Building Heatwave Ready Communities: The Prototyping Process
Introduction
A few months ago, the Product team under Crisis Emergency and Response (CER) embarked on work to develop a proactive offer of how the British Red Cross (BRC) could support people during heatwaves. The heatwave season of 2022 illustrated that England and the rest of the UK are not adequately prepared to respond to extreme heat events, yet they are likely to become more common and more severe.
We began work to understand where we would target a proactive offer through understanding the unmet needs of vulnerability groups. The Product Team, which is new within the CER, is tasked with designing and improving the services that CER offer. To do this, we use the methodologies of design thinking and agile to properly understand the problem area and design the right interventions. My role as a User Researcher is to ensure that the user's voice is always prominent and that the user is at the centre of our solutions.
Senior Transformation Delivery Manager, Melissa Colak, shared a blog about the work we had done during our discovery phase learning about what knowledge people had about the risks of heatwaves. In this blog, I will share how the team used different elements within the design and agile process to develop interventions that are user-centric and impactful.
Discovery: Putting the user first
Our discovery phase brought with it a richness of insight and findings. Within design thinking and agile methodology, it is important that we understand the problem our user is facing. To ensure we did this, the team embarked on a discovery phase holding in-depth interviews with 18 participants and 5 community centres to understand peoples’ risk perceptions and behaviours during heatwaves.
We learned how people do not see heatwaves as a pressing issue, yet they still change their practices and behaviour to ensure they are protected from the heat. We also learned how different occupations affect people’s vulnerability to the heat. It was important that we took the time to learn these findings as they would help us develop the appropriate interventions for our users.
Alpha: Working together to design solutions
1. Ideation
To make sense of our findings and to begin thinking about what our possible solutions would be, we had to brainstorm several ideas. We did this through an ideation workshop where we included various stakeholders and facilitated a process where we could generate as many ideas as possible together. We then filtered them to remain with the most viable and the simplest solutions. To ensure that this process would be as effective as possible, we included the following voices in the room.
· Voice of Intent: People with the passion motivation, authority, or mandate and who drive change. This was our senior stakeholder, who had given us the task.
· Voice of Design: People who can broker, facilitate, and coordinate, the creation of solutions. This was ‘us’ the Product Team.
· Voice of Capability: People with the resources to contribute (money, labour) with specialist knowledge, skills, and tools. These were members of different teams who would carry out our interventions.
· Voice of Experience: People with lived experience of the issue and ground-level context. People who will be users of or impacted by the solution. These were represented by the insights we received during our research (Extended 4 Voices of Design by Thinkplace).
The end of this session saw participants generate a multitude of ideas that we, as a product team, could then go through and decide which would best fit the brief that we were given. Several ideas were centred around education, communication and, creating awareness around the risks of heatwaves.
After analysing all that we had received, we decided to let the research guide which approach we took. Through our research, we found that even though people changed their behaviours during hot periods of weather, they didn’t necessarily see heatwaves as a serious issue. We also learned how embedded community groups were within their various communities and how they had unique ways of engaging with people in the community.
We therefore decided to design interventions that would give people the relevant information and awareness about heatwaves and the best avenue to reach them would be through community groups. Thus, our interventions would be centred on how to best support community groups to help provide information about heatwave risks to people in their community.
2. Alpha- Developing the Prototypes
With a clear solution of what our intervention would look like; we worked to develop prototypes to be able to test it out with users. A prototype for the purpose of our work is a product that we build with the intention of testing ideas that we can change until it resembles the final product we are looking for. As our interventions were centred around community groups, we developed prototypes that would target them. Our Senior Service Designer, Paola Salles Manica, and Content Designer, Juudit Breakey, developed three prototypes/ concepts that community groups could use to help them support their communities during heatwaves. These prototypes were low fidelity because at this stage we were testing the validity of the idea.
To ensure that we centred the user’s voice, I recruited the community groups to test our ideas with as well as designed the interview guides that we used to interact with them. The whole team carried out the testing together.
