top of page
The Reach Foundation Project
UX Research & Service Design
Quick Project Overview
Client:
The Reach Foundation
Team:
Natalia Rodrigues
Jess Deng
Joshua Zeng
Project Goal:
Reach needed help understanding how best to train and develop its facilitators.
Constraints:
-
Budgetary: low-cost solutions were a must.
-
Time: three weeks sprint in Agile Environment.
Project Tools:
*click to see more
-
Miro Board with all the artefacts delivered to the client*
-
Trello Board
-
FigJam
-
Google Slides/Docs
UX Methods/Artefacts:
*click to see PDF
-
User Interviews
-
Affinity Map*
-
Archetype*
-
Journey Map*
-
Service Blueprint*
-
Design Studio
-
Solutions Prioritisation Matrix*
-
Handover Appendix to the client with Artefacts and findings*
Highlights:
Successful articulation and documentation of the findings and recommendations, finalising with a pitch deck presentation, making the client highly satisfied and eager for further collaboration.
This Project is all about
Advocating for The Power of UX:
A Strategic Human-Centred Design
In our first meeting, our client made this clear: one of our responsibilities would include advocating for your importance as UX professionals and the effectiveness of UX Design. Some stakeholders are sceptical about the field or unaware of its existence. Be prepared for that. You may find some resistance.

*Pitch deck presentation to the client
Well... After the presentation of our process, findings, and final recommendations, we left the two attendees highly impressed by our work, eager for future collaboration, and our client finished with a "Hell, yeah!"

That’s why I always say that UX is the iterative process of designing for people, with people. We don’t just solve people’s problems; we work to bring delight to their interaction with products and services.
Key takeaways
A safe, open and active-listening environment, where feedback is welcomed; and communication is clear and constant, is critical to a successful project.
​
Designing a service or product, especially at the beginning of the process, can be challenging, so all personnel involved need to remain resilient, flexible and understanding.
Experience Designers must always be prepared to advocate for UX, explain concepts to unfamiliar stakeholders, and sell our designs.
Project Management Strategy:

*Tools: Trello Board, Miro Board, Slack, FigJam, Zoom
Design Process:
Project's Double Diamond

The Client

Reach is a not-for-profit foundation that delivers transformative workshops for kids and youth of schools and communities across Australia. These experiences are delivered by highly motivated in house trained young Facilitators, affectionately called The Reach Crew.
Project Scope
Reach's Workshops are a Trend!


The goal:
Reach's workshops are in high demand, and they have a clear goal - to deliver 1k workshops and impact more than 50.000 young people by the end of 2022.
The problem:
The young Facilitators are eager to impact kids' and teenagers' lives by delivering powerful experiences but are running low on numbers. Only a few of them feel confident enough to run the workshops solo. The challenge for our UX Team was to understand Reach's training process, map the Facilitators' experience to spot key factors that are preventing the Reach Crew from developing faster and finally be able to do what drives them - "UNLOCKING THE POWER OF YOUNG PEOPLE SO THEY CAN SHAPE THEIR OWN LIVES!"
Insights
Sometimes the client has no clear idea of the project's scope; in this case, the UX team needs to explain that the beginning of the design process is expected to be messy and confusing, but with patience, active listening and effective communication, things will get clear.
Talking with all the stakeholders related to and impacted by the project gives a holistic understanding of the characteristics of the ethos of the institution. It helps to build a better communication strategy with all the personnel involved.
UX & Service Design:
Human-Centred Strategic Solutions

To develop good products and services that will solve people’s problems, we must apply UX Methods to uncover their real needs and combine them with business goals.

But UX Design is all about PEOPLE.
Products and services will only solve problems and provide people with tailored experiences if we talk to them, listen to them and empathise with them...
Listening to the Facilitators:
User Interviews | Affinity Map
To better understand the Facilitator's learning experience, goals, motivations, pain points and empathise with them, we conducted six User Interviews.
This will guide us to design the right design solutions, specially tailored to the Reach Crew.

The next step was to place the collected data in an Affinity Map and organise it into trending insights. We found two main issues:

1. The Facilitators were struggling with the Accreditation Process. To become a confident Facilitator that can conduct solo workshops, they have to progress within Reach's Learning Program, but the process seemed not transparent, biased, and the expectations were not clear.
2. The Facilitators needed a more structured way to access resources and training opportunities to develop the necessary skills to deliver solo workshops confidentially.
Insights
"What do we want to achieve with the User Interviews?" Having a clear answer to this question and keeping it in mind during the Research Plan is key to the success of the Discovering phase.
Explaining to the interviewees that there’s no right or wrong answer to the questions makes the environment more friendly, relaxed, and results in richer data.
Representing the Facilitator's Behaviour:
Archetype | Scenario
Backed up with the data collected from the interviews with the Facilitators, an Archetype was created to guide the team to develop tailored designs according to their needs and goals while keeping their frustrations and challenges in mind. A scenario is also important to give the designers perspective by inserting the Archetype into a context:

Visualising the Skill Seeker Experience:
Journey Map
To help us to represent and to have a better picture of the Skill Seeker's learning and development path, a Journey Map was created. Containing all the stages of the process, required actions, thoughts, feelings and pain points, the Journey Map will help us to point out the opportunities to improve the progressing journey of our Archetype:

Service Blueprint
Essential to map the interactions between the Archetype and Reach's stakeholders, a Service Blueprint was created to identify the necessary logistics behind each step of the Archetype's journey. This UX method will help Reach to have a clear picture of the required structure and touchpoints to support the Skill Seeker in achieving their goals:

Ideating Conceptual Solutions:
Because X, They Need Y
Considering all the findings of the UX design methodologies applied so far, our team decided that we had enough information to kickstart ideating conceptual solutions using the Because X, They Need Y method:

Design Studio
Following with brainstorming design ideas, we run a Design Studio with our team to sketch solutions to our Archetype's problems. This fast-paced technique helped us to come up with multiple creative solutions, which we will iterate and refine during the final handover of our recommendations:


Recommendations and Concept Solutions
After the Ideation phase, our team discussed and refined the conceptual ideas, turning them into final recommendations and addressing five main issues faced by our Archetype - The Skill Seeker.
The recommendations were sensibly designed based on the client's constraints and goals. They were also backed up with all the trending insights collected from the interviews with the Facilitators at Reach.
Strategic Design is also about feasibility. Here, our mindset was about evolution, not revolution. By managing the scope of the project, we came up with solutions that could be immediately implemented in the current learning program, accordingly to Reach's possibilities, and tailored to The Reach Crew's needs:






Deciding Solutions to Implement First:
Prioritisation Matrix
To help Reach decide which recommendations should be implemented first, we placed them in a prioritisation management method called Prioritisation Matrix, based on the variables - impact, cost, and effort:

The first quadrant contains the solutions that should be implemented first. They will generate high impact but require low cost and effort, so Reach will focus on the solutions with the lowest risk:


Wrapping Up
The Expected Outcome:
Confident Facilitators Flying Solo
More Workshops Delivered
Youth Empowered and Impacted by The Crew


bottom of page