Hi there, I’m Ellie, and I’ve just joined Made Tech as a Senior Designer.
I’ll soon be starting my first project, working with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).
I’m excited to work in a sector I’ve never dipped a toe into before. I imagine it’ll be quite a contrast to my previous life as a service designer at Macmillan Cancer Support; but hopefully, some of the challenges will be similar - albeit with a different set of users and systems - and my learnings will help me tackle them.
Designing with, and for, people living with or beyond cancer was both rewarding and challenging. Seeing the positive impact our services were having on people at a difficult point in their lives was a big motivator; but there were many hurdles along the way. These are just a few of them.
Researching and co-designing with sensitivity and flexibility
My first project at Macmillan was a piece of Discovery work to understand the unmet emotional and practical needs of people living with cancer - and for myself and a teammate, specifically the needs of people with a treatable but not curable (TbnC) cancer. This involved research interviews with healthcare professionals, people with cancer, and Macmillan colleagues.
I, along with most of the team, had never conducted user research with people with a medical condition before, nor discussed a topic as sensitive as experiences during cancer - so we had to consider carefully how best to approach it.
We prepared participants beforehand with short pre-calls, checking they were happy to participate and reassuring them about the process. Even so, we learnt there was an emotional impact on both participant and interviewer. To find out the gaps in support for people’s needs, we needed to ask them about the “bad stuff” - and this could be upsetting for the participant to describe, and for us to hear. Providing access to support afterwards was crucial.
Logistically speaking, we learnt that we needed to be flexible with timings and schedules. People with cancer can be affected by their illness or treatment differently from day to day, so a scheduled interview could be postponed at short notice. Some people weren’t comfortable doing a face-to-face interview but were happy to participate over the phone. And with TbnC participants, an hour’s discussion guide could go out of the window if a person had been living with cancer for many years - there was so much more treatment history and experience to discuss.
This need for flexibility applied to co-design sessions too - and also to working with healthcare professionals, who were also subject to last-minute schedule changes. One way we overcame this was by running a remote ideation session after our in-person sessions, to allow people who hadn’t been able to attend in-person to still contribute.
Balancing user differences with the need for scale
The world of cancer is a very complex one; there are more than 200 types of cancer, which can present at different stages and with different symptoms. People with cancer can experience varying side effects of treatment; and those with a TbnC cancer have additional challenges, like living with ongoing uncertainty, a more complex treatment journey, and, for some, the devastating prospect of passing away.
In addition, cancer affects people from all walks of life, at different lifestages, and in different communities. This means people’s ability to access support can vary massively.
We needed to balance designing for those differences with supporting the most people possible, which usually meant creating services that could work for many different types of cancer sufferers. We then made sure those services offered users a range of options, or the ability to personalise the service to their needs.
Involving diverse audiences
Macmillan’s most engaged users tended to be older, white, middle-class females. We knew we needed to involve a more diverse range of users in our work, but it was a struggle to reach them.
When organic participant recruitment failed to give us sufficient diversity we enlisted the help of a recruitment agency, enabling us to test possible solutions with a broader audience.
Ensuring services were inclusive for older people was also a consideration, given the average age of the UK cancer population; digital solutions can achieve scale but may not be as usable for an older person.
Considerations for public sector service design
Whilst these challenges feel very specific to designing with and for people with cancer, I can see them also applying to the public sector work I’ll be doing.
The need for empathic, inclusive research and co-design runs through all user-centered design work, so I’ll be looking to deliver this on any project I work on.
Balancing different users’ needs to create a service that everyone can use and be helped by is also something I expect to encounter, given the diversity of UK public service users.
Hopefully, my experiences at Macmillan will stand me in good stead for the work ahead of me at Made Tech; and I’m excited to learn a whole lot more as I go!