Immunisation Consent: Part 3
We’ve reached the end of the Discovery phase of this project. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s been a bit longer than we would have liked due to the break for summer holidays. We were hoping for an 8 week/4 sprint Discovery phase but it ended up being 12 weeks/6 sprints.
User Research
As well as the 3 schools that agreed to speak to us, we conducted 15 interviews with parents that had experience of the current paper consent process. This was a really good result for us, considering the difficulties we had finding parents to talk to.
Going where the people are was definitely the best approach! We found people very happy to talk to us and they gave us a range of opinions. The thing that has surprised us the most, is the amount of support there is for the paper process that exists. People are very comfortable doing it this way.
Maureen (Mo), Angeline and I all got involved in interviewing the parents, both to spread the load and also so that we all got some exposure to the differing views — following the “User research is a team sport” mantra— although we acknowledge that involving the service team in this could have been even better.
Our online survey was eventually filled in by 41 parents. This also showed a lot of parents are happy with the paper process, but 80% of them also said they would prefer to do it online. It’s a pretty strong result, but we also recognise the inherent bias of using an online survey to ask people if they’d prefer to give consent online!
Research Analysis
The research sessions with parents and school staff produced a lot of information and quotes that we wrote on post-it notes. Most of these were done by listening back to the audio recordings we made. These post-its are all great to look at and interesting on their own, but how do you make sense of all that qualitative data and pull out the lessons to be learnt?
We roughly followed a method called affinity sorting, that we have some experience of from working with FutureGov and our own Bulky Collection booking service to a lesser extent. Briefly (and maybe too simplistically) it means we get all of the information on the wall and discuss it as a group, arranging the post-its into themes. These themes form the basis of the insights we get from the research. We were also able to identify the main challenges and issues we will need to address.
Some of the notes also helped produce the draft full journey map, including the perspectives of our main users (School Nursing team, school admin staff and parents). We transposed the paper version onto a Microsoft Excel version of the map that included the steps of each actor, the systems involved, the personal data collected and verbatim quotes to keep the user experience front and foremost.
This was printed for us on A0 paper and we were able to use this in our most recent show and tell. It is now in a communal area for viewing and receiving feedback (by post-it notes of course!) from the wider School Nursing team.
Next steps
We need to spend some time writing some user personas based on the qualitative research we’ve done. These can help us by giving us a link to the real-world application of what we’re doing so we can keep the design of the future service centred on the users and meeting their needs.
We also need to write some well structured problem statements, which will help us to focus in on where the opportunities for improvement are.
We’ll use both the personas and the problem statements in the workshop we are planning with the service team. This workshop will involve generating ideas on how we might solve the identified problems. We’ll also try to incorporate the suggestions from parents in the research interviews and online survey.
Our next update will include the results of those sessions.
