Context
As a new Service Designer at the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID), I was tasked with stepping into an existing project aimed at improving and expanding their research panel. The research panel is a group of people with lived experience of deafness, hearing loss, and tinnitus, who have signed up to participate in research that helps RNID and other researchers and organisations understand their experiences to deliver better outcomes. RNID had identified that panel membership did not represent the full diversity of the communities they serve. This meant led to turning down research opportunities, including those from corporate partnerships that are an important funding source for the charity. Furthermore, it limited the value and impact of their research.
When I joined the team, work on expanding and diversifying the research panel had been side-lined due to delays in the implementation of the new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system it depended on. The panel was being managed using a manual interim process that meant little data was collected about new people joining, and the user experience for panel members was largely rejected.
Understanding the background
The team working on the project was made up of those who stakeholders involved in its day-to-day running. They had a good understanding of how the research panel worked and where they needed it to land, but lacked the time to figure out how to get there alongside their existing workload. My role was to build an understanding of the context and challenges surrounding the work and support the team to put structure and process around the work, as well as champion user centricity.
I started by picking up an existing story map created by my predecessor, which identified the different journeys that make up a user’s involvement with the research panel and started to identify some of the tasks that needed to happen at different phases of release. The map was a useful high level sketch, but to meaningfully understand the work to be done, I needed to flesh out more detail.
Service Mapping
Using the existing story map as the foundation and filling in the blanks through stakeholder interviews, I created a detailed map of the planned future end-to-end service as we currently understood it. For each journey I mapped the user actions, staff actions, systems, and external actions involved.
Through the mapping process, it became clear which areas were well-defined, and which required focused work. I highlighted the gaps in our understanding, identifying them as opportunity areas that needed to be explored in more detail. I also annotated the map with outstanding questions we had and proposed actions we might take to answer them.
Problem definition workshop
Having built a broad and shared understanding of the service, the next thing I did was facilitate a problem definition workshop to help the team clearly define and align on the purpose of the work. They had an existing purpose statement but it had been written several months ago without being revisited and failed to capture the nuance of what the team wanted to achieve.
This was also an opportunity to start introducing service design methods and mindsets to the team. Introducing the idea that the framing of the design challenge should be user-centred helped to lay the foundation for user-centricity throughout the work. Aligning on a user centred framing of the challenge would help us check any activities that followed matched the user impact we wanted to achieve.
The second part of the workshop focused on defining clear goals based on the agreed design challenges. These would give us a measurable definitions of success we could use to track progress towards resolving the design challenges. I walked the team through a series of questions to tease out the detail of what they meant by initially broad goals like ‘more diversity’.
Opportunity Prioritisation
The next step was to bring together the high level opportunity areas identified through service mapping with the goals set by the team to prioritise the work to be done. I facilitated a prioritisation session where we reviewed and checked our understanding of the opportunity areas, then prioritised them against an impact vs effort matrix where the ‘impact’ referred specifically to the impact towards addressing our design challenges.
Once we had completed high level prioritisation, we added further layers of information by colour coding sticky notes to highlight activities that are essential to the organisation’s purpose and those that needed to be completed more urgently to facilitate other work that depended on them. We used stars to highlight activities that we could easily start now without waiting for the new CRM.
The outcomes of this session provided a clear set of priority opportunities that we were able to break down into tasks to create a project backlog.