The Cancer Research UK Design Principles

We've adopted a set of design principles to help us describe how we want to work at Cancer Research UK.

We've written another blog post that explains a bit more about design principles, and why we think they're important. So give that a read if you're interested in learning more. And we've also included the agenda for the workshop that helped us get to these design principles at the bottom of this post.

Our Design Principles

 

We focus on outcomes, not outputs

We start with a problem, and work out the best way of solving that problem. By focusing on solving a problem over delivering a list of features, we make sure we provide the right things, for the right people, at the right time.

We treat our data as a critical asset, and make decisions based on evidence

How our products and services collect, manage and query data is vital to the everyday operations of the charity. And we believe using that data is the best way to make the things we deliver better. We always test our assumptions before making decisions, and we’re not afraid to stop working on things that aren’t backed up with evidence proving their value.

We partner with the people in the charity who use our services, encouraging co-creation and empowerment

We put power into the hands of people so they can manage their work with autonomy. Governance is light touch, we recognise that good ideas can come from anywhere, and a self-service approach is encouraged in everything we do.

We disagree without being disagreeable

Disagreement isn’t something to be scared of, as long as it’s done in the right way. If we don’t agree with something we speak up, but once a decision has been made we commit wholeheartedly to its success.

We start small and develop iteratively towards our goals

The best products, solutions and services start small, test early with users and iterate from there. We’re comfortable with experimentation and testing, since it’s the best way to keep things simple, future-friendly and usable by everyone.

We always think about delivery end-to-end

Although we start small, we know a Minimum Viable Product (an MVP) is not a final deliverable. We make sure that whatever we deliver is robust enough to scale. And that security, quality and resilience are designed into everything we do.

We don’t rest on our laurels

We celebrate success, but we also avoid complacency. We recognise that inspiration can come from anywhere, and we know that however well we’re doing, there’s always an opportunity to be better.

We work ethically, honestly and deliver things that act in our users’ best interests

We start with user needs and provide products, solutions and services that treat people with respect. We do what’s right for our users, even when it’s difficult or controversial. And we never trade in their goodwill for a quick win.

We work in the open

We’re open and transparent about the things we deliver, the way we work and the challenges we face. This means we share as much as we can as often as we can, and we’re comfortable with ambiguity.

The workshop that helped us decide our principles

• Introduction - what are these principles for, why should we use them  + questions (15 mins) 
• Talk through existing 'example principles' and where we've gathered them from
• How is today’s session going to work?  (5 mins )
• Warm up -... thinking about how we do things in our directorate  (15 mins)
• Individually brainstorm what we're good and not so good that make us different from other directorates (5 mins)
• Discuss with your group (10 mins)
•  Design your own  (post it notes/sharpies on table) (40 mins)
• Think about the best project you’ve worked on here (15 mins)
• What made it so good? What behaviours did people exhibit? How did you go about things?
• Add one post-it note per ‘thing’
• Share with your table group and discuss similarities/differences (20 mins)
• Stick post-its against one of the example principles on the wall – or in its own space if it doesn’t fit any
• Coffee break (15 mins)
• Review the example principles/new principles individually (10 mins)
• Discuss as a room together, stress testing with ‘anti-principles’  (30 mins)
• Dot vote with 5 dots – on existing principles, or individual post-it notes (10 mins)
• Play back principles with most dots (5 mins)
• Hopes and fears post-it exercise (25 mins)
• Any worries, concerns, doubts about what we have? Share on post-its, then let’s discuss
• Wrap up and cover what happens next (5 mins)
• Flag that any disagreements or contradictions will be discussed at SLT level
• Flag that we'll collate, wordsmith and recirculate what we have

Designing our design principles

Why do we need design principles?

It’s always tricky bringing 2 teams together, and it was no exception when our old IT and digital teams came together to form a new Technology directorate. Back when we were 2 separate teams we had different cultures, ways of working and delivery methods. And we knew these differences wouldn’t magically disappear after we’d restructured.

So, alongside our new strategy, we had an assumption that a set of design principles could help everyone to commit to one way of working to solve problems. And give us a way of describing how our newly formed team would work with the wider organisation.

What are design principles?

There’s a bunch of definitions out there, but I think the best way of summarising design principles is by thinking of the place where your culture meets your design process. So imagine a mix of “the way we do things round here” and “the things that are important to us when we deliver work”.

How did we build them?

Combining teams had left us with a jumble of visions and behaviours from different parts of the directorate, that weren’t as aligned with each other as they could have been. This left us with a couple of challenges; ‘how do we make sure we’re not starting from scratch unnecessarily?’ and ‘how do we motivate people into sitting through yet another vision setting away day?’.

