Redefining Q - identifying user and stakeholder needs
I worked in collaboration with digital design agency, William Joseph, to redesign the Health Foundation’s online community platform, Q.
The challenge
The Health Foundation is a leading charity that exists to improve health and care in the UK. They provide research and data, analyse policy, and through their online community - Q - they enable healthcare professionals and patients to connect and collaborate, driving problem-solving and care quality improvement.
The Q community website was developed in 2015, the result of a co-design project led by 231 of its founding members. Since then, the community has grown significantly to more than 4500 members, but the platform hadn’t managed to keep pace with the evolving needs of the community. After developing a new strategy and vision for digital, the Health Foundation were ready to begin planning a new website.
How I helped
My involvement spanned two critical points in the Health Foundation’s transformative journey. Initially, I led on gathering and defining requirements for the new Q website. Later, I partnered with William Joseph to lead on the refinement and prioritisation of these requirements to guide the design and development phases.
Image: The homepage for new Q website.
My approach
To kick-start the process, I conducted depth interviews with key internal stakeholders to understand strategic ambitions, user needs, challenges, and opportunities. Alongside this, the team at the Health Foundation had already done a lot of work to gather external user feedback, so I had a vast trove of insights to analyse. I synthesised these insights with my internal research and created a comprehensive log of requirements, mapped across various business areas and value propositions.
With a clearer picture of priorities in hand, I then helped the team to create a RFP document so they could start their search for a development partner. The successful agency partner was William Joseph, who I rejoined later in the project when I led the formidable task of refining and prioritising the 120 discrete requirements my research had identified earlier.
Using MoSCoW workshops, I led internal stakeholders through a democratic process of sorting requirements into Must-haves, Should-haves, Could-haves, and Will-not-haves. This approach not only fostered discussion and challenged assumptions, it also ensured a laser focus on user-centered decision-making.
We successfully honed the requirements into a concise, realistic, and user-focused list. This refined roadmap laid the foundation for subsequent user-led service design workshops and informed the later stages of development.
The new Q website successfully launched in winter 2024 - you can read more about it here.