My deliverables

I joined the team a year into the project for a 7 month contract to deliver research insights and design direction for the Parent and Carer Hub to inform the design testing and iteration phase in the new year.

Main stakeholders

Our main stakeholders were cross-departmental experts in child health, development, and education

Customers

Parents and carers of children from 0-5, with a focus on vulnerable cohorts

Challenges
– Limited access to and time with departmental stakeholders
– Departments that were not used to working together
– Limited time and budget to create the solution
– Designing something that would be owned and managed by another team
– Stakeholder tendency to provide critical information in an overwhelming way
– Avoiding repetition of content across departmental sites

My Process
1. Summarising previous research—Review existing research to summarise customer needs and pains
2. Ecosystem scan—Analysed the ecosystem of parent/carer online hubs to identify opportunities and help define a point of difference of the Parent and Carer Hub
3. Defining the challenge
4. Brainstorming solution
5. Playing back to ‘Parent & Carer Hub’ owners
6. Early Concept testing—Test early concepts with users to test assumptions
7. Cross-departmental Stakeholder Workshop—Share insight from the research review and concept testing to guide cross-departmental brainstorming sessions on how they can collaboratively define and prioritise ‘development actions’
8. The Discovery Output Summary

Process

I reviewed existing customer research to summarise customer needs and pains in obtaining information to support their child’s development:
– 8 previous research/testing documents
– Other related research, such as for vulnerable cohorts<

Findings

I summarised the needs and pains of parents and carers particular to finding information to support their child’s development in the first 200 days by creating a profile of parents and carers, and individual profiles for vulnerable cohorts, such as Culturally and Linguistically Diverse families, children or parents with disabilities, etc.

These profiles served two purposes:
– Summarising needs for the discovery work
– Tools for the design phase and testing

I reviewed the ecosystem of online support for NSW parents with a focus on the first 2000 days to identify opportunities for our point of difference to be meaningful for parents/carers:
– 10+ key parent support websites for NSW parents
– Parent and Carers Hub Phase 1

I have much more to share from this project that I can’t share publicly, but I can take you through more detail in person!