Weeknotes — 27 July to 10 August 2021
This week’s weeknotes are brought to you by our Change100 intern, Jack Slater and Abbie Foxton our Business Support Manager.
The first co-creation workshop for pre-application support
The team is always looking to find different ways of improving the processes of the organisation. From the very start of the application journey, we want to provide the best possible experience for the groups and organisations that come to us for funding. So naturally, we looked at improving the pre-application ‘Engagement’ process.
Prior to this study, we conducted a series of remote interviews with internal staff to gain an understanding of how they worked, the tasks they carry out as part of their role and how they support applicants. This research gave us unique insights into how the pre-application process could be improved as well as an understanding of the limitations it currently had. The main insight that arose from this round of research is that there is not a concise agreement of what the aim of pre-application support should be across the Heritage Fund.
With an understanding of pre-application support and insight into some of its problems, the team came together to create a series of three co-creative workshops that followed a double diamond design methodology. The goal of these workshops was to bring together senior members of staff to understand and agree upon the goal of the pre-application stage, ensuring consistency both within the organisation and externally. The first of the workshops was to explore the context, the purpose and the problems with the pre-application stage from a very practical perspective with Engagement Managers.
Over the month of September, we aim to conduct the final two workshops with the intention of reviewing the pre-application stage from a strategic perspective and to co-design how it might look in the future.
Designed the payment request and progress report flow
We took the current payment request and progress reports and broke them up into their individual parts. For example, questions about volunteers, questions about money and so on. By doing this, Kas Sithembaram our interaction designer was able to rework them into a new flow.
Jack, Abbie and Kas worked together to discuss and sketch out ideas for the design and content of the new process. One of the big challenges for this process was working out a way for grantees to tell us about the invoices they have that were less than £250 or £500 (depending on the grant amount). This is because in the old form people would add these up, include a total and add a breakdown of what that total included as a separate document. Redesigning this part of the flow required a lot of thinking and consideration of what the best way to present this would be and how the content would explain what to do. We were able to look back at some research to help shape some ideas we thought would or wouldn’t work and built a foundation from that.
One area we had very little research on already was the progress report because it hadn’t really been tackled yet. With limited research, the knowledge and experience of Rachel Cull and Melanie Wong to draw from was essential for helping shape the design. The flow, pages and content will need some usability testing to validate or invalidate the assumptions we have made in the design.
Planned usability testing for reporting progress design
To test if the reporting progress flow and content would work, we will be doing some initial research with staff to get some feedback. Based on this feedback, we will be able to make iterations and redesign. Hopefully, then we can test again with applicants when we have filled our open Senior User Researcher vacancy.
In the meantime, we used the Miro designs to create a prototype in PowerPoint that would be used during research to see the pages. We wrote a script in Dovetail which is the tool we use for collecting our research. We based the structure and questions of the script on Jo’s previous user research work, specifically on usability tests, to make sure we were focusing on the right things and covering important steps like consent.
Jack identified that the PowerPoint prototype could be improved by using Invision to make the pages clearer and the buttons clickable in their actual location on the page. This meant the experience would be better for the research participants and would potentially lead to more useful research feedback because the low fidelity of the prototype will be less distracting.
Melanie, Rachel and Jack will be leading the usability tests during the next sprint (10 August to 24 August). How the research goes will likely be covered in the next weeknotes.
