UKSIC
The UK Safer Internet Center was looking to embed service design capability across their partnership so they could make better use of their shared data and insight to drive innovation in online safety.
This project was delivered with support from Martha Hampson, Natalie Shaw, Keira Anderson and Katie Slee.
Scoping the work.
Whenever we’re asked to deliver capability building, we start with a scoping phase to better understand the level of maturity and drivers behind becoming more design-led. This was a particularly interesting ask, as the UK Safer Internet Center (UKSIC) is a shared project between three charities so we needed to better understand the culture and ways of working across all three organisations.
We interviewed a cross-section of staff from across the partnership, people working in different levels and roles with various degrees of involvement with UKSIC work. We provided mechanisms for the team to self assess themselves against a design maturity framework and share their own perspectives on what design could bring to the partnership.
Co-designing a strategy.
With the driver behind becoming design-led still emerging, it felt important to revisit the strategy for the UKSIC so the team could better understand how design approaches would help the partnership deliver on their mission.
We ran an in-person Design Day to work across the partnership to refresh the UKSIC’s vision, mission and values. It became clear that a core driver for integrating design approaches was to help the partnership make better use of their shared data and insight, and capitalise on their unique position in the sector to deliver innovative solutions in the online safety space.
We used a series of idea generation techniques to help the partnership align around shared problem areas and work together to develop ideas for services that the UKSIC could be well placed to design and deliver.
Developing a service idea.
Taking the shared problem space of online harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) we brought together a small, cross organisational team and ran a design project. Following the double diamond approach we led the team through from discovery through ideation and co-design before prototyping early stage user journeys for a new digital service aimed at young people.
The project exposed the team and wider UKSIC staff to design methods and approaches that they were able to take away and use in their day-to-day work. It highlighted ways in which the UKSIC can adapt their ways of working to improve collaboration across the partnership and developed a roadmap for steps they can take to continue growing their design capability.
This funding provided an opportunity for the UKSIC to explore new ways of working and identify the value they could bring to the future of the partnership. It afforded them the opportunity to explore problems openly and collaboratively without funding dictating a prescriptive outcome.
Details of the proposed service are confidential while the UKSIC work to secure funding for further design and development work.
“Emma recognised our challenges in time and resourcing and guided us with patience, skill, and focus. She introduced our teams to new design-led ways of working and supported us to work more collaboratively together. She is an excellent workshop facilitator and a joy to work with.”
- Louiza Youlzari, UKSIC