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Research & Design Strategy for Policy Lab & DfE

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Research & Design Strategy for Policy Lab & DfE

We undertook a 6 month user research and design strategy project on childcare policy development for The Cabinet Office’s Policy Lab. We worked with the Department for Education to research and co-design  options for early years childcare provision that meets parents’ needs.

We did exploratory research sessions with stakeholders, desk research and worked with an ethnographer on in-depth contextual interviews. Phillippa led a series of co-design workshops across  with 57 parents, and 16 child-care providers to generate insights on childcare needs and report a range of solutions to inform national policy development.

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Championing innovation through Open Data

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Championing innovation through Open Data

Phillippa championed the £50k Innovation and Jobs sector challenge for NESTA and the ODI as part of the wider Innovation Open Data Challenge series. This involved cultural intelligence, community building, advocacy. We also provided intensive coaching and mentoring to shortlisted applicants through-out the programme.

This Challenge and £50,000 prize was won by Performance in Context (PiC). PiC developed an algorithm to use open data to put academic attainment performance into context, enabling more informed student recruitment decisions, increasing access to university and jobs.

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CX with London College of Communication

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CX with London College of Communication

We’ve been working on a year long customer experience project with front-line staff at London College of Communication.

Stemming from a Design Thinking Workshop with over 60 staff, we have supported working group of staff from diverse teams to explore ways to improve the student customer experience.

Topic ranges from enrolment to communications, and we have worked together to research and analyse pain-points in existing user-journeys and develop improved processes and touch-points being piloted.

User Research for Met Office

User Research for Met Office

We led user-research over 18 months on the latest Weather App and worked across digital with multiple teams and partners. We also helped the Met Office transition to agile project management.

We employed a range of methods to identify existing and potential users and better understand user needs, working closely with product designers to develop initial concept to continuous improvement over time.

Methods included remote diary studies, usability lab testing, data analysis to guerilla research interviews. Personas developed as part of this project have been featured in the forthcoming 'This is Service Design Doing' book.

Reflections on South West Futures

Reflections on South West Futures

Here’s a recent RSA guest post with insights from South West Futures and next steps.  Thanks everyone who helped make it happen – let’s build on it and keep raising our game.

Revealing Hidden Histories

Hidden Histories:

Archive Volunteers Visual Storytelling as part of ethnographic research

On 17th January we invited some volunteers to tell us about their favourite images from the Old Beaford Archive, as part of an HLF supported user research project exploring the potential to digitize and further develop the Beaford Archive of over 80,000 20th Century images and audio recordings in North Devon.