CANCER RESEARCH UK: SUPPORT US
DECEMBER 2013
Project introduction
In 2013 Cancer Research UK (CRUK) launched an ambitious digital transformation project for its business, one part of which was to overhaul its online presence. The first phase of this project sought to redesign the existing Support Us section of the main Cancer Research UK site. The Support Us section is a high transaction area of the site where users can donate money, sign up for events and fundraising activities and find volunteering opportunities. The project involved merging 7 existing micro-sites and a mountain of legacy content into a single site with a new CMS and a responsive design. The redevelopment was done within an Agile project environment, the first project at CRUK to do so.
Audience
The target audience for the Support Us section were clearly identified as individuals who wish to donate money, time or goods, participate in fundraising events or volunteer in many different roles for the organisation. Potentially everyone could be a Supporter for CRUK, but in reality and in terms of demographic the traditional audience tended to be female and slightly older. Reaching, appealing to and serving the needs of a younger wider audience was one of the goals of this redesign.
Team and my role
I worked as a contract lead UX designer on the project. I was brought in last minute to replace the previous UX lead who had decided to leave the organisation. The well resourced digital team at CRUK consisted of a team of specialists of which UX lead was one, the others being a content strategist, SEO, marketing and taxonomy specialists. On the project we also had a product owner, project manager, a team of digital planners, a team of producers, scrum master and in-house frontend and backend development teams, all co-located in CRUK's Angel Islington office. Branding was also handled in-house, but visual design was outsourced to an agency.
A major part of my role was to orchestrate the design, making sure all teammates and stakeholders were on the same page, managing expectations as the project moved forward and communicating progress to the business.
Constraints
CRUK is no different to other large organisations going through a digital transformation program where the culture, practices, processes and technology within the business are being rethought in order to deliver more fully on the digital promise. This results in a general feeling of change and uncertainty and I could sense a tentativeness amongst the teams with the challenges ahead. There was a lot of learning going on, people in new roles, working in new ways with new processes and different technologies and this project kicked off in the middle of that.
Although the new site was to be launched on an open source framework (Drupal) with a clean slate from a technical standpoint there was still a good deal of legacy to deal with, encompassing technical debt and dependencies on other in-house technical platforms, databases, forms and customer management tools and this proved to be quite challenging.
Design process
I joined CRUK a couple of weeks before the start of the development sprints. The project itself had already been running for 6 months and a lot of the content strategy had been thought through, personas created, backlog populated, and IA agreed.
Project background
I spent the first couple of weeks taking in the 10,000 ft view of CRUK, trying to understand the organisation as a whole, how a charity operates, their business goals, historically where they have come from with digital products, how the project team operates, how design is perceived in the business, who their users are (in their eyes). I talked to a lot of different people in all parts of the business, asked a lot of questions and scribbled lots of notes and sketches.
I have seen personas used on projects with more or less degrees of success, but at CRUK they had developed a series of personas covering cancer patients, researchers, health workers and supporters that in my opinion worked extremely well. When starting from a baseline of zero in terms of the organisation holding a position on their users (which CRUK did), the personas became well embedded in the organisation gathering executive alignment on who they were serving. Supporter 'Sally' was known from the senior stakeholders through to the business and development teams.
Having taken in the wider picture, I then zoomed in a bit to the project in hand to focus on the intended outcomes for the redesign of the Support us section. I worked closely with the content team to understand the content hierarchy, business and user goals, and supported journeys. I also accessed analytics data to understand current site usage. I held a series of workshops with the production team to establish basic modelling of main content types and key user journeys were mapped out.
Concept development
At the beginning of Sprint 0, I moved into concept development, sketching up wireframes and flows and interface design patterns. I created sketches and paper prototypes for the main page templates to frame problems and understand strengths and weaknesses of ideas. I held design workshops with business teams to test initial concepts, then moved into HTML prototyping to begin working up higher fidelity designs with responsive layouts. I conducted user testing both formally in user testing labs, but more frequently guerrilla style. For these I wrote test scenarios, attended the tests, analysed observations and fed these back to the content and development teams, working together to deduce actionable insight. The visual design was handled by an external agency and so my role was to work closely with their team to maintain design consistency and coherence across the product.
Sprint cycle
Once we moved into the development sprints I worked across both a content scrum and a development scrum, dividing my time and participating wherever I thought was most appropriate for the work in hand. I attended backlog grooming and planning sessions where I was required to present the designs to the team, explaining and demonstrating functionality. The deliverables for this were sometimes click-through prototypes, sometimes static mockups and other times HTML prototypes shown on different devices. At the end of each sprint we would hold a review and invite anyone in the organisation to attend and view our progress. For these presentations I demoed our work and fielded questions.
Design review
An important part of the ideation and iteration stage for me was the ability to share my work with a special working group that met once weekly and consisted of senior stakeholders from the digital team. In this 2-hour session anyone working on the project could book time and present an idea or a piece of work in progress, not with the purpose of getting it signed off per se, but to help evolve ideas with constructive criticism.
I also opened up my design process to the organisation as a whole by sharing sketches, wireframes and prototypes on walls and in shared digital areas. I also wrote a number of blog posts detailing findings from workshops and user testing sessions.
Retrospective and lessons learned
The Support us section successfully launched on May 14th 2013 and saw an immediate increase in traffic, particularly for mobile. The foundations laid down in the first phase of the project are now being applied to the other sections of the site.
Co-creation with business teams, gave a feeling of ownership and involvement in design decisions. The business teams were a great source of information, they understood the history, they suffered the pain points and they were an inspiring source of ideas.
Having an in-house UX designer was fairly new to CRUK, taking a user-centred approach to design equally so. One thing I learned is that for my role to be most effective it is important for people to understand what I do, why I am doing it and how it can benefit the business. Making work visible, explaining my process and talking about my work was a way to raise the profile of design in the business and I was happy to find a receptive audience at CRUK. Showing work regularly across the range of sketches to high fidelity mockups was key to keeping stakeholders happy and engaged in the process.
A large and enthusiastic team to work with is priceless, but I did find it resulted in too many meetings, with too many people, with a lack of decision-making taking place. This was recognised in our end-of-sprint retrospectives and a couple of sprints in we had managed to eradicate this.
On a final note I loved my time at CRUK, it was a privilege to work there and I enjoyed the challenges of the project.
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