Designing with young people
User Research | Digital Strategy | Service Design | PrototypingClient: Barnardo’sDeliverable: Design principles, content strategyAims and Objectives
The digital team at Barnardo’s has been working on a new design system to ensure design and accessibility consistency across the range of digital products it produces. Traditionally, most of the products Barnardo’s releases were aimed at adults and very little was made with children and young people in mind.
To address this and make the guidance in the design system applicable to a broader audience, we embarked on a research project to understand young people's digital and content design needs.
Outcomes
At the end of the session, the outputs and notes were collated and analysed. These insights were fed into the design system and helped inform several projects, general content strategy, and design principles.
Approach
Past experiences with designing for children and young people have taught me that traditional approaches to validating design decisions and hypotheses aren’t suited to that audience. There were also challenges with getting younger Barnardo’s service users to come to us or attend a session in a lab.
Rather than present young people with a series of prototypes to validate, I decided that the best way to achieve this was through co-design workshops with young people aged 11-16. The idea was that we would run the workshops at several venues nationwide during school holidays, and the young people would be recruited from local Barnardo’s services.
The workshops I designed were facilitated mini design sprints, and the young people involved would be presented with design challenges in small groups of no more than 5. A researcher would facilitate each group with a key worker present.
The challenges were framed around themes like trust, online communication, and privacy; within each theme, we had many hypotheses we wanted to validate. The researcher used the session to informally question the young people about their design ideas, reasoning and other topics related to the challenge and our hypothesis. The sessions were designed to be fun, and In return, the young people gained an insight into what it was like to create a website and had the opportunity to ask the researchers and designers about their jobs.