Sandyford Sexual Health Service published a tender for a facilitator to develop and lead an engagement event. The purpose of this event was to identify how best to translate the recommendations contained in a Needs Assessment report into an achievable action plan for short, medium, and longer term implementation.

As this was a project for a public sector organisation, we wanted to ensure what we did before, during, and after the event was aligned with the Scottish Approach to Service Design (SAtSD) principles.

Developed by the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate, the SAtSD describes:

This strongly reflected the ethos and purpose of the event. This is why, now that this project is complete, we’re keen to share any potentially reusable insights, methods, and outputs with others. 

In this post, we’ll provide an overview of two key outputs that were developed post-event, focussing on why and how these key deliverables were produced. We’ll also detail the additional links and resources that we benefited from throughout this project.

What you learn should inform what you do next …

One of the key learning points from the event was that:

Existing resources need to be reviewed and evaluated by a broad range of stakeholders. This should include adults with lived experience, parents, carers, specialist practitioners, such as speech therapists, health and social care staff, support workers, etc.

Given the volume of resources to be reviewed, this would require a substantial volume of volunteers who would most likely be working asynchronously. This was likely to pose challenges in terms of applying a consistent evaluation framework that was relevant to resources that needed to meet the needs of such a:

So, this led us to consider how might we harness the disparate knowledge and expertise of a diverse range of stakeholders whilst ensuring a consistent approach to evaluating content.

Focussing on outcomes: Identifying the guiding principles that matter most

We believe that having a strong set of guiding principles, that everyone buys into, can really help foster alignment and establish a shared focus.

We regularly work with clients to define in-house principles that are:

For the event, we ran a series of collaborative design exercises that were focused on exploring what these could be. This was achieved by investigating what participants in the room wanted people to think, feel, and do when using a resource or attending a workshop or session. Given the volume and variety of stakeholders in the room, this encompassed a broad range of:

This meant that there was an incredibly rich source of data to base these principles on.

Once we had cleansed, coded, and analysed the outputs from the event, a clear set of principles started to emerge. The highest frequency keywords were used to inform the title of each principle. Once these were identified, the next step was to ensure relevant unpacking text that was written from the point of view of whoever was consuming the content. This was achieved by synthesising the long-form text that accompanied each of these keywords.

Ultimately, the aim of this deliverable was to:

We’ve detailed the user experience principles that were defined following the event below:

These have been:

Over time these principles could be integrated with an evaluation and production checklist for new resources and workshops.

Establishing consistency: creating an evaluation and production checklist for new resources and workshops

Another deliverable that was developed post-event was the evaluation and production checklist. The purpose of this deliverable was to provide a set of simple questions that could be used by cross-functional teams to co-evaluate and co-produce new resources and workshops. 

Like the user experience principles, we wanted to ensure that anyone who was part of a working group post-event, or those from the wider profession, would have a starting point for critiquing the resources that currently exist. To ensure consistency, there needed to be a standardised approach to assessing resources even though different people from disparate backgrounds could be doing the assessment.

The checklist categories and questions were identified based on:

We’ve detailed the questions that could be integrated into a standardised evaluation and production checklist for evaluating and/or creating new resources below:

Relevance

Accuracy

Clarity

Outcomes

Although written specifically for Sandyford, these questions are high-level and project/organisation agnostic. So, we hope they can be used and adapted by others to make the process of evaluating and/or creating high-quality resources and courses a bit easier.

Sandyford is committed to ensuring that everyone enjoys good and positive sexual health. Their vision is perfectly aligned with the Scottish Approach to Service Design. Which is why everyone from Sandyford and the broader working group were so keen to share these outputs post-event.

So, if you’re looking to define a set of user experience principles or define an evaluation and production checklist that guides a broad range of volunteers we’d highly recommend reviewing the outputs produced following this engagement event. 

And, if you’d like to learn more, or discuss either of these deliverables in further detail please feel free to contact us.