The Problem

  • LCN is the membership body for Law Centres across the UK.
  • Early in 2020, we recognised that our members area was not fit for purpose, best-practice guidance needed to be written and disseminated across the Network to support Law Centres and communities of practice needed a hub to flourish.

The Approach

  • Given the complexity of this problem, we decided to split the project into component parts:
    • Community Project (focused on connection and collaboration)
    • Content management Project (this was an existing project, focused on developing best practice guidance for managers)
  • We drew from existing research about the needs of our users (Law Centre staff) and took inspiration from help-desks like Help Scout. We co-designed journey maps and produced low-fi mockups, to communicate the concept in real terms with our stakeholders.
  • Our biggest challenge was in deciding on the underlying tech we would use. We decided to adopt a jamstack approach and take advantage of Contentful, Salesforce, Azure Directory, and other third-party tools.

The Results

Measured against our objectives

  1. Members find the Platform USEFUL
  1. Members find the Platform USABLE
  1. Members feel part of a wider COMMUNITY

Lessons

This project generated SOOO many learnings throughout, which we have tried to apply to future projects. Most importantly:
  • Establish roles and responsibilities early on and keep refining these as the project progresses.
  • Leave enough time to understand how the service will support the product being developed. Especially when the product is a new offer and may lead to new processes.
  • Ensure that product decisions are recorded consistently and shared openly. This is the same for sharing insights (we produce a weekly update for the wider team).
  • User feedback is powerful. However, to be influential, it needs to be presented to senior stakeholders in context (otherwise it can be dismissed).
  • At the beginning, there were so many objectives we had for the product. We refined these down into three (useful, usable and community) and have been tracking core metrics against these objectives.
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