3. The Prototypes- Phase 1
These prototypes were as follows;
a) Heatwave preparedness workshops-risks and guidance
With this prototype, community groups were presented with the concept of a 2-hour online workshop which would focus on the risks of heatwaves and how to prepare for them.
b) A tailored heatwave plan for your organisation
Under this prototype, community groups were presented with an idea where they would have the opportunity to work one-on-one with an expert to create a heatwave preparedness plan that fits their organisation’s needs and resources.
c) Heatwave insight tool: A way to drive proactive action
With the insight tool, community groups were presented with the idea of a map that provides an overview of heatwave-related risks, services available and vulnerabilities in a geographical area.
4. Testing and Results
As part of the Alpha phase of the agile process, we started our testing. We tested our prototypes with 5 community groups. They included big community groups that worked as hubs, facilitating partnerships within the community, volunteer sector groups, community groups that worked with persons with disabilities and smaller more local groups which were the only ones providing support to people in a specific area. The differences in groups were important as it enabled us to understand a wide range of user needs. This was also illustrated in the different findings that we received after the testing. Our testing was done online, and we asked the community groups a range of questions pertaining to how much they liked the idea, whether it would be feasible for their organisations and what changes they would add to it. We also asked the organisations to rank their ideas based on the questions mentioned before.
Because we were testing out the validity of the ideas and not actually carrying them out; for example community groups did not attend a workshop we had created or interact with a real map, some organisations found it hard to envision how and if they would engage with the ideas. Nonetheless, we were still able to get strong reactions and responses to the prototypes.
Our testing showed an overwhelming preference for the Heatwave Preparedness Workshop. Community groups were already familiar with this format and liked that the idea was collaborative and would provide the opportunity to network with other groups. The community groups also liked the insight tool/map although it had some mixed reviews. Some thought it would be helpful for strategy and support planning, however, some were intimidated by it and stated it would be more suited for bigger organisations. The heatwave plan was the least liked idea. Organisations found the idea overwhelming and stated that they would not have the capacity, time and effort to commit to something like this.
5. Iteration and Testing and Results from Phase 2
The main purpose of testing is to get feedback that can be used to quickly iterate on ideas that have been developed. Following the feedback from Phase 1 of the testing, the team used the responses to iterate on the prototypes. Based on the responses we received, we carried over the Heatwave Preparedness Workshop Idea and the Heatwave Insight Tool to the second round of testing as well as developed two new concepts. The concepts were as follows,
a) Heatwave Preparedness Workshop and Heatwave Preparedness resources
We kept the Workshop idea, however this time, it was presented as an in-person workshop as opposed to an online session and had more topics specific to the UK. In addition to the workshop idea, community groups mentioned how it would be good to have pamphlets or material that people could have alongside the workshop. This birthed the idea of the Heatwave Preparedness Resources. These would be online learning resources on various topics around heatwaves to help communities prepare for heatwaves.
b) Heatwave Insight Tool and Heatwave Databases
We carried over the Insight tool to the next level of testing. However, since some groups mentioned that they found the map intimidating, we iterated on this idea and developed a Heatwave database, which would present similar information to the map in a database format.
We tested these new ideas with 4 community groups and 1 member of staff from the BRC. Our second round of testing re-iterated the importance of testing with different users and how that brings about different kinds of feedback. With our first round of testing, most community groups liked the Workshop idea but during the second round of testing, they had some reservations about it. For example, they mentioned organisations not having the time to attend these workshops regularly and the possibility that organisations would send individuals with minimal influence within the organisation to attend the workshops simply to tick it off their list.
It was also interesting to see the difference in opinions between the map/insight tool and the database. Although these tools presented the same information their different formats greatly impacted people’s response to them. There was an overwhelming majority of organisations that said they preferred the database to the map as it was less intimidating and more user-friendly. Again, this highlighted the importance of prioritising and understanding the user voice and carrying out this testing.
The Value of Testing
Our project ended after the second round of testing. From the alpha phase, we were able to get insights about how best to support community groups as they helped people during heatwaves. Although our discovery phase gave us a richness of insight into the problem area, the testing we did during alpha helped us further validate our interventions and make sure they would be beneficial and appropriate for our users. Similarly, testing low-fidelity prototypes enabled us to rapidly test ideas without having to invest a lot of resources (time, cost, labour) into their development.
