Collaborate, communicate, community: what charities can learn from the public sector
Compared to the private and public sectors, user-centered design is still relatively new to charities. Many have only recently begun to invest in the user research and design capabilities needed to improve and innovate their products and services. Often charities start by relying on agency support, then begin to recruit small in-house teams. I experienced this first hand at Action for Children. As a UX team-of-one, I worked with a handful of bright and inventive Product Managers to solve some of the biggest problems facing children, young people and families in the UK.
Pooling the knowledge and resources of this small team helped us build solutions that sought to tackle some really complex social problems — from helping parents get the support they needed during a pandemic to helping a child settle into their new foster home.
We achieved great things in our small, creative but atomised team at Action for Children. Since moving to NHS Digital last summer, though, I’ve become part of the more mature public sector community of practice. Watching and participating in how this community solves majorly knotty health problems — the most obvious one being the small matter of responding to the Covid-19 public health crisis— has given me great insight into how a similar community of practice could really benefit the charity sector.
I’m now part of a community of around 40 user researchers at NHS Digital. Although we work on very different projects, we come together every fortnight to share what we’ve been working on and to collectively problem solve. Research insights are shared across teams and departments. Training opportunities are sourced centrally and offered out to the whole community. We are also encouraged to share our work regularly with the wider design community in the form of show & tells and more focused ‘design crits’, gaining regular and constructive feedback to improve our work. Furthermore, GDS organises monthly meet ups with the hundreds of user researchers working across the public sector, who take turns in spotlighting their own areas and sharing what they’ve learned.
Having this space to talk with, and learn from, other user researchers has inspired me to plan my own research projects differently, use new tools and templates, and seek out more regular feedback and creative space to collaboratively problem solve with people outside of my immediate team. It’s also been a personal lifeline when starting this new role remotely — due to the pandemic, I’ve been at NHS Digital now for 7 months and have yet to meet anyone in person! As our Head of User Research, Rochelle Gold, points out in her blog about this very subject, the user research community has “provided a space […] for people to see a smiling face, to laugh, to chat, to vent. We’ve not had tears yet, but we all know that it would be OK if there was.”
I passionately believe the charity sector could benefit from a similar set up. Charities could learn so much from each other. Firstly, more collaboration in solving big social problems can only be a good thing, right? Sometimes the problems facing charities can feel overwhelming for just one person or team to solve. Secondly, it’s more efficient — if charities shared their insights with one another, this would prevent them from potentially trying to solve the same problem — or worse, competing for the same funding to solve that problem. Snook and Hackney Council’s pilot of a user research library sought to solve a similar problem facing local authorities, where research insights were not shared and solutions not joined up —a potential challenge that I also see facing the charity sector. Finally, a more structured community of practice would help charity researchers and designers share knowledge and best practice in just how to solve these problems most effectively — creating a better experience for their users, while keeping the charity sector from falling behind other sectors.
