Co-designing a digital community platform for Q, part of The Health Foundation
Q, a community of people working together to improve health and care, were looking to reimagine their community space. After working with Q on their digital strategy and joining journey, Joy partnered with William Joseph to bring a co-design approach to the redesign and replatforming of Q’s digital community space.
This project was delivered via William Joseph who led the project.
Working with a co-design cohort.
We worked alongside the team at Q to recruit, onboard and develop relationships with a small group of members that would work alongside the team through the co-design process. We were conscious of recruiting for diversity as well as getting a mix of different roles, levels of seniority and geographical locations. We ensured the cohort were incentivised for their participation and people were aware of the commitment required upfront, being busy healthcare professionals.
Co-designing right from the start.
We worked with the co-design cohort right from the start of the project. Q had already done a lot of work internally to gather the requirements for the new community space and we started by working with members to prioritise these requirements together. These requirements were used by the William Joseph team to assess digital community products available on the market to create a shortlist.
This project involved a website build alongside customisation and integration of an off the shelf digital community space. We worked hard to ensure the co-design cohort were influencing key decision making without having to understand the detail of the technical side of the project. We were also conscious of the people we were working with having busy schedules so we worked hard to design the engagement in such a way they could fit it around their work and lives.
A mix of engagement methods.
We ran a mix of online and in-person workshops to cater for different engagement preferences but also ensure we could involve the cohort in a range of co-design activities, some of which were better suited to an in-person environment, and some a digital space.
We ran exercises that allowed the cohort to contribute to key aspects of the redesign like the website navigation and content creation. Members also co-designed resources that would be available on the website and worked together to design the journeys from the website into the community space.
“Emma was instrumental in setting up and working with an incredibly engaged group of diverse users to co-design the Q Community product. This group ensured that we made design decisions that worked for the audience and built equity into the product journeys.”
- James Gadsby Peet, Director of Digital & Strategy at William Joseph
Continued involvement.
As the project continued, Joy’s involvement reduced with Q taking responsibility for ensuring the co-design cohort continued to be involved at key points in the project when testing was required. William Joseph also worked to ensure continuous testing of the designs with a wider group of members who had not been involved in the co-design process.