We design better digital products and services.
We’re not a team of yes people. We work with you to understand your users and potential customers to create better digital experiences.
From websites to chat bots and mobile apps, we have the capacity to create, test and get your digital product up and running…
InnovateHer is an organisation with a mission to inspire girls aged 12–16 to think about a career in the digital world. They organise digital professionals to become mentors in an 8-week programme based in schools. Our own Urška decided to get involved in the programme and became the lead mentor in a Manchester school.
The programme evolves over 8 weeks. The mentors go into school one day a week to share the different processes involved in working in digital. In the first week, girls are given a real client to work with, shown how to do research about the client and define some of the problems the client is facing. The girls learn about users, create personas and think about how their products and services can be used by different people. In the middle of the programme, there’s a field trip where the girls visit a local digital company and see what it’s like to work in a digital office. Once they‘ve learned more about the digital industry they are introduced to prototyping and coding, and then present their ideas to the public. At the end of their 8 weeks they are encouraged to self-reflect on their own thoughts of the professions they have been introduced to, and what they may want to pursue in their futures.
Seeing girls not only explore the realms of a digital profession but, as well, start believing in their creativity and begin to think about how they can apply their new skills in other areas of their lives was very inspirational. We truly hope to see some of them joining digital teams in the future. Want to learn more?
The DfE launched the Schools’ buying strategy in January 2017. We began the work after a lengthy and tricky discovery which meant we had to reframe the Alpha quickly into something deliverable.
We began to challenge the recommendations from discovery which were too solution-focused and lacked clarity on the problem we were solving. We translated the research into new user needs, focused hypotheses to test and rapid prototypes we could use to validate our thinking. We produced several very different prototypes to explore various aspects of purchasing and discounted those which weren’t meeting user needs (in 2-week sprints). We also made recommendations for how the programme should rethink how it measured research, and how the various teams should focus on one problem, and one need, rather than several, to join up the entire service.
We narrowed our scope down to a select few ideas, to ensure we could help the department deliver their first digital service.
Our service assessment also stated: ‘The panel was impressed by the teams focus on user research and the basis for continued development of the service prototype throughout alpha. The panel was impressed by the teams consideration of DfE’s structure and how this impacts on user experience. The team had an impressive understanding of the policy landscape around the service with good examples of communication between policy and delivery. '
Still not made your mind up about us? Our model is a big part of what makes us different.
Our principles guide more than just what we work on, it guides the people and the culture here at Paper.
How we work with clients is super important to us.
Steve says, - “Paper really acted as an extension of our small project team. Through working closely together they’ve gained great understanding of our product and there’s a real feeling of us working towards a joint goal.
We write about things you might find useful such as what we're working on and the industry we work in.
We’ve been very lucky at Paper to be able to continue working remotely throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. We decided to start working from home a week or so before the lockdown was announced, and during this time we’ve finished 3 projects and recently won a bid to start on another large project. For this article, I wanted to share some of the things we’ve been doing to remain productive and sane over the past few months.
Things change so quickly at the moment. In February we posted the Service Designer or Senior Service Designer job description. We’d just come off the back of another successful year, and we’d been stretched really thin again, especially with our design capability.
Continue reading We're postponing hiring and changes behind the scenes
Happy Paper-versary to me! I have apparently survived my first year as a full-time user researcher and now it’s time to reflect on what I’ve achieved and how I’ve been settling in to the digital industry.