Design Hops
A free, practical online programme to help you better understand your users’ challenges, and create simple, helpful solutions.
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What are Design Hops?
A Design Hop will help you develop a better understanding of the challenges faced by your service users, volunteers or colleagues, and learn how to create simple solutions to address them.
This course covers some of the fundamentals used in User Centred Design – if you’ve heard of this and always wondered what it means, this is your chance to learn more about it.
Bring along a challenge that you wish to address in your role, and we will guide you through the fundamental skills and processes you’ll need to come up with a solution. This could be an internal or an external-facing challenge.
Here are some examples:
- My colleagues don’t know when the next fundraising events are taking place, so they aren’t able to signpost volunteers or service users to sign up
- My service users frequently miss their appointments
- Volunteers don’t know how to submit their travel expenses
- Service users aren’t engaging with a particular programme or channel
Outcomes
The skills you’ll learn on the Design Hop are transferable to both digital and non-digital projects or challenges, making this course ideal for anyone who would like to improve their problem-solving abilities.
You’ll gain:
- Increased confidence with digital problem-solving processes, regardless of whether you are working on digital or non-digital projects or challenges
- Improved understanding of the challenges faced by young people, volunteers or your colleagues
- A small solution or action plan to take away
- Resources and next steps to continue learning about this topic
- Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn new skills that will benefit you, your organisation and most importantly, your service users.
Dates
We’re currently planning the next dates for the Design Hops. Please sign up for our waiting list to be the first to hear about new dates.
Who can participate?
Staff and core volunteers from UK nonprofits of all sizes who are curious to learn about the potential of digital.
Ideally, we’re looking for decision-makers who will be able to put the methods learnt directly into practice and are in a position to further develop ideas, for example by allocating internal resources or making grant-funding applications. You should have a good understanding of your charity’s existing services and the challenges in providing the
Unfortunately, this course is not suitable for organisations whose primary beneficiaries are based outside the UK.
How does it work?
Here’s what we cover on a Design Hop:
Discover
- Choose and investigate the social and organisational challenge that you want to work through
- Understand the real user needs of the people affected
Define
- Be inspired by examples of free and simple digital solutions
- Generate your own ideas
- Explore how they fit into your wider services and the lives of your users
Develop
- Develop the quickest, easiest way to test your chosen idea with your users.
Next Steps
- We’ll set you up to continue your digital momentum inside your organisation, or with new peers and digital experts met through the course.