Developing the Skills to be User-Led

It’s essential to properly consider the needs of stakeholders and users in digital activities from the outset of a new product or campaign, yet we know user-engagement remains a consistent challenge for charities, with the 2024 Charity Digital Skills report highlighting that 48% of charities either consider themselves poor at user research or conduct no user research at all.

Through the lens of insights built during three years of Brook’s Digital Front Door innovation programme, my session will take attendees through some of the key principles needed to develop skills and build confidence in ensuring digital innovation is led by end users – and will provide practical ways to apply these insights to your own work.

Running a project that is user-led can feel daunting, but it needn’t be. There’s a range of different methods that can be easily implemented (including design-thinking, agile project management or simply the UK Government’s Design Principles), all of which can help to put user needs at the core of any new or progressing digital project. I’ll introduce these to the audience and talk through ways of applying them to your everyday practice.

We’ll also cover scale: Starting to get to know your audience doesn’t need to be an enormous task right from the outset. Sometimes smaller is better, and often relatively small changes in approach can make a big difference when increased gradually increased with iteration and continuous improvement.

Key learnings from this session:

• The key principles of delivering user led products, innovations or campaigns
• Tools and techniques to apply these principles to your own work
• An overview of design thinking, agile project management and and introduction to the Government Digital Service principles of user-led design
• Tools and techniques to get started and to build your experience with user-led product design