Navigating Discovery: Unveiling the Process of Our Heatwave Response Journey at British Red Cross
Introduction
As the weather began to warm up at the start of summer, our newly-formed product team within Crisis and Emergency Response were given the task to explore the ways the British Red Cross (BRC) could extend its support during heatwaves. Our Product Manager, Jo Straw, has gone into the details of some of the things we learned during our discovery phase, and so the purpose of this blog is to share the invaluable lessons we learned during this phase and showcase some of the techniques and revelations we had in this journey.
Our learning journey as a team
The heatwave work became the first project that our team was given as a cohesive unit. Therefore, the discoveries that we were going to make would go beyond the problem we were trying to solve and become the building blocks for our collective growth and ways of working within our team. Every approach and method we used provided us with practical insight into effective practices and the dynamics of our collaborative teamwork.
1. Opportunity Canvas
Upon being tasked with exploring a heatwave offer, we recognised the need to have a solid understanding of the problem and opportunity area, which is where the opportunity canvas emerged as a blueprint to probe questions in these essential areas. It covered questions about what had already been happening, what the problem area was, who was being affected, what success would look like, and how we might approach solving this. We took this canvas to Chris, our Head of Crisis Response, and conducted a 2-hour workshop together where the foundations of this project were set.
Key Point — it was important for us to define the project scope in the early stages to provide us with a clear sense of a path to follow as we entered into discovery
2. Assumption Mapping & Prioritisation
After gathering notes from our meeting with Chris on Miro, we dug deeper into these to pull out assumptions. Themes began to emerge covering user needs, communications, BRC’s role, partnerships, and capacity. With these assumptions on post-it notes, we mapped them based on certainty and risk.
It dawned on us that being a newly formed team, we were still in the process of aligning our understanding of key terms and concepts, realising that we each had different interpretations of the term risk. We recognised the need to address this by validating our shared understanding and clarifying definitions at the outset of tasks like this — an insight that resonated throughout various moments of our project.
Once the mapping process was completed, we went on to discuss which of the areas and assumptions we should prioritise within our discovery. This was fuelled by considering what some of the benefits would be for focusing within quadrants and assumptions until we were able to pull out the key ones we wanted to test.
Key Point — Outlining our assumptions helped us take a step back and distinguish between things we were guessing and things we were sure about. It helped us figure out where we needed to learn more and what we needed to test.
3. Research Scope
Before embarking on research, we paused to frame our research boundaries:
a) The problem we aimed to solve
b) Our research goal
c) Guiding research questions
These anchored us to deliver on our research goal which was to ‘understand where we would target a proactive offer through understanding unmet needs of vulnerability groups’.
Key point — This would be the goal we would continue returning to whenever we felt like we needed validation of the direction discovery was taking us. It also allowed us to have confidence in knowing when discovery would come to an end.
With our goal in place, we crafted a series of research questions where we noticed three distinct themes emerge. We found ourselves exploring questions surrounding individual needs, the strategies adopted by other organisations in tackling heatwaves, and the ways in which data and insights were captured regarding vulnerabilities and the impact of heatwaves. We developed a dual-pronged approach to gathering insight, one was to engage with individual user interviews and another to interview organisations.
However, before starting our research we had one final decision to make — selecting the geographical regions for our study. We considered the situations of vulnerability people would face in different settings, such as urban and rural areas. We consulted various internal and external resources to review heightened heatwave risks across areas which finally led us to Cardiff and Merthyr Tyrell in Wales, and Plymouth and Redruth in the Southwest.
Key point — Having a mix of perspectives was a real game-changer for us. We wanted to hear from a diverse range of people to get a wealth of insights. It was all about casting a wide net to gather valuable and varied insights.
4. Recruitment (interviews)
To begin our interviews, we had to recruit participants, as we wanted to hear from the public who had heightened risk towards heatwaves. Initially, we partnered with one market research agency to identify suitable interviewees. Developing a comprehensive research brief, we outlined specifications encompassing location, availability, incentives, health status, and socio-economic conditions. We aimed for five interviews per location, with a balanced mix of 2–3 in-person sessions and the rest conducted online. Our experience had taught us the benefits of this diverse approach, offering participants the flexibility they appreciated.
To streamline the process, we utilised an internal research template, slightly tweaked to suit our project’s requirements. The first agency confirmed participants for three locations, leaving us to search for the final five in the fourth location through another agency. Working against a tight two-week deadline, organising diaries, and aligning availability across these two agencies posed a challenge. A learning we took from this is to aim to work with one agency if you are up against time, or to develop a shared diary that both agencies can access.
We used the agencies only to find individuals and thought it would be easier to find organisations through desk-based research, which did not go to plan (more on this in the next section).
5. Interviews
Ahead of our interviews, our User Researcher, Mabala Nyalugwe,, developed an interview guide, one for our individual interviews and another for our organisational ones.
For individual interviews, the guide navigated through their persona, their perception of heatwaves, and the mechanisms they turned to for support.; with each section having many thought-provoking questions to encourage a natural dialogue that uncovered valuable insights.
