Power To Change approached us with an exciting challenge: to codesign a service flow that would help their network to support community businesses through Covid-19.

The Brief

With the impact of Covid-19, community businesses and community businesses leaders are facing multiple challenges, from the loss of income to furloughed staff to a confusing support landscape.

Power To Change approached us to help create the onboarding process into a new Crisis Assistance Support scheme, which would help create a safety net for businesses.  They needed us to:

The client

Power To Change works with community businesses to protect the services which local people rely upon. With an endowment from the Big Lottery Fund, they strengthen community businesses and take an approach that’s bold, collaborative, open and informed.

Their support is delivered through implementation partners such as Locality, Ubele and The Plunkett Foundation.

Our solution

Service design through a bespoke Design Sprint

To help create an onboarding process into the Crisis Assistance Support scheme, we devised and ran a bespoke 3 day mini Design Sprint online, adapted from our established Design Sprint approach.
Our facilitator and designer worked with a cross team from Power To Change and their implementation partners, many collaborating together for the first time.

Together we focused on BAME business leaders and dove into their needs and challenges. This was followed by concept generation and then MVP definition.

Prototype service flow and applicant user journey

A subsequent prototyping phase from our designer led to a strawman service flow and the creation of an interactive prototype of the Crisis Assistance Support application site.

Here applicants could begin their journey or arrange a telephone consultation with a member of the Power To Change support team.

Meanwhile, the Power To Change team created an MVP version of the scheme’s application questionnaire.

Remote user testing

Putting them all together, we delivered a scripted user testing session with community business leaders.

User test subjects (business leaders) were led into task based testing ‘missions’ through the application process, as well as roleplayed phone-calls with a member of the applications team.

We captured the test subjects’ completion rates, noted behaviours, errors, likes, dislikes, questions and ideas. The Power To Change team could then spot trends and themes, so they could adapt the service before launching it for real.

Impact and going forward

We are pleased to say that since user testing the service flow Power To Change have opened their scheme and received 40 applications from community businesses. 20 are planned to move into becoming the scheme’s first cohort.

Richard and Diana were excellent, and with their support and facilitation a process that could have been fragmented and taken a long time was completed in a matter of days, with a consensus on the approach we should take forward to test.

Ed Howarth, Programme Manager