Finding our User Experience Journey : Team way of working
After 3 months of user experience mentoring, what have Carers’ Centre staff learned about user-centred design and what this means for us? As a group we sat down to share our experiences. Quite possibly they can all be summed up in this quote:
“It was a journey, and with any journey you’ve not been on before it was full of wrong turns and dead ends. But from exploring those wrong turns and dead ends we took the scenic route and this helped us better understand the landscape that surrounds us on the journey, spotting things we would have missed if we had taken a straight road. Also, I guess the journey hasn’t finished and we are still exploring!”
Here are our key takeaways from this journey in more detail:
Collaboration is key!
It’s not that we’re traditionally un-collaborative. Everyone is always willing to pitch in and lend a hand with projects. But when it comes to tackling key challenges, or redesigning services, we’ve definitely devolved responsibility to key individuals, or specific teams. Yet the tools and approaches used in our user-centred sessions required a truly collaborative approach, with voices from a variety of levels and areas of the organisation. There was such value in this.
The basis of this collaboration was a tool called Miro — designed to get you thinking visually and collaborating together. It allowed us to hold all our thoughts in one place and work quickly through tasks, as well as enabling everyone’s voice to be heard. There were many activities (naming our stakeholders; generating ideas; dot-voting on key issues) where we could all put our thoughts down on post-it’s in Miro at the same time. Quick, easy, and doesn’t rely on stronger group members dominating the conversation (hands up, I tend to be one of those people!). Everyone had different ideas and having good collaboration tools helped show how different voices add real value when starting a new project or trying to look at things from a new perspective.
Another approach which helped was breaking tasks down in to small chunks so that everyone could help. For a busy team this was really important, but it also helped us see how much we could achieve over a small space of time. Each session we broke down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks. It was then really easy for everyone to pick off one or two activities they could do to support this and made it much quicker for us to get what we needed.
By the end, we felt like a taskforce spanning the organisation, tackling a key issue which touched every team. It was the first time we’ve done this and we loved it — so much so that we’ve set up more taskforces for key challenges we are tackling in 2021!
Insights can give you Lightbulb moments
We thought we knew our service users well. We talk to them all the time. We know what they need. Don’t we? Yet whilst we might have a general sense of their varying needs, without asking the right questions we didn’t necessarily know which of those needs are the key priority.
As mentioned in blog 1, the message we heard was that former carers valued connection. They felt lonely and wanted to connect to others in a similar situation.
“I don’t think anyone really understands what you are going through when you lose a loved one. Former carers may have some understanding of the emotion”
Yet, this hadn’t been what we’d identified as their key need! It was on the Miro board but not as a key issue. These insights were a lightbulb moment for us in 2 ways: understanding the need and understanding the vital requirement of insights for service design.
It’s about more than developing a ‘product’
The more we’ve aimed to be user-centred, the more we’ve realised it’s about a user’s journey, not just the service or product you’re trying to ‘sell’ to them. To just focus on the product misses out so many stages a carer goes through before they get to the point of deciding to ‘sign up’ or use something. This helped us realise 2 key things:
- You can’t just design products for one stage without thinking about how the carer got to that stage, or how they feel once they get there. We’d never really thought about this before. We had assumed if we designed something, people would just use it. We now know it’s far more complicated than that and we’re learning how much thought needs to go in to the journey someone takes into our service. Getting that right is key to engaging and helping them with their caring role. A lot for us to think about in 2021!
- At each stage, there were lots of things we could do better to help carers! A bit daunting, but using dot voting we were able to (collaboratively!) identify what we wanted to work on first, and what could wait. Much more manageable.
Sometimes you just have to pivot!
We were really excited about the former carer cafe prototype — then Lockdown 2.0 hit. But the beauty of this journey has been identifying lots of challenges to tackle and opportunities to explore! Going back to our Miro to see what we could work on during lockdown meant we could still use the effectively. The former carer cafe will still be prototyped, when the time is right. But in changing direction we were able to keep momentum and deliver user-centred change for carers.
It takes time & energy
9 staff took part in this mentoring — a big resource commitment in our team of 20, but it was important that all parts of our organisation were involved. We can’t transform the way we work if only one or two people are looking to work in a new way. It has to be bigger than that. But this sort of commitment, and change, does take time and energy.
For staff trying to manage normal workloads as well as learning a new way of thinking as part of a new project, it was a lot to juggle. The mentoring programme was 2 hours a fortnight, with work in between, but the headspace required to learn as well as deliver was a lot. Manageable for a one off project, but how do we now grow this in to something we live as an organisation? How can we create the space for staff to embed this new way of working? This is a key challenge for 21–22.
It requires confidence & bravery
There are so many tools we learned to use when taking a user centred approach — how do you know you are choosing the right one, or using at the right time? Within the mentoring we were reassured that they are just tools, and we should use which feel the most appropriate. But this is a real challenge moving forward without experts on hand to guide the process. Are we using them ‘right’? It requires confidence to step out in to the unknown and say ‘I think this is the right direction’ and then the bravery to change if it starts to feel like it’s not working (such as when we gathered our carer insights!).
Using the tools for the first time, we definitely sometimes felt a little unclear of our direction. “How will this exercise get us to a solution?” “Why haven’t we got an idea yet?” were just a few of the comments I heard. I think it takes bravery to trust a new process or way of working — and as the quote at the top says there was an awful lot we learned on the way even when we might have felt we we meandering a little! Sarah, our Wellbeing Manager summed this up well:
“I’d probably visualize my experience as ‘spaghetti’ junction. The task in hand might appear daunting, as you find your way through you might feel frustrated, surprised, excited, you might take 1 step forward and 3 steps back but keep plugging away at it because eventually you will be able to see the wood for the trees.”
Is it worth it?
Although it hasn’t been easy, the fact we are now looking at ways we can implement new tools and learning across the organisation (we have around 10 Miro boards live at the moment!) speaks to the value we have found in this approach. I guess our message to anyone who is starting out on the same journey we’re on is:
“Don’t go in with any preconceived idea’s, solutions or goals. The journey is your destination.”
And our question to those who are further on than we are is — are we getting it right?! Any hints and tips as we try and embed this in our work moving forward would be much appreciated we’d love you to get in touch!