Our interview structure involved two people- an interviewer and a note taker- either in a physical or virtual room. We offered the in-person interviews either in the individual’s own home or at a local public place (such as a coffee shop). Notably, in-person interactions led to richer insights compared to their online counterparts. But over the process, we were able to hone in on our interviewing skills and learn what worked effectively in each setting. For example, we realised that asking individuals to walk us through a normal day in their lives and then again through a day they would have during a heatwave managed to pull some interesting responses, especially in cases where people had said they had not felt impacted by a heatwave, it became clear that they had.
After some of the individual interviews, we discovered that some participants were unfamiliar with official guidelines for dealing with heatwaves. While this knowledge would inform our work, we recognised our duty of care towards these individuals. We promptly shared an email detailing government guidelines on staying safe during heatwaves.
Key point — It was important for us to strike the right balance for the number of interviews we did to ensure we had both robust and applicable insight.
The interview guide for organisations included questions about understanding their structure, the previous year’s heatwave impact, their offerings, collaborations, and the tools and data integral to their work. Initially, we anticipated finding organisations primarily through desk research and online outreach. However, this approach yielded a lower response rate than expected, realising we were essentially initiating cold calls. So, during our regional in-person interviews we used this opportunity to personally connect with local organisations through some impromptu drop-ins, which led to some great interactions and even led us down a trail of recommendations, allowing us to tap into many different local organisations.
6. Affinity mapping
One of the best ideas we had was to start a light touch affinity mapping while the interviews were still going ahead. As each interview ended, the designated note-taker would go into our digital canvas and begin to add post-it notes.
Key point — This approach proved to be a significant time-saver, as it provided a structure to our notes that formed the basis of our affinity map. This approach made the synthesis process much more manageable, as our notes were already organised and edited, compared to if we hadn’t utilised this method.
So once all our interviews were wrapped up, the toughest part started as we had to delve into all our findings. We ended up spending two intensive days in a room workshopping to try and make sense of our results. Initially, we each took a theme and broke them down further into ‘buckets’ of sub-themes. We did a separate one for organisations we interviewed and another for individuals we interviewed and came back together to rationalise our allocations and bring together insights that sat across the same areas.
With the buckets established, we went through and discussed what the key insights were from each of these sections. There were around 40 insights that came up in this stage and our goal was to narrow this down, so we decided to vote on which of these insights would feed into the original problem area that we had set out to solve. From this vote, we drew out 11 ‘top insights’ that we would use when it came to designing a solution to our problem.
Key point — Identifying themes at various stages of the discovery process greatly enhanced the manageability of our tasks. These themes acted as guides, making it simpler to approach each task with a clear direction.
7. Ending discovery workshop
At this point, we had a better idea of our problem area and felt ready to take our insight to our internal Crisis and Emergency Response team to workshop with them on what our next steps could look like.
During the workshop we presented back our synthesis to them, presented back the 11 insights, and went on to prioritise these further with the team, voting on 6 top insights that we collectively thought would have an impact on our problem area, would be feasible and that would be a BRC ‘fit’. These then became the 6 opportunity areas that we would focus on, so we went into two breakout rooms with each team taking 3 of the insights to ideate over.
We used the ‘how might we…’ questions structure to ideate in these rooms, as we presented an insight, into the opportunity area/ problem followed by a discussion around ideas for impact in this area. Throughout we would vote on the questions and ideas that the people in the room would prefer to work towards to capture prioritisation and preference.
This workshop became the bridge between us exiting from the Discovery phase and entering Alpha and guided us to the approach we would be using for Alpha.
Key point — We didn’t anticipate the extent of time required to engage the crisis and emergency response staff in this process. Looking back, we recognised the value of a more comprehensive approach. Instead of cramming everything into a two-hour workshop, we realised that a deeper session to share our insights, followed by a separate ideation workshop, would have been more effective.
Next steps
Numerous lessons were learned from this phase. The project served as our team’s first opportunity to work together, allowing us to solidify our testing and learning approach both to establish our ways of working and within the project. Early scoping emerged as a crucial lesson, one we intend to carry forward into future projects. Establishing a clear scope is essential for maintaining a north star throughout the project, serving as our constant point of reference.
Following on from this whirlwind of discovery, the team have spent the last month going from transforming ideas to developing and testing prototypes. In a short span of time, our team has gone from a seed of opportunity to creating tangible solutions.
Our overarching goal arising from discovery was to ‘add specialist knowledge to enable community groups and services better support their communities to prepare for and/or respond to heatwaves’. As of now, we are in the process of prototyping two distinct solutions in collaboration with local organisations that to test the impact that can be made. This has been our second phase within Alpha as we began by prototyping three ideas. In our next blog, we will delve deeper into the progress of our Alpha phase and what we have learned along the way (keep an eye out for this).
By capturing our journey through blogs and ‘show and tells’, we want to build on our service memory apply it to our next project and share our insights and learning with others that might be in a similar boat.
