Addressing unmet user needs for the National Archives

Introducing co-design and prototyping techniques

As part of our engagement with The National Archives across the Discovery and Alpha phases for their new website, we introduced co-design techniques to ideate and prototype solutions to solve critical user problems and produce innovative ways to more easily navigate the scale and complexity of the archive. This enabled them to:

• Embrace the benefits of a design thinking approach to ideation
• Turn user insights into opportunities with ‘How Might We’ (HMW) statements
• Facilitate multidisciplinary teams all along the ideation phase
• Ideate solutions to HMW statements using a number of creative techniques
• Produce rapid interactive wireframes and prototypes
• Ensure user testing took place to validate our work

Solving complex problems and finding desirable solutions as one team

Rather than trying a one-size-fits-all co-design formula, we looked at every user insight and determined which types of ideation activities were best suited for each. The resulting outputs from the co-design sessions were remarkable: 50+ ideas/concepts and 15 prototypes for user testing. The collaborative nature of the approach allowed for interdisciplinary teams to bring their different opinions and experiences to explore opportunities informed by business goals and user needs.