Using time on furlough and design thinking to help the COVID response
In March myself, Natalie and Rebecca were placed on Furlough as a precaution in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the following post we share our experiences of volunteering during this time to help with the COVID-19 response.
Introduction
So, at the beginning of April, Kainos decided to take a cautious approach (like most sensible organisations) and place some employees on furlough due to the impact of the COVID pandemic. Natalie, Rebecca and I found ourselves among the few that were pulled from our projects and placed on this scheme. As we were all graduates, we found ourselves really worried that this time lost from projects would put a pause on our career development. We decided that because we all knew each other well and enjoyed working together that we should look for some volunteer UX projects to join!
Rebecca came across a website called ‘HelpwithCovid’ that seemed perfect. It allowed us to browse a range of UX projects and select which ones we found most suitable and most interesting.
Reach4Help
Using this website, we were able to research different projects and see which suited us best. The first project we reached out to volunteer for was called Reach4Help. This open project is designed to address issues which have presented in light of COVID-19. The project was designed to help coordinate volunteer workforce and to prioritise and fulfil requests. Their main purpose was to connect people in need, with people who could help, with things such as food shopping, picking up medication or even dog walking.
After we reached out to the project we were then onboarded and met some of the other volunteers. During our onboarding they made it clear that their main focus had been around the UI and the tech, and that we were the first solely UX volunteers on the project.
During these sessions we were taken through their designs, and they had tasked us with the website redesign. From what we gathered during that session we knew they wanted UX help but also got the impression that they wanted more of a quick fix on what they already had, as their main aim was to release the service as soon as possible.
The designs that Reach4Help had were created from instinct and they hadn’t conducted any research or even tested their designs. So, from this we knew that we wanted to do it right way around, which meant we really had to push forward the idea of doing a two-week design sprint in order to help deliver something which was tested and usable.
We split the design sprint into 2 weeks, the first one was for discovery and the second week for design and iterations. During these two weeks we completed a variety of tasks:
Week 1 (Research week):
- Current site teardown
- Competitor analysis
- Identified areas that needed testing
- Identify main features we wanted to include in our designs
- Created and released a survey (this gave us a good foundation to go on, compared to the limited information we had previously)
Week 2 (Design week):
- Created screens using Figma
- Used Invision to prototype
- Conducted two rounds of usability testing
- Iterated on our designs based on feedback
At the end of the two-week design sprint we managed to handover a tested prototype and a summary report of recommendations from our usability tests. This was an intense but productive two weeks. Interestingly, our usability sessions were a first for some of the other volunteers and we gained feedback that it definitely helped to spark some initial understanding in the value of UX. This was really good feedback considering that most of the previous designs had been created through instinct.
Curio
After we completed what was required from us on Reach4Help, we still wanted to continue to help out on more projects, and it was great timing because it was around then that furlough was actually extended for all of us!
We decided to go back to the ‘Help with Covid’ website and came across Curio. Curio is a service which facilitates online coaching groups, mainly focusing on personal growth. Curio was launched during the peak of COVID, and their main aim is to help people live better lives, regardless of how unpredictable the world is, which was really fitting considering we were in the middle of a pandemic.
This project was much more research focused than Reach4Help as it was still in the discovery phase. The founder had concepts and a vision but needed to understand and connect the different elements of the potential service. After onboarding this project, we were pleased to find out that we weren’t the only UX volunteers helping. Having a whole UX team on this project meant that during the weekly calls we got the opportunity to speak to volunteers from so many different companies and countries.
Our main focus on this project was understanding the therapist’s journey into Curio and then how they would facilitate group sessions. The aim was to gain insights on how to retain therapists but also with who should be recruited in the future. For this we joined a virtual facilitation session which allowed us to do some virtual contextual research into the therapists. We witnessed the onboarding process into Curio and what was expected of the therapist’s when they facilitated these group sessions. This really gave us some good insights, which we used to create the user personas and scenarios. In addition, we then did a follow up survey to unpick and understand certain aspects more.
From here we took part in an affinity mapping session led by the service designer on the project before creating an ‘as-is’ journey. Bringing together all the research we had conducted allowed us to highlight the pain points and gaps in the current journey. We presented these findings as well as our recommendations of where to go next to the team at Curio. Our intention was that following this we would then begin working on some designs and exploring this journey further.
Main takeaways
Both of these projects were amazing to get involved with and we can all confidently say that we’ve learnt so much from them. As Natalie was a researcher she was able to get more experience in the design side of things like creating screens in Figma and user journeys, and as for myself and Rebecca we were able to get more involved with things like creating surveys and reports and then also analysing the findings, so this was a really cool aspect for us all.
One of the things that stood out to us the most was being thrown into more challenging situations, especially since we’re all so junior it’s not something we’d ever dealt with before. An example of this was during our two-week design sprint on the first project, another volunteer challenged us as they were mainly focused on getting the product out quickly rather than take the time to understand the users. We were able to stand up and argue our points, and in the end got them to see how important UX design and research is!
All in all this was a really valuable experience and we highly recommend anyone to get involved if they get the opportunity. We have included some links below;
