22 September to 5 October
Digital Service Design Weeknotes
Last sprint we talked about starting to build out the legal agreement part of the service for grants of over £250,000. This sprint Kerry, our content designer and Abbie, our Business Support Manager share how the build is going and why documenting content patterns is important.
Building the legal agreement for grants of over £250,000
The investment management service is made up of 2 main parts:
- Frontend — this is the online part where grantees and applicants use the frontend to apply for and manage funding, sometimes referred to as funding front-end.
- Backend — this is Salesforce, where staff manage, monitor and maintain information about funding, projects and grantees.
A big part of this sprint has been to bring the user-centred design team into the exploratory build work for Salesforce — the backend — to think about how the permission to start information will look and work for staff. Structured, and unstructured data travels between the front-and-back ends of the service, and it is part of our job to consider how to do this. We discussed and sketched out what fields we need, where data will live and how to make it simple and easy to use.
Part of this work is us starting to apply more user-centred design thinking to Salesforce, which is very much something we would like to do. What this means is being consistent about what fields (basically, the names of the boxes that contain information) should be called, any guidance that is built-in, what information is most useful at the top of the Permission to Start Form. We are aware that although we are still using Permission to Start and the Grant Notification Letters for large grants, the way they will work will be different. For example, Grant Notification Letters will be sent as an attachment to a Salesforce email template. The Permission to Start Form will be built into the online service. Grantees sign in, read their project details, upload supporting evidence, sign and submit it. So all these slight differences need verifying, designing and built in parallel with guidance for staff.
Creating content patterns for Salesforce
As we apply more user-centred design thinking to Salesforce it is useful to document content decisions as we go. Things like, how to write error messages, bell notifications and rich text. There are lots of technical-sounding terms for the bits that make up Salesforce. We are learning with our Product Manager, Jamie, and senior developer, Alicia, what these terms are, and which bits of Salesforce they refer to, so that we can be clear we are all talking about the same parts during the design process. Documenting content patterns helps us to develop a consistent style for Salesforce, as we have for funding front-end. These patterns will be tested and iterated as we continue to build out the service and do user research. We are at the start of our journey with this work.
Ran the third co-creation workshop with Engagement staff
The third co-creation workshop took place on 29 September with Engagement staff. Our service designer, Rosa Fernandez Cerdan led the workshop, and our subject-matter experts Melanie Wong and Rachel Cull facilitated the groups. The goal was to work together to start thinking about what the pre-application, or process for getting advice, might look like in the future.
The first step was to work in small groups to identify problem statements. A problem statement is a description of an issue or challenge. Defining the problem, helps set a target for design work to focus on. It helps us understand where we are and where we need to be. In terms of the pre-application process, defining the challenges gave the workshop team a place to start to move into design thinking and how the problems can be solved.
The possible design directions were rated from most important to less important. In group 1, the most important design directions were chosen to be:
- Easy checking to see if the service is suitable
- Explain the purpose, scope and steps of our service ‘getting advice for your project’
During the discussion of why they were chosen, it was agreed that these 2 steps were foundational for making sure the service worked for both potential applicants and Engagement staff. It was also agreed that if we can get those steps right it will make getting the others right a lot easier.
The next part of the workshop was to brainstorm ideas for improvement. For group 1, this meant coming up with ideas for how the 2 points above could be solved. People were able to be ambitious and creative with their ideas. We had suggestions ranging from using Tik Tok, films and infographics to informal tea and chats and, changing the language we use.
Once we had an impressive collection of ideas we did some dot voting. Each person in the group had 2 dots and these were used to find which ideas were the most popular in the group. Unexpectedly, group 1 had a 4-way tie! After finding our top ideas, we came together as a whole to share our design directions and outcomes.
This resulted in a shared understanding between the Digital Service Design team and Engagement about what we want from the pre-application service. For now, this is the last of the co-creation workshops, but the outcomes give us a solid base to ideate further in the future.
Said goodbye to our Head of Investment Services
This sprint saw us saying goodbye to Alice Kershaw, our Head of Investment Services. Alice is off to join The Wildlife Trust as Head of Digital Transformation.
At the Fund, she was instrumental in getting the digital service design team off the ground and with the help of her leadership, we have a new grant-giving service for applicants and staff. The service has come a long way since its inception but the design and build process isn’t over, it’s just started really, and the work continues. Thank you for setting us on the right path Alice!
