After three years in the Australian Red Cross digital production team, I was seconded into the newly-formed innovation team to bring people together around innovative practices and tools as the team’s Experience Designer. We were tasked with driving the innovation strategy for the organisation, establishing an innovation lab for rapid experimentation and validation on emerging initiatives, and supporting capability uplift across the organisation in emerging methodologies like Human-centred design, Agile and Lean.
With my background in the use of a diverse range of human-centric approaches to the design of digital products and previous experience as a publication designer, I was tasked with the creation of a "toolkit" to empower this new way of working.
This initiative was pivotal in nurturing a culture of innovation and agility within the organisation. By creating a comprehensive toolkit, I facilitated the widespread adoption of human-centred design principles across different teams, enhancing their ability to design more impactful, user-friendly services and experiences. This effort not only refined our internal processes but also significantly amplified our capacity to respond to humanitarian challenges with tailored, effective solutions.
"I love the design and simple explanations. I really loved being able to take the cards for the specific activities I wanted to run and either refer to them myself while facilitating or give them to people to be able to have a read themselves."
– Caitlin, Senior Officer – Strategic Projects, Australian Red Cross
This project taught me about the power of simplifying complexity into structured, repeatable processes. It required that I zoom out of my unconscious competencies and attempt to codify them.
Additionally, it taught me about the benefits of combining established, universal best practices with original, culturally-specific nuances. This allowed me to tailor a toolkit that was both immediately familiar for my colleagues in the organisation, and highly valuable for the public.
"I love the design thinking approach to solving problems. Super impressed with the toolkit Australian Red Cross have created. The coolest part is it’s available for you to download."
– member of the public from a post promoting the toolkit to their networks on LinkedIn
The final toolkit printed and assembled.
I took a an approach grounded in human-centred design to the formulation of this toolkit, starting with an initial design challenge:
How might we provide useful, tangible activities and tools to Red Cross people, so that they feel confident and inspired to embrace new ways of working?
At the same time that this toolkit project was emerging, our team was in the throes of developing and communicating its strategic purpose to the broader business. One of the outcomes of this work was my drafting of an "innovation process" visual, intended to explain the way our team worked and how we might inspire others to do the same. The development of this process was informed by the toolkit project, and vice-versa. There were multiple internal reviews and iterations of the process visual, and it was only after additional participatory design activities used through the formulation of this toolkit that we agreed upon what is now known as the "problem solving process".
The “problem solving process”. Once you’ve understood your context, the design of good products, services and experiences moves from exploration, to validation, then onto delivery; with moments to pivot, iterate, and continuously improve along the way.
The initial research began with a form of service exploration. This involved deep-diving into the other “innovation toolkit” offerings that existed, reviewing their contents and determining which of these contained useful tools and activities that would be relevant in a Red Cross context. I reviewed offerings from IDEO, Atlassian, Google, Strategyzer, Stickdorn & Schneider, the Stanford d School, Gamestorming, Board of Innovation, Leanstack, Trello, Mozilla and many others.
I considered how much time and effort was involved for novices to familiarise themselves with tools, the visual systems that sat behind the various toolkits, and how language was used in conveying complex ideas and terms. Many of the resources available from other sources were highly generalised, and often provided only very superficial explanations of the content. This paved the way for a niche offering to be developed internally by myself; a toolkit that provided just the right amount of detail and explanation, tailored to the context of Australian Red Cross, and formed in collaboration with groups across the organisation.
From the body of initial research, I began a closed card sorting exercise with innovation team colleagues to sort the most useful tools and activities into groupings that might form the early contenders for our toolkit contents. I realised this would be crucial to ensuring there was an easy means of navigating the toolkit, and would need to align with the previously mentioned "problem solving process" phases. The intention was to ensure the right tool was used at the right time in the life of a project, and that it was grouped logically with other similar or complementary tools.
Once the initial sort was completed on a wall with sticky notes, the innovation team was then invited to perform an additional group card sort in order to ensure there was shared understanding of which tools should be used when, and allow for ambiguities to be resolved.
The results of this card sorting helped define the main stages of the final "problem solving process": explore, validate and deliver. Sub-sections under these main stages informed the grouping and navigation of tools within the toolkit.
The card sorting exercise, a few iterations in.
When it came to the format and design of the toolkit, it needed to be easy to understand at first glance, and not confusing for new users. It would be crucial to include a clear visual system to make navigating the cards and selecting the right one at a glance as easy as possible. The first thing to do was put pen to paper and sketch some layout options.
This sketching process helped me to take the time to understand all of the necessary visual features that would need to exist on a page, and work with the constraint of a small final print size (A6) to ensure that this could all be conveyed neatly, and in a well-structured fashion.
One of the sketches that informed the final layout and visual features of the toolkit.