Developing Blood Cancer UK’s approach to user-centred design
Rewind to 2018. I’ve been assigned an objective: develop and embed a user-centred approach to innovation at Blood Cancer UK.
The only slight problem? I wasn’t quite sure what user-centred design was. I recognised how important it was to involve people affected by blood cancer in decisions that would affect them. It felt like common sense. But did I know there was an entire discipline dedicated to it? It’d be a stretch to say yes.
Beginnings
So I googled. And it turns out when you start googling words like ‘innovation’, ‘user-centred design’ and ‘iterative product development’ you get amazing, but jumbled, content. You see ideologies and techniques that talked about being user-focussed, but you also see about 30 different ways of doing it.
Okay, so where should I begin? After speaking to some colleagues in the sector, I went analogue and bought a book. This is Service Design Doing. This proved a bit of a game changer and has become a bit of a bible for me.
Suddenly this ideology was becoming paired with a methodology. I started to trawl Medium, and places like IDEO, Nielsen Norman, Hyper Island and Catalyst’s website for real world use cases, tools and best practice. It was starting to come together — on paper.
Building a framework
I learnt enough to build a framework we could use at Blood Cancer UK and an innovation toolkit, which I used to develop small innovative products. I also spoke to innovation and UX teams across the charity sector to understand how the framework and tools could be improved and, vitally, embedded.
Whilst I’d created this framework, it’d be a huge stretch to say I’d embedded innovation at Blood Cancer UK. I was now using the framework, but very few other teams were. It’s not easy to woo colleagues busy trying to beat blood cancer with a diagram or a spreadsheet of a seemingly obscure concept.
Breaking through
We were then given the opportunity to work with the agency Ayup via CAST’s discovery programme to better understand marginalised and seldom heard blood cancer patient need. The tools provided by Ayup and Catalyst were so intuitive, and the research methods so rigorous, that suddenly there was another layer of understanding for me, and for the organisation. We learnt a huge amount about both marginalised patient need and using service design methodology to problem solve.
March, the month it all changed
Then, in March 2021, two things happened which catapulted the organisations’ interest in user-centred design.
- We developed a hugely successful fundraising event, Walk of Light, using the framework.
Back in late 2020, we recognised that we had a huge gap in our fundraising portfolio. We had this pool of regular givers, scattered across the UK and aged 50+. Yet our current event audience was closer to 30 and generally based in and around cities. We knew from our research that we needed to have something that allowed you to take part from wherever you were and whatever your fitness level. So we developed Walk of Light.
The event, which took place on 27th March, was absolutely rooted in service design. We listened to users from the very beginning and were completely guided by their feedback. In the end we raised almost £500,0000 from the event, the most successful single day event we’ve ever had. Colleagues from around the organisation noticed and interest in the innovation framework started to pick up.
2. We presented the prototype developed during the definition phase of CAST with the agency Panda to senior colleagues at Blood Cancer UK.
During the CAST Discovery phase, we heard repeatedly from people with blood cancer from communities where cancer is stigmatised that they didn’t see themselves on any literature or on any websites. Peer support for people with blood cancer from these communities was next to non-existent. So we have built a prototype web page full of stories from people from these communities.
Users were finally seeing stories that resonated, tackling issues that mattered to them. And, internally, colleagues were starting to see that the framework could do much more than just build a fundraising event.
So where are we at?
Well, we’re not there yet, but suddenly I’m getting loads of enquiries from across the organisation about user-centred design and how they can use the framework to meet their team’s needs.
So, we’ve developed Innovation Champions training to help teams across the organisation understand the methodology and ensure the knowledge is shared.
What’s the best advice I can give if you’re looking to embed user-centred design at your organisation?
You need a gold-standard ‘case study’. Something like Walk of Light or our CAST prototype. Something that makes a difference.
I’ve realised that you can talk about user-centred design all day, but until you’ve used the discipline to make a real difference, only a small number of people in your organisation will pay attention.
Use your framework to do something great and then talk about how service design made it what it was — then people will listen.
