We drive change from our own lane

We start by understanding why your brief is important and how it supports the overall strategy of your organisation. This not only involves reading strategy documents but also talking directly to key stakeholders about how they are implementing strategy and how our work will help them to do that better. It’s this clear view of what matters to the wider organisation that helps us to maintain successful relationships and deliver digital work that is well-received and supported by everyone.

Our next step is to explore the audiences that will be using the finished product.

We do this together, identifying the various audience groups and theorise about their needs and how they want to consume content.

These theories about users are then translated into “user stories” - a short description of what a user wants to achieve and why, written from their point of view, before being validated through user testing and interviews.

As we already understand our clients’ strategy and goals, we can identify and focus on the user stories that will contribute towards these.

Even better, we can locate the “sweet spot”, where prevalent user stories align with the organisation’s goals, and plan to focus the majority of our future effort there. We decide on the minimum group of user stories to deliver and begin to plan the features that will meet them.

By the time we get to production we’ve aligned everyone’s understanding of what we’re delivering and why, so we make to sure we continue this focus throughout the rest of the process.

Using the principles of User-centred Design (UCD) helps us to continually focus on our newly discovered sweet spot while constructing the various layers we need to create truly sustainable and durable digital products.