So rather than re-invent the wheel, we pulled people in to a workshop to try and bring our existing outputs together to form our new principles (more on this later).

And, since the idea of design principles is to inform a behaviour, we decided there’s no point in a design principle that’s self evident. For example, ‘be user-led’ could be a design principle, because some organisations would take an approach of ‘our users don’t know what they want until we build it’. But ‘do good work’ couldn’t be a design principle, since there isn’t a (serious) organisation out there that would describe one of their principles as ‘doing bad work’. So we also made sure to stress test the principles we came up with by reversing their meaning and seeing if they still made sense.  

What did we learn?

Don’t make them sad bits of laminated paper

Our Director said this early on in the process and it stuck with me. We’ve all seen office motivational posters of jargon encouraging us to ‘cross fertilize high value corporate deliverables’ or to ‘develop a best in class service led ecosystem’. Design principles shouldn’t fit into the category of meaningless phrases that are laminated, stuck on a wall, and then forgotten about by the people actually delivering work.  For design principles to work they need to be used and referenced regularly.

Power to the people

The easiest way to make sure something’s used regularly is for the people using it to feel a shared sense of ownership on the thing that’s been created. So we invited representatives from every team in our 300+ person directorate to attend the workshop. Not everyone could make it, but those who couldn’t were given the opportunity to feedback on the draft principles. So everyone had the chance to contribute.

One group we did exclude from the workshop was our directorate senior leadership team (SLT). The main reason we did this was so that the principles were created by the people who would use them the most. And were closer to the reality of the day-to-day challenges of delivering work at Cancer Research UK.

Use them or lose them

Although they weren’t at the workshop, we made sure to share our outputs with the SLT afterwards, and take the time to listen to any comments or suggestions they had. This was important to prevent the opposite of the ‘laminated pieces of paper’ effect. Since we knew that if that group didn’t stand behind them and defend them to the wider charity they’d never take off.

It also helped create a contract between delivery teams and leadership. By endorsing the principles created by the team there’s some clear expectations around the behaviours the SLT expect from us. And around the behaviours we expect from the SLT.

This helped position our design principles as something that sits outside of our organisational hierarchy. So everyone is held to account for the same standards of behavior, not matter how junior or senior they are.

Build your design principles, not someone else’s

There’s a bunch of existing work out there that influenced our design principles. From the new digital design principles for charities to the how to guide by Protoypr and the work GDS have done. We definitely didn’t want to create our own principles just for the sake of it.

But at the same time, we knew that just copying and pasting the GDS principles wouldn’t work for us. Because we’re not GDS, we’re Cancer Research UK. It sounds obvious, but when you’re thinking about what organisation you want to be, you also need to take into account what organisation you are right now.

So while we weren’t afraid to use existing templates and research to influence our thinking, we tried to make sure we weren’t just taking a cookie cutter approach. Since if they weren’t relevant to our situation we knew they wouldn’t be used.

What’s next?

At the moment we’re taking our design principles on a mini-roadshow to the different teams in our directorate through a pretty simple workshop exercise where people:

•  Pick a principle they’re great at, and another principle they think they could be better at
•  Pair off with someone else
• Guess what the other person picked for their 2 principles, then swap over and discuss

It takes about 15 minutes, but we found it’s a great way of getting the discussion moving. It also forces people to actually read and reflect on the principles, rather than just reading them and ignoring them completely.

And what have we got planned for the future? Well, the honest answer is “We’re not sure”. We’re still finding our feet with our strategy and our place in the organisation.  So we’re positioning our principles as an ‘open beta’ that we’ll be testing out as our team becomes more mature. We’ll only really see how successful they are by seeing the quality of work they help us deliver when we use them.

Of course, there is a danger we won’t use them. But if that’s the case, then either our behaviours aren’t right, or the principles aren’t. At the moment we’re planning on doing a strategy check-in in around 6 months’ time, so once we’ve done that we’ll do another post to share how we’re getting on.

So what are they?

If you’re interested you’ll find our design principles and a full outline of the workshop we ran to get them here. Hopefully our principles will change and evolve as our team does, so we’ll keep them updated. In the meantime we’d love to hear any thoughts or ideas on how we can make them even better.

Chris Flood

Content and Search Lead

Cancer Research UK

Dude, where’s my content?

One of the nice things I’ve noticed recently is that more and more people are recognising content strategy as a ‘thing’.

But even though I can hold my head high, safe in the knowledge that people understand my job isn’t actually made up (yay!), and is as crucial to a project’s success as a designer or UXer (double yay!), I still find that people tend to ignore one of the most important aspects of content - good governance.

