Connecting Families: Sprint Notes from Develop

 

Communications and Design Manager | @tweetssavepaper


WHAT WE’RE DOING…

 
 
9 steps.jpg
 
 

  • Commissioned a graphic designer to bring our ‘9 steps’ to life

  • We’ve also tried a number of new kinds of social media engagements, i.e. polls

  • Held our penultimate workshop with the 5 partners to: 

  • Hear what they’d learnt through their second round of prototype testing, and to offer guidance and support.  

  • Explain how to do user journey mapping, to help them develop their prototypes further 

  • Receive their feedback on a few different visual designs of the 9 steps (shout out to Ellie Pritchard, an ace visual designer we’ve been collaborating with in the final stages of this project, for her work in creating these)

 
 

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT?

  • The market is saturated with feedback forms. If we had had another opportunity, would we use another form to gain feedback or could we have chosen another route? It’s hard to know given the COVID-19 context, but it’s something to think about going forward.  

  • Testing works! In our session with the five partners, we saw they had gained lots of feedback from their staff and families about how practical and sustainable some of their prototypes would be. More testing is required at this point. 

  • Staying nimble will be essential. The pace of change has been massive over the 11 weeks of the project and many of our partners are worried about the relevance of their prototypes, as COVID-19 restrictions continue to change. While some of their families can’t wait to return to in-person services, others have engaged more online than they ever did. Most of the 5 partners will offer a mixture of both face-to-face and online/remote in order to make sure they remain as inclusive and accessible as possible. Nevertheless, question marks remain over how families will respond to their offers and how things will change as the landscape of COVID-19 restrictions change. It will be more important than ever that the charities continue to watch and listen to how their ideas work with families, and remain flexible enough to change course where necessary.

  • Hybrid delivery is still a worry for many services. COVID-19 has changed everything about how we use and deliver services. All signs point to hybrid service delivery being here to stay, but are early years services really ready to move away from face-to-face as the default delivery mode? This is something that has come up in our workshops as a concern for service staff.

  • We need to practice what we preach. In every workshop we do, we model how to ask for and incorporate feedback using our 9 steps as a talking point. We’ve been really open to feedback from the 5 charity partners inside the project but we’ve not been as quick to open up and encourage feedback from a wider group of critical friends.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Next week marks the last sprint of Connecting Families: Wrap-up. We’ll be supporting the 5 partners to plan their next steps, and coming together for one last workshop, where we’ll reflect on how far we’ve come. We’ll also be tying up all of our outputs, grounded in our 9 steps for reaching digitally excluded families, to make sure the rest of the sector gets to benefit from the work they’ve done.

 
 
 
 
ReflectionBLOGfamilies, Young people, Programme Adaptation, online, Digital, digital exclusion, earlyyears, Collaboration, co-design, Service Design, Design, Rachel Lily, Digital Inclusion