Finding our User Experience Journey : Mapping the users
Over the past few months a group of 9 Carers’ Centre staff have taken part in a series of mentoring sessions from Dot Project. These sessions have guided us through a range of tools and processes which can help deliver more user centred services. This has been a real journey to understand what ‘user-centred design’ means, and what it can do for us in helping us provide better quality services to carers.
It’s been both fun and challenging(!), providing us with lightbulb moments and headaches as we’ve grappled with new ways of working. As we come to the end of this first stage of our journey, we wanted to share what we’d learned and what we hope to take forward as we design new services for carers in 2021. This blog series is in several parts looking at what we did, and what we learned.
Caveat: Our journey was not linear. There were lots of circles. Lots of head scratching. Some moments where we thought we’d lost our way. Looking back we can see how all those points contributed to our understanding, and getting us to the best solution. We’ve tried to look back to show the path we took, but also show where we veered off this path, so we hope it makes sense to those who weren’t on the journey with us!
PART 1: Learning & Understanding
(Unsurprisingly) It all begins with the user
We came in to our user experience mentoring sessions knowing we wanted to use the time to create some solutions for a specific group of carers — former carers. We were all ready to create solutions from the off. But we were first asked to do some critical thinking about the users we were trying to help first. I think a lot of us found this challenging. We’re generally quite solutions driven. There’s a problem, I have an idea as to how to fix it. But the problem with that approach is: how do you know it’s the right idea? We needed to put our solutions to the side and move users to the centre in order to find this out…..
The first question we set out to answer was ‘how much do we really know this user group?’ We created an ‘Empathy Map’ looking at who a former carer might be; what they wanted to do; what they are feeling and why they might find it hard to get support. Creating an empathy map collaboratively meant for once we had a holistic picture of the experience of a former carer. Lots of words on the board were not ones I would initially have thought of, but in seeing them I realised yes, of course they feel like that. Of course that’s a challenge for them.
A second question we looked at was ‘what happens at each stage of this user’s journey through our services’? This was a brain teaser. Surely a carer hears about us, signs up, and that’s it, right? Well, we learned it’s not quite that simple, and understanding this journey in more detail was at the heart of improving our offer to former carers. Creating a user journey map of the different stages a carer goes through really helped highlight a number of things, many of which may well seem like common sense to you:
- Carers have different needs and emotions at each stage of their journey. Being aware of this can help us improve what we offer.
- There’s a lot we could improve. The How Might We section, which looks at challenges you might want to address on a carer’s journey, had a LOT of post it’s on it!
- There’s a lot we don’t know. For example, it highlighted we are not good at using data (something we have covered in other blog posts)
All of this taught us that jumping in with solutions without taking time to find out what users really needed wasn’t the best way forward. Taking time to think would mean we knew we had the right service at the end. But again, a challenge for a lot of us to accept!
Untangling issues and challenges
As mentioned, there was a LOT we could improve. But doing all of it at once, with limited resources, just isn’t possible. So how do we move forward? It could lead to paralysis of the problems feeling too big to deal with.
Pulling out all of the challenges and using dot-voting to decide on the key issue to focus on was a great way to break it down in to something manageable. Without this, I think we would have fallen at the first hurdle, given up and gone home! Our work to this point led us to believe that the key thing we needed to work on was our communications to former carers. So, let the work begin….
Getting messy
We wanted to work on carer communications. But why was this a problem? We used a WHY game tool to try and work this out, trying to get to the root cause of the problem. This did reveal a lot of interesting insights as to why we might not be good at communications, so we created some user needs statements to try and distil in to one easy sentence the need we were trying to meet. This enabled us to start collectively thinking of ‘How might we’s’ to meet these needs. But what came up again and again was ‘How might we find out……’ We didn’t feel we had enough data to develop a solution. Despite the experience in the group and the number of former carers we speak to, we hadn’t asked them the right questions to hear the answers we needed.
It felt messy as it didn’t feel like we had a clear path. We were all a bit confused and didn’t know which direction to go in. For many of us, this was the least enjoyable bit of our journey — it definitely put us outside of our comfort zone and unsure as to whether we were doing the right thing. Danny, from Dot Project, had to do a lot of reassurance at this point! But we decided to trust the process — if it didn’t work at least we’d know what doesn’t work…
Gaining user insights
To get clarity we developed some key questions to ask former carers and over 2 weeks had some conversations with them.
The results enabled us to much more clearly articulate what former carers needed through a new user needs statement.
When former carers are lonely and isolated, they struggle to reach out for support. This means that their emotional wellbeing decreases and they are in need of opportunities to connect with others.
Some of you might pick up that this doesn’t really relate to the key challenge we thought we needed to solve, which was around communications. You’d be right! It doesn’t mean our comms aren’t important, but our insights had told us this was what we needed to work on right now, so we pivoted to look at this new issue instead.
NOW can we problem solve please? :)
With a clear understanding of what our users needed, we could confidently (at last!) begin coming up with ideas. The bit everyone loves! In about 10 minutes, the 9 of us we came up with, again, far too many ideas, but dot-voting helped us narrow it to the best to take forward: a former carer ‘cafe’ or peer support group.
The next blog will look at what happened when we took this idea and tried to make it reality (it wasn’t straight-forward!)
