Inclusive Experience Design: Local Peoples and WorkSafe Victoria
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What do these four products have in common? Bubble wrap, Dyson vacuums, WD40 and Wheaties?
All four went through a lot of prototyping before they became the products that we know and use today.
WD40 because they had 39 failures before the right formula was found. Wheaties up to 36 times before they hit on breakfast cereal success. Bubble wrap started and failed as a trendy wallpaper, and James Dyson failed 5,271 times to create the perfect vacuum.
So, prototyping is vital – though some say it can be expensive. But it’s far less expensive than building the wrong thing, which can cost you in other ways (reputational damage, bad publicity, for instance). The question then becomes, how can you test your ideas more effectively, quickly and inclusively? Enter rapid prototyping.
This is the process of prototyping fast and at low cost to better define your product or service before you build, to ensure you’re designing the right solutions for the right problems for end users.
Low fidelity prototyping involves using low cost methods to come up with your product or user flow. Paper, pens, post-it notes, cardboards, role playing and LEGO are all great tools to use at this stage.
"Discovery and learning"
Once you’re confident with how your low fidelity prototype is working, you move onto high fidelity prototyping. This will look and feel a lot closer to the finished product so you can test it with external audiences.
There’s a lot of work that can be done to validate your product or service before you get to the design stage. Local Peoples run a process called the Double Diamond, practised widely throughout the world. It is essentially four key phases.
Phase 1 is “discovery and learning” – go wide to understand as many issues as you can. Stage 2 is “define”, aiming to synthesise what you have learnt back to a concise and simple problem statement. This enables a focus on the following two phases of design and then delivery (convergent to solutions). Rapid prototyping typically sits in the define and design phase.
Local Peoples x WorkSafe
Local Peoples recently embarked on a project with WorkSafe to help them improve their WISE program. WISE is a wage subsidy that offers a new employer up to $26,000 for hiring a previously injured worker. This program supports almost 3000 injured workers each year with job seeking in cases where they have been unable to return to work with a pre-injury employer. These job seeking services assist workers to connect with employers looking for skilled employees.
WISE supports workers to overcome barriers associated with their previous injury. They might feel disadvantaged on the open job market when competing with uninjured candidates, and employers might be wary of re-injury when hiring an injured worker.
WorkSafe, supported by Local Peoples, identified opportunities to improve the WISE program to encourage greater participation by workers and employers.
The WS innovation team commenced work on WISE, which was handed over to LP after the WS team was re-aligned to another business area.
Local Peoples creating fresh viewpoints and best practices
After initial talks with WS’s digital team, a traditional jobs board seemed like a strong possible solution. And it was important to identify testing solutions before investing in a product. So, after initial recommendations, WorkSafe looked to Local Peoples to support these two key areas in order to remove service barriers and develop digital tools to move workers from hesitancy to hope.
Investing time in setting up your project for success ensures you have stakeholder buy-in at all levels, established ways of working, collaborating and communicating with teams. This is the foundation of a good project.
Local Peoples then applied the four-stage Double Diamond process, while overlaying their inclusive design principles to ensure the project was approached in the correct manner. Given the real impact on vulnerable people’s lives that could result from any solutions implemented, LP placed heavy emphasis on broad representation when recruiting workshop participants, an example of acting intentionally and with respect.
LP segmented Injured Workers by type of injury and present or past participant in the scheme, and whether they had found new work, were still looking, or had given up. LP then segmented employers by social enterprise: SME, Large Corporate and Government Organisation.
When inviting people to attend workshops, LP set clear expectations, ensuring they allowed time and space and full agency of anyone with lived experience. Even with recruitment and planning activity, you need to approach all aspects of inclusion and apply all inclusive design principles.
Local Peoples had a strong start with initial research and insights developed by the WorkSafe Innovation team. This created a springboard from which Local Peoples worked, but were also challenged to take a fresh viewpoint.
LP began desktop research that would help to give the project an idea of best practice, and good examples from the real world. This, along with workshops with stakeholder groups helped form early insights.
Examples from Agents/ORPS (rehabilitation providers) included job descriptions for these roles were often not representative of the work.
The process can be challenging to navigate at a time when these people are feeling incredibly vulnerable. So, ensure engagement with all stakeholders and weigh opinions accordingly, with end users most highly.
"It’s important when researching people with lived experience and trauma to be sensitive to how you conduct workshops and research, and always create a safe space for all participants (virtual or real world)."
In the Co Design and Ideation phase, LP ran rapid prototyping workshops, and worked with participants to develop low fidelity and paper based prototypes to co-design quickly and develop ideas together while discarding elements of low value. This helped draw together insights that would be synthesised down into the recommendation for the website.
It’s important when researching people with lived experience and trauma to be sensitive to how you conduct workshops and research, and always create a safe space for all participants (virtual or real world).
LP recommends holding in-person workshops in a neutral space, such as at a community arts precinct in a dedicated workshop room. It doesn’t feel like a boardroom or office – which may be intimidating for some – creating a safe, relaxed space. The goal of trauma-informed design is to create environments that promote a sense of calm, safety, dignity, empowerment, and well-being for all.
LP then took all the ideas and prioritised them on an impact vs efforts matrix by feature, across awareness initiatives, service and policy ideas and digital tools, to further help support workers’ journeys.
Once happy with how this looks, flows, and feels, high fidelity prototyping is next. LP built a clickable website that looks and functions as close to the real thing as possible in a platform called Figma.
Here’s an example of a prototype created for WorkSafe:
"What came out of the process was a new website, with support features and functionality for Injured Workers and a separate side to help Employers hire through WISE."
They tested these high fidelity prototypes with 15 stakeholders and refined the designs each time. The next stage was how to plan out implementation.
The priority was to work with the internal web development team to understand what elements were in their design system, and what could be deployed in BAU development there were “low hanging fruit”. And what might then form more complex project briefs (for example, integrating with Salesforce).
LP prioritised the work into phases then sprints within those phases. It iterated on the implementation roadmap multiple times before it was handed over to the Worksafe team to move forward with development.
What came out of the process was a new website, with support features and functionality for Injured Workers and a separate side to help Employers hire through WISE.
This was to make it easy for employers to create briefs, and make it easy for applicants to be supported in their journey. This included a list of WISE-friendly employers and vacancies to give job seekers confidence to use WISE. However, rather than apply via the website, workers could be assisted by their occupational rehabilitation provider to apply directly.
And there was a content plan, including Interactive videos, to guide Injured Workers through the journey from injury to work.
At the heart of the process is consideration and empathy for the people you are designing for. Through this project, LP gained insight into the powerful role human-centred design can play.
Project Takeaways
Our key take-outs from this project were:
1.) Invest time up front to ensure you set up your project for success.
2.) Engage end users at all stages: This guarantees it will solve their problems and avoid delivering an amazing product that no-one needs.
3.) Anticipate the impacts: When co-designing with people with lived experience, ensure you consider any adverse impacts (being as aware of your biases as possible) and always work to mitigate these.
4.) Invest in prototyping: It can help to de-risk projects by ensuring you deliver products and services that solve the problems of the people you serve and not the problems you think they have.
5.) Inclusivity testing: User test with representatives across all user groups. Design your user testing to ensure you are not missing minority groups.
After all, public services are for everyone.
