In the Guardian’s digital department we work in multidisciplinary teams to improve our products and ensure our readers have a great experience while accessing our content. Digital projects are usually very complex: they involve many people from different areas of the Guardian, and the products are used by millions of people worldwide.
As designers and researchers, when tackling complexity, we use various methods to learn about behaviours and explore ideas. We usually do discovery work, then facilitate workshops to involve the different internal teams, create prototypes and test our hypothesis with readers. In our current project, we felt we needed more than that to find opportunities to deliver more value and impact for readers.
As Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, said in her essay on redefining our mission, we should collaborate with readers to constantly challenge our assumptions, understand how the world is changing and what that means. So, we decided to invite a group of highly engaged readers to our lab to work together with us on the problems we have been trying to solve. In this post, we explain how we planned and executed this first session of co-design.
Co-design, also known as participatory design, is not a new approach. It has its roots in Scandinavia and has been used since the 1970s as a way to involve people in the design process. Anyone who can affect or will be affected by the products or services being designed is called a stakeholder, and the earlier we get them on board, the better and more frictionless the whole project will be.
Unlike a focus group, a co-design session involves hands-on activities, not just group discussion. In our session, although the participant readers were a group, all the activities were done individually and each one of them had their time to speak. Our aim was to avoid group bias and dominant profiles to lead and influence discussions.
Our planning started with setting our objectives and reflecting on the reason why we were proposing this session and what were the expected outcomes. Following this, we thought about the recruitment criteria of participants and what kind of reader could potentially contribute the most to our project.
Once the objectives were defined and the recruitment was sorted, we planned a two-hour session, trying to anticipate all the details and the material we would need for each activity. Here is how we broke down the time:
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Introduction: 10’
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Icebreaker to get everyone comfortable: 10’
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Three rounds of post-it notes: 30’
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Positive things about our current product: 10’
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Things that should be definitely improved: 10’
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Reasons why you pay or do not pay for our product: 10’
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Break: 5’
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Two rounds of sketching to come up with concepts and ideas: 40’
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Challenge 1: 20’
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Challenge 2: 20’
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Wrap up and final discussion: 15’
It was great to hear directly from the participants about our product’s strengths and weakness and also see their drawings with ideas and suggested improvements. But, the best part was to see them bonding as a team after two hours of working individually but together.
The feedback we received from the participants was positive and they said it was the most interactive session that they have been to.
For us this was just the beginning of a more collaborative approach with readers – something that we believe will help us in this turbulent era for journalism.