A Design Sprint to prototype Sue Ryder’s new video counselling service

We love projects where we get to help our clients transform their services, and it’s been exciting to work with Sue Ryder to reimagine their pioneering video counselling service.

Sue Ryder

24 Sep 2019 3 mins read

Digital products Charity & non-profit

Sue Ryder, the leading charity providing palliative, neurological and bereavement support, had already been running a pilot video counselling service (using Zoom) for around 6 months, and had received positive feedback from people using the service.

"This is a fantastic service and has helped me through the most difficult time of my life so far"

Anonymous service user

Let’s sprint!

We began with a Design Sprint to get stuck into the most impactful areas that we could improve upon the pilot system - but without getting bogged down by the existing functionality.

(Starting with a Design Sprint also helps us to deliver value fast and gives the Sue Ryder team first-hand experience of working with us - take a look at more Design Sprints we’ve run recently with Oxfam GB and MQ.)

Doing a design sprint was completely new territory for us and felt a long way from the traditional ways we are used to kicking off development projects. But we were almost converted by day one, and fully-fledged converts by the end of the week. It was intensive but such a good use of time.

Lizzie Wrobel, Head of Digital, Sue Ryder

Monday - Map & Sketch

On day 1 we agreed that the fundamental success of the product would be based on letting the counsellors spend as much of their time as possible doing what they do best – counselling. This means reducing the administrative friction for them in managing their appointments and their caseload – and so that was where we decided to focus the sprint.

We mapped out the product experience for the three main actors – the counsellor, the counselling client, and the Sue Ryder service administrator. We had one of the current counsellors in the room as part of the design sprint team, who gave us really clear insight into the daily frustrations and issues as well as opportunities, and helped us focus on the part of the experience map where we could make tangible improvements from the pilot.

After just 1 day in a room together, we had a set of sketches based around the day-to-day experience of a counsellor with some great ideas on how we could make their work easier:

Tuesday - Decide and Storyboard

On day 2, Todd, our Tech Lead worked on a proof-of-concept, building a video chat application using Twilio and Ben, our designer, created the clickable wireframes of the counsellor’s administrative view.

Wednesday - Create the Prototype

In the space of 1.5 days, we built a prototype end-to-end experience for a counsellor. From a “daily dashboard” showing them their appointments for the day, a client listing and client detail page, to a pop-up notification that launched a live video chat, and a session feedback form at the end. We even ran one of our sprint meetings using video chat to give it a thorough test!

Thursday - Test!

After a fast-paced start to the week ideating and creating the prototype, test day is the perfect opportunity to step back and validate our assumptions. By listening to users’ feedback, we quickly got a steer on how to improve the video call controls and spotted an opportunity to give counsellors convenient access to their clients’ notes.

“I want to go home and use it this afternoon”

Feedback from user testing

Friday - Iterate and Agree Next Steps

Running this design sprint was a low-risk way to get to the heart of the new product without spending too much budget, and to provide a solid foundation for moving into development. We followed the sprint with a story-mapping exercise to begin to define the functionality, and to prioritise into MVP, beta and live release phases.

We've happily since launched the new service - check out our case study.

We're thinking about how we can use a similar approach now in other areas of our work, not just digital, to get projects motoring forward from the get-go.

Lizzie Wrobel, Head of Digital, Sue Ryder