Connecting Families: Mid-Sprint Notes from Develop
Communications and Design Manager | @tweetssavepaper
WHAT WE’RE DOING…
We’re halfway through DEVELOP – this is the part of the project where we flesh out the prototypes we landed on during DEFINE, by carrying out small, quick tests with families and early years practitioners to get their feedback.
The five ideas
The five partners have chosen a range of ideas to work on, each of which builds on the opportunities we identified during DEFINE, based on our research to date:
Over the last couple of weeks, the five partners have been developing their prototypes by creating storyboards and mockups and running these past their families and staff. At the same time, we’ve been sharing their ideas on social media and directly with others in the sector, to get their feedback (there’s still time to input! See our twitter thread here).
9 steps for reaching digitally excluded families
We’ve also consolidated all of our research into another prototype: ‘9 steps for reaching digitally excluded families’. These are some principles for reaching digitally excluded families that pull together everything we’ve learned over the last couple of months.
We’ve been getting feedback on these steps from designers and early years professionals, and our lines are still open – we'd love to hear from you. You can look at our first draft here, and complete a 5 min feedback form here.
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT?
Living by the motto ‘start small and fail early’ is hard! It takes bravery to share drafts of things and unfinished works.
We need to sense check ourselves: a lot of the time we may use phrases that people don’t understand. We need to take time and space to recognise if the words we’re using is “design jargon” or whether we’re over-familiar with this way of working!
Our work is relevant beyond the Early Years sector. There’s lots of common ground on the barriers we face when trying to engage in online services, and the ways in which they can be overcome. The 9-steps we’ve created are applicable to many different sectors and that’s a triumph.
The same things that made the five partners good at their jobs pre-COVID, can help them post-COVID.
Reaching families remotely still requires creativity, imagination, and knowledge and experience in supporting early learning, all of which they have.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
The charities are currently running through their second round of testing with their five ideas, while we’ve been developing the 9 steps. On Thursday 18th March, we’re having a half-day workshop to bring together everything we’ve learned about all our prototypes, and all the feedback we’ve received through our networks and social media. By the end of that session, the aim is that all of us will have the beginnings of a roadmap for developing these ideas after the project wraps up at the end of March.