Basis in Wales: Our work here so far
You can read this in Welsh, if you would prefer.
Our work in Wales so far
A while back I shared (in Welsh and English) about Basis’ ambition to do great work in Wales in a way that acknowledged Wales’ unique context, and how we had been building a team to enable us to do that.
But now, I want to talk about what we have already been doing here.
Over the last year or so, we’ve worked on some really interesting and diverse projects in the Welsh public sector. Here are some highlights:
- The Basis team helped local authorities in Wales to conduct user research exploring the barriers people are facing to accessing digital technology. You can read more about this research on digital inclusion, its findings, and outcomes here.
- Medrwn Môn is a social impact organisation that promotes and supports volunteering and community groups and voluntary organisations working on Anglesey in North Wales. With our support, they were able to try new ways of working and were able to experiment with self-organising teams. This led to decision-making responsibilities and boundaries being made clearer in the organisation, a greater sense of shared responsibility among staff, and they now feel better equipped to support the third sector on Anglesey. But don’t just take out word for it — read what they said about their experience with us here.
- For Cyngor Gwynedd and Isle of Anglesey County Council, we helped locality based teams to establish eight Community Resource Teams across North Wales to help older people in the community to live their lives as they want to. As part of the work we introduced agile ways of working and supported teams to conduct a range of experiments to test out new ways of working
- Working alongside Perago, and commissioned by The Centre for Digital Public Services Wales, Joe, Gwenno and I designed and delivered training for the NHS in Wales and other Welsh public services on user research. This included introductory sessions, in both Welsh and English, for those who didn’t know much about user research, as well as a lengthier course for user research practitioners to improve their skills and knowledge. 161 people went through the training in total!
- Joe, Gwenno and I are currently working with Natural Resources Wales to design the woodland creation content of their website in a user-centred way. The goal of this project is to help get more trees in the ground in Wales as part of the effort to tackle climate change. I have loved conducting research interviews with users as part of this project to test content with them, helping to make sure that this service by NRW meets their needs.
What next
Public services in Wales are going to be pushed hard in the coming months and years. As one of the poorest regions of the UK, with the lowest GDP per capita of the UK nations, the current cost of living crisis is almost certainly going to disproportionately affect people in Wales. Public services in Wales are faced with the unenviable task of managing this huge challenge, all while still coming to terms with the complexities that Brexit and Covid has brought.
Joe and I are passionately Welsh, and want to see public services in Wales, and the citizens they support, thrive. Although we don’t have the answers to the challenges we all face (honestly, nobody does), we do think we can help to unpick them.
If you are in public services in Wales and are facing a complex problem, or want to develop your team’s capacity to design user-centred services, please get in touch. We’d love a chat.
You can email me, owain.james@basis.co.uk, or Joe, joseph.badman@basis.co.uk.
