What I learned from my first co-produced design project
Our content design team at Scope ran a co-produced project to help newly disabled people find our information and advice. You can read more about the project and reflections from other team members here.
I was the user researcher in this small team. I was also managing Ruth and Sue (our co-producers) which meant I was their main point of contact and support.
What I learned:
I went into the project aiming to create an environment where everyone could have equal influence on design decisions, where we could come to solutions that everyone would agree on. Now I know that aim is not necessarily realistic or helpful.
Next time I will focus on defining roles together, and agreeing on who holds the final decision for different parts of the work. Everyone can have equally meaningful roles and responsibilities in the project, without having equal authority on every decision.
For example, as a user researcher I won’t decide on copy. I can express what our audience might need from it, but the wording will be the responsibility of the content designer or editor.
This brings me onto my next reflection, defining the role of the co-producer.
Some roles have clear responsibilities, for example our product owner James held the final decision on which dynamic features we could include because he knows the limits of our Content Management System
But the role of co-producers will depend on the reasons you are bringing them into the team. In defining co-producers’ roles (with co-producers!), it is important to be clear on why you are doing co-production in the first place.
Scope believes in co-production, so we brought Ruth and Sue into the team because they were interested in the project and we believed that when designing for disabled people, bringing more people with lived experience of disability into the team was the right thing to do.
I learned from this project that good intentions are not enough to make co-production work. You also need to be clear on what co-producers want to gain from the project and what you want the project to gain from having co-producers involved. The role of co-producers will follow.
Co-production versus user research? You need both.
What co-production and user research have in common is the aim to bring the lived experiences of the people using your service into the design process. I almost called this blog “From user research to co-production”. As if co-production was a progression from user research to something more impactful.
A lot of emphasis is put on lived experience in design. There is no substitute for it. Having lived experience of something is not comparable to having heard about the lived experiences of others. But this project has taught me that in design you need both.
As a user researcher I am privileged to hear people’s stories all the time. Thanks to those willing to share, I have a broad (but still growing) awareness of the situations disabled people navigate.
As disabled people, Ruth and Sue(our co-producers) have unique perspectives on disability that are embodied and personal.
My job is to express this breadth of experience to the designers I work with, so that they know who they are creating for, and what information we need to provide to them. What I can’t do (as a non-disabled person) is foresee the impact that a design decision might have on a disabled person without asking them. That’s what Ruth and Sue can do.
Good user research means considering a broad range of situations that people may face when using your service. It means that co-producers don’t carry the weight of representing all disabled people. Co-production means building accessibility into your processes. It means guarding against omissions that result in inaccessible design. You need both.
The limits of co-production
My final reflection is about the limits of co-production. It often involves employing people on a temporary contract. Is there a more sustainable way that would benefit all work, not just single projects? Could we support co-producers to learn skills that would enable them to continue their work, rather than saying goodbye when the project ends? Could we just employ more disabled people? I would hate co-production to be homogenous and inaccessible organisations’ answer to calls for more diversity in their workforce. If you want to make services or products accessible long term, you need disabled designers, user researchers and developers working permanently in your teams.
