these appointments, being intimidated by professionals, and feeling dehumanised in the process. In the best cases, parents became full-time project managers for their families, and had to essentially become experts in the systems themselves to get what they needed. In the worst cases, they felt isolated, incompetent, and were unable to provide adequate support and care for themselves and their child.

Giving space for ideas to grow organically

After doing a few weeks of research synthesis and workshops with the team, we came up with three ideas to test, based directly on those insights. These ideas emerged directly related to the insights that grew out the research.

One of them was the idea of long-term parenting support — to give parents and carers the space to connect to a professional who would help humanise and demystify the systems they were interacting with. This could include referral services, social services, schools, local council support, and more. We narrowed down further to focus on parents who have children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). These parents were amongst the most underserved, and had to face a lot of professional involvement, frustrating waitlists, and complex processes to get the right support.

…And the right funding may come

We had already been working with Twilio to build the contact centre for our Parent Talk 1:1 support, a service we had been running since 2018 on a different back-end. While we were speaking to our account manager regularly about our short and long-term plans for service development, they put us in touch with twilio.org, which specifically supports nonprofits and social enterprises to reach service users.

After running an in-person workshop with Twilio on how building long-term parenting support might look using Twilio tech — we applied to their Digital Innovation Builder grant. And we got it! The user need was clear, and we already had evidence that online support for parents works.

The lesson

This was one of the few times I’ve had the freedom to embark on my own ‘brief’. And while we can’t (and shouldn’t) always operate with that sort of freedom, speaking directly with your user group is always going to bring value to your team’s work. In this case, it gave an open space to discover needs without a lingering end goal in mind.

What’s next?

We’re planning to pilot Parent Talk+ this summer. We’re currently narrowing down the scope of the programme, doing in depth-research with parents and carers who have children with SEND, and working with our tech-for-good partners, Super Being Labs, to build the technology behind it.

If you’re interested in hearing more about this project, please get in touch at aneta.perehinets@actionforchildren.org.uk.