Steps towards user-centred design
Here at B&NES Carers’ Centre, our mission is to ensure unpaid carers get the support and recognition they need to stay well, in control, and feel connected.
Our National Lottery Digital Fund project has enabled us to look at how we can transform what we do to be more user-centred and data informed in our service design, and better support this mission. It’s a big challenge. We’ve always prided ourselves on including carers within our decision making, and using co-production techniques in our work. Yet the further we travel in understanding user centred design, the more we are realising how much more we could do to understand user needs and behaviours. How much assumption is built in to our decision making process. And how much better we could be at responding to user needs if we address this.
Shifting the way we look at service design requires a change in culture. So how can we go about this? One of our first steps has been to take part in a free online Design Hop — an initiative developed by CAST and contributed to the Catalyst network. Designed to support charities looking at digital service design, but with application much broader than this, the aim of the course is to help introduce an approach to design which removes assumption and puts users at it’s heart.
The online course was structured to enable us to fit the sessions in at times which suited us. Best of all, you can dip in and out of the course, enabling you to complete it all at once, or spread it over a number of weeks. Given the change and complexity we have been facing navigating COVID-19 and lockdown, this flexibility was vital in enabling us to feel we could find the time to engage.
We used the course to tackle a real challenge we currently face: how can we give carers confidence that the person they look after will be cared for if they are in an emergency.
So, what did we learn about the benefits of this approach and how has it changed what we do? This first post focuses on the user research stage of the Hop.
Assumptions are everywhere
Being user-centred challenges what you think you know. Before we had discovered ‘assumptions mapping’, it’s fair to say we used our gut instinct. A lot. We’d make relatively sweeping statements about what carers wanted or needed, and it wasn’t that we were wrong per se, but we were relying a lot on anecdotes and assumptions.
Each time we’ve actually sat down to understand what we do or don’t know about a problem, using a knowledge board (see below) we’ve realised there is a lot about ourselves, carers, or our community that we don’t know. I’ll be honest it can be a little depressing, and debilitating, to realise the knowledge you don’t have. But we’ve found it’s an essential starting point to improving our services.
Realising what we don’t know makes it really clear what we need to find out from carers in order to design a service which works for them. This process revealed that we don’t know what would make them feel confident. Without that knowledge, how can we design successfully? We also don’t know if carers already have their own plans in place, meaning their isn’t a perceived need for the service. Both key questions we need answer before beginning a design process! If you want to check out how a knowledge board might work for you try out this template from CAST.
Focusing on the user makes their need more pressing
Coming up with a user needs statement before pressing on with user research or the ideas process really put the spotlight on what we’re trying to achieve. It’s not about the tool we think is best to use, or what funders want delivered (although this is a tricky one to balance!) or what staff think is the right solution. For us, a user needs statement gave us a touchstone to refer back to, checking in to make sure we weren’t going off course and were keeping carers (users) at the centre far more than before.
Getting the right questions gets you better answers
We’re fairly experienced at asking carers what they think. We hold regular focus groups and surveys. But asking focused questions with the aim of understanding our assumptions was fairly revelatory!
Previous discussions on service design have focussed on what carers like, or don’t like about what we do. Or asked their impressions new ideas we’ve already formulated. We’ve been less good at asking about needs or behaviours. This can mean that when we get feedback, or research, it’s not quite as helpful as it could be. Coming out of the research session where we asked 3 questions based on our knowledge board was completely different! We felt we understood how carers were feeling, and what they needed. It was exciting to see the tools we’d used make a difference!
‘Feedback’ doesn’t mean ‘survey’
As we’ve started to move in to user centred research, and assumptions, there is so much we feel we want to ask carers. Yet sending out multiple surveys is only going to lead to feedback fatigue. So how could we do this effectively? We’ve discovered 2 key tips, with guidance from Ab at CAST:
- You don’t need to ask everyone, every time. With a carer base of over 3500, asking a sample each time we are seeking user input will help us hear a wide range of voices. And this sample doesn’t need to be sent a targeted or segmented email (although that is a way to do it). It could be done through the daily interactions all of our staff have with carers. If we’re just asking 2 or 3 questions each time, they could be added on to phone calls, activities, emails, standard feedback forms and more!
- Linked to the above, you don’t need to be an expert to ask a question, You need to be personable (I say personable as there is no reason AI couldn’t do it!). So rather than worrying about one staff member being responsible for research, all staff can play a part and be a part of the service design and development we’re looking to implement!
We’ve therefore decided to change the way we work and are looking at how we can ask a different set of user feedback questions each month through regular calls staff are making, setting up a Microsoft 365 form to capture the results.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel
The Design Hop introduced us to asset mapping — looking at what skills and assets you can tap in to both internally and externally.
Thankfully, undertaking bespoke user research for Bath and North East Somerset doesn’t mean we need to create an emergency plan offer (or any other service offer) from scratch. A quick google reveals there are some brilliant emergency planning offers for carers around the country, which are all slightly different in their approach. What the user research does is show which is going to be most likely to meet the needs we are hearing in our area.
Peer support is reassuring!
Navigating how we, as an organisation, look to learn and implement a new way of listening to carers, is not a small task. Managing our National Lottery Digital Fund project means I have been dipping my toe in to user centred design for the last 6 months. But we needed to consider how we could embed this more fully within the organisation.
User centred design isn’t something one person can easily deliver. It needs to be threaded through the way you work, involving everyone in being inquisitive and considering what users need and how they are behaving. Undertaking a Design Hop with a colleague has meant we are both now excited about what this approach can offer us as an organisation and we can support each other as we look to implement it. It also means we can both now champion the approach as we cascade our learning to other staff.
Additionally, being guided by CAST, and having a mentor we can go to to ask questions, check in that we are ‘doing it right’, query when it doesn’t seem to go as we expect has been invaluable.
So the user research is done, the insights gathered. The next step is to learn from the insights and look at how we can collaboratively come up with ideas to solve the problem in a way that will meet the user need….stay tuned to find out how we get on!
Follow this blog to keep in the loop with our journey and feel free to leave a comment if anything above resonates with your experience!
