Discovering relevant insights to finish building our MVP
Digital Service Design Weeknotes 22 March — 5 April 2022
This sprint weeknotes are from Kasturi Sithembaram, Interaction Designer and Rosa Fernandez Cerdan | Rosikaa, Service Designer.
Looking into how to introduce co-design as a regular practice
This sprint the user-centred design team took our weekly social time to talk about an interesting topic: co-design. This practice goes beyond doing research and designing for our users, their needs, wishes and interests. Co-design is about challenging us, as designers, to give more power to users in the design process to co-create these solutions or to define the problem.
We have run some co-creation workshops in the past to discuss what a good pre-application looks like and what a future pre-application process might look like., but this still a new approach to bring to the Fund. We aim to leverage the potential and value of co-creation to design better services and experiences for both, our internal and external users. .
In order to do that it’s crucial to build robust relationships among our colleagues in the Fund and it might take time to create trusted and safe spaces for co-design to happen. But it is worth trying it. You have to start somewhere! The Fund itself is immersed in a change towards more collaborative ways of working, so this mechanism might be a “normal practice” in a few years. Why not?
How would it be co-designing a new funding program involving potential grantees and different staff roles in the same room?
How would be working along a few days in the hall of a heritage building, with local actors and communities before we launch a new program?
We just need to start and evaluate the results. Our next steps are considering opening some co-design sessions for some of the upcoming designs in our MVP, such as the second payment journey for grants £10,000 — £100,000 or the final stage for all the grants, the completion report.
Research discovery for 2nd Payments to Medium Grants: What is it and how we did it
We were excited to pick this piece of work. It fed nicely into our motto of working collaboratively.
We used this sprint to investigate the problem space that the business and our users face in order to apply for and receive the advance payment of 40% of the grant payment (specifically for grants up to £100k).
We scrutinised all legacy processes, the pain points that we already know users face and what workaround processes the internal users take to mitigate this due to the limitations of the legacy system.
This technique helped us to unearth what we already know and what we do not. This will help our researchers to outline a research plan. We hope that once the full-fledged research sessions are carried out in the next sprints, they will help us identify and develop solutions that work.
Understanding the problem and setting research goals
When we started the work earlier this sprint, we thought “this is going to be an easy task, we know the user needs that need to be addressed.”
But of course, once we start exploring all the processes and user journeys one by one. and we started to question the status quo, we realised this could be a big task after all. We needed to reconvene and set fresh goals and objectives to tackle this problem. We did this by deciding what to research, who to research with and the research activities.
Being clear about objectives is crucial because measuring progress against set goals is the only way we will know we have done enough research. Otherwise, we will end up researching and exploring endlessly!
Research methods
There are plenty of research methods to choose from. But what we thought will be apt for this work are semi-structured interviews and live observations with internal and external users.
We are particularly excited about the live observations observing how external users use the current legacy forms and processes. After 2 years of interrupted research due to the big C-19 we are excited about this ‘real-time research.
Our Junior User Researcher, Jack Slater is using the end of the sprint to structure research questions.
Watch the space in next week notes to see how we got on with our research work.
Stakeholders
We know first-hand that user research is a team sport. It shouldn’t be the case where only the user researchers are going away and doing all the research and then reporting back to the team. That doesn’t work well. We actively encourage the team to come along and observe the research first-hand. This also includes the stakeholders. We believe if we get stakeholders to be involved from day 1 it will be easier to get their in buy in.
Getting valuable insights about Completion Report from external and internal users.
This is our second sprint focused on the user research about the last stage in the grantees journey: finishing the award project and sending a completion report. Along the last two weeks our user researchers have interviewed more than 10 people, including grantees and different staff. A considerable number of insights and discoveries have been collected to help the next step:, designing a new completion report stage and digital journey following the patterns and scope of the MVP in place.
Although a summary of the analysis and synthesis of these insights is still in progress, we would like to highlight some of the “worms” and pain points identified.
- The reports have a couple of purposes, but it’s not meeting our needs fully. We are not always getting the information we need to complete checks or learn for the future. We don’t always get a completion report, or it comes in quite late.
- It’s not the easiest process, with a lot of back-and-forth, manual communication and chasing. The revision process is difficult and time-consuming.
- We could offer more support, and grantees want more guidance, instructions and transparency about what to expect.
- Actions at project start and during a project, affect the reporting experience.
“It shouldn’t be daunting; it should be an exciting way to finish the project” (Participant 1 in research)
“Well, personally it was intellectually stimulating…And going in the sense of pride, when I’d finished it and I was pleased with the reaction I got from colleagues who read it in terms of its enduring worth” (Participant 2 in research)
Next steps for this relevant and insightful work are identifying six potential approaches to re-design the completion reports, based on a combination of these findings.
Using prototyping kit to prototype for Salesforce
As we mentioned in our last week notes, Rosa has been collaborating with Alicia, our Senior Developer, to bridge the gaps in design between the front and back end, They’ve created a Miro Board of all the components and features of Salesforce, to act as a prototyping kit,
This has tremendously helped us to prototype for Salesforce quicker than before. This means we had more time to gather critical feedback from the team . This has rapidly improved our productivity in identifying areas to be improved and redesigned.
Although it took time and resources away from other work to create the components and features now, this will help us work faster and to a higher quality in the future. It’s helped us bridge the gap between ideas and products, between assumptions and insights. More importantly, this has allowed us to gather critical user feedback so that we can produce a better end product.
This has also opened the UCD team’s minds to thinking about Information Architecture, how data are stored and how the data are passed on between the front and back end. This improved knowledge will be useful for us in designing sustainably in the future.
Exploring data models for changes in approved purposes.
Achieving the approved purposes and outcomes of the project is the most relevant task that grantees need to complete after getting funding for their heritage project. The Approved purposes is a list of agreements between the grantees and the Fund. These purposes are set out by the grantees when they apply and are confirmed by the Fund before awarding the project. However, the approved purpose might change along the project and this change needs to be approved by the Investment manager. We give grantees the opportunity to update progress of the project and communicate or discuss any changes in the project.
The potential changes in the Approved Purposes that grantees agree with the Investment manager need to be tracked and recorded in the system. This sprint backend and frontend developers in the team have been exploring different options to collect multiple updates across a project’s lifecycle. A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. Basically, a data model determines the structure of data. The exploration aims to change the data model so that Approved purposes and Additional conditions are flexible to capture multiple updates against an item. Another feature to explore is including the ability for staff to mark an Additional Condition or Approved Purpose as “met”, “complete” or “closed”.
