A remote discovery for Action for Children: our top five takeaways

So what happens when we are thrown into the middle of a pandemic, where diaries are suddenly frantic with emergency meetings and remote working is the only way forward wherever you are located?

This was the challenge we faced with a project for Action for Children, a children's charity who help vulnerable young people in the UK. Five weeks on, we have successfully wrapped up our discovery phase so we thought we'd share our top five takeaways.

Working remotely has added an efficient and economical edge to the way in which we collect, test and write up our findings. We started by conducting all our interviews on Zoom and Skype for Business, and recording them for easy reference. This is unusual in the case of a UK-based client, as we would normally be on site conducting back-to-back interviews. However, we were able to adapt to each key stakeholder’s now rather frantic schedule, conducting our interviews over the space of a few days. Perhaps an obvious win but never more crucial than at a time like this.

Now for our second win in findings: let me introduce to you our Action for Children UX mission control in Airtable.

Collecting and writing up findings in a way you can quickly and easily refer back to can be really tricky to do well. We used Airtable to accommodate this need and this included referencing historic desk research. In the click of a share button a complete UX discovery database was passed across to Action for Children.

There's no getting away from the fact that collaborating in person to solve problems that will ultimately help others is very enjoyable, even fun! But truly, the fun didn’t stop when lockdown started. We sent an invite to our best friend Miro to join our ‘Cross Synthesis’ and ‘How might we?’ parties (or workshops as they are more commonly referred to). Miro provides a great virtual post-it note board with unlimited space. We captured all our thoughts and reordered them around the board many times over. I am pleased to report not a single post-it fell off the wall during the rearranging process, and we experienced the added bonus of having everything digitally captured, instantly.

We had lots of cursors with little name tags attached, flying around our board representing each person on our team. Everyone was able to easily add their thoughts into the session simultaneously, so it quickly came to the time to prioritise our findings. For this task we had even more fun by playing a Miro-style game of musical chairs. We substituted the music for a five minute countdown timer and the chairs for five votes each. When the timer stopped, our votes landed and we were able to see at a glance who our winners were!

On a slightly more serious note. To really get what you need from a workshop that would normally be carried out in person, I cannot emphasize enough the following: prepare, prepare, prepare!

It may not be rocket science but pre-populating a Miro or Trello board with a template or an example or two, to run through at the start of a session, makes the all important introduction to a session go smoothly. You are then able to extract 80% of the value from participants (in a shorter than normal timeframe - 90 mins max in one sitting) which has been in effect delivered with 20% of the overall effort required to get to the final output. I like to call it my pre-populating Pareto principle. Add a dash of post-population and you have a fully formed Opportunity Backlog with which to move into the design phase shown below.

When it comes to flagging things up it's really all about communication, which for the most part, is operating as normal. We are still using dedicated project Slack channels or MS Teams, Codebase Kanban boards, and of course emails. The subtle change arises from each of us working independently rather than in our co-located teams. Now for the not so subtle impact: the intensity of messaging has skyrocketed!

We employed the following 3 tactics and a good dose of common sense to keep communications flowing (not overflowing), protect output and the overall wellbeing of the project.

• Flag it tactic no. 1. We were prepared to jump on short calls (5 mins or less) which quickly unblocked the way forward and cut down on countless messages and miscommunications.
• Flag it tactic no. 2. Checking in more often as a team in addition to our typical agile stand up ceremony. Check outs at the end of the day (again 5 mins or less) helped to keep the tempo of work high.
• Flag it tactic no. 3. Simply flagging up what is going on, however obvious it may appear to one individual it may not to another e.g signposting quiet working periods in workshops (simply giving ourselves time to think) which really helped with the awkwardness of it and the natural tendency to fill silence.

Forming a single project team across organisations is always a key focus right from the start when carrying out our work. At a time when a wartime-like 'all in this together’ mentality has taken hold of the nation, this mindset has seeped into our work even more than normal.

A flexible mindset particularly helped around planning. From an overall schedule point of view, we originally planned for two, two week sprints to run consecutively. In the end we stretched this to five weeks in total to include short pauses to allow for collecting valuable input while protecting the budget.

From a workshop point of view we kept a flexible approach reacting to the needs of each session. We split big sessions into two with a maximum time limit of 90 mins in a single session. If we needed more input we simply topped up with a short secondary session. The unknown unknowns didn’t quite hit so hard with this flexible approach.

Our first UK-based fully remote discovery was successfully completed by focusing on gathering quality findings, being flexible, flagging up issues quickly and of course having some fun along the way. It is safe to say the combined Torchbox and Action for Children team have learned a lot about remote working, and we're really excited to crack on with our fully remote design and build phases.