Dropping the G-bomb

Without a doubt, the number one reason that content strategies fail is a lack of governance. You can spend hours understanding exactly what your users want, and exactly what type of content they need. But if no one’s empowered to enforce standards and guidelines (or if you don’t have standards and guidelines in the first place) all that work is pointless.

Because how will you know if the content you create is meeting those user needs? How will you know if it’s providing value for your business? And how can you be sure you’re not going to get 50 stakeholders crawling out of the woodwork wanting to sign content off before it goes live?

The answer is you won’t. So your strategy will fail. Always.

So what do we do?

If you stop to think, it seems obvious. Just setting content live and forgetting about it is a bad idea. As is just letting anyone publish whatever the hell they want on the website.

But actually, most of the time the challenge isn’t getting your organisation to govern its digital content effectively, it’s getting any kind of governance in place at all.

If your organisation has strong governance for other aspects of its business, the idea of content governance might not be all that foreign. Especially if you have strong brand and style guidelines in place for your more traditional channels of communication.

But sometimes large organisations with clear governance in traditional areas are some of the worst offenders. So how can they take what they already know about governance and apply it to content? In my mind, most governance issues can be solved by keeping in mind three things: 

1.Making sure you’ve got the right people, doing the right things, at the right time

At Cancer Research UK our digital strategy is to devolve content creation throughout the business. There’s no one central team that owns every piece of content on our site.

So one of our biggest challenges is working with teams to identify the roles and responsibilities they need to manage their content effectively throughout its lifetime.

Meghan Casey’s excellent Content Strategy Toolkit identifies 6 phases all content goes through during its lifetime.

I’d probably also add ‘retire’ to that list (or KILL if you’re applying it to a bunch of old Flash animations).

The best way I’ve found to get visibility on this stuff is to run 2 quick workshops. In the first workshop, you get all of the senior stakeholders involved in the content creation to map out every step involved in each of those phases, with the people they think are responsible for them. And in the second one you get all the people who actually produce the content itself to do the same.
 
By the end, you should end up with a whiteboard filled with post-it notes that looks a little something like this, once you’ve collated everything and digitised it:

Most of the time you’ll find any bones of contention slot into 1 of 3 categories:

• Gaps appear in each phase, where everyone assumes something happens, but it actually doesn’t
• You’ve got multiple stakeholders who all think they’re content owners who should have the final sign-off on a piece of content
• You’ve got 1 person doing 90% of the steps in each phase. Someone who not only owns the content but writes the content and is also responsible for its sign off

Once you’ve invested the time upfront to work out every step involved in each of these phases you can start asking the big questions; why is this necessary? Who is responsible for it? What’s the output?

The answers to these questions are key for building visibility on how content flows through your organisation. And working out where the gaps, problems and stress points are that you need to address.

2.Making sure you’re measuring the right stuff

If you’ve developed an effective content strategy upfront you should (I hope) have a clear idea of what your content needs to achieve, and the metrics that let you know whether it’s achieved it.

Where governance fits in, is to provide clear guidelines on when to review your content against these metrics. And when you should consider acting.

If things are going badly – consider changing your content

Sometimes we make changes to our content that we think will move our metrics one way, but actually end up having the opposite effect. This is fine, as long as we’re able to quickly shift the blame to someone else honest with the size of the problem, and its cause.

A small problem is a bump in the road. A bigger problem might send everyone running to panic stations. Whichever it is, being honest about the size of the problem helps you work out how to prioritise what you need to fix first. And if you find you’re having a lot of these smaller problems take a step back and look for any patterns – they could be the symptom of a bigger problem.

Similarly, spend some time interrogating the cause of the problem. Speak to your users, grab as many insights as you can and work out what they mean. Yeah, sometimes your content might just suck. But sometimes the UX might be doing a bad job of supporting your content. Or that new image the designer’s put together jars with your brand messaging.

And above all, share what you’ve learnt with your team, your stakeholders and the wider business. That’s the best way to stop the problem happening again in the future.

If things are going well – consider changing your content

So our content’s smashing its metrics, our users love it and our stakeholders treat us like rockstars. Time to just sit back and congratulate ourselves on a job well done right?

Well, maybe. But failing that, questions you might want to ask yourself are “how big is your success?” and “how do I make it happen again?”

If you’ve had a big success shout about it. Build a story around what you’ve achieved that you can sell to your stakeholders to get more resources to make your content even better.

And, just like when things go badly, speak to your users and get their feedback. Once you know why your content performed well it becomes a lot easier to replicate that success in the future.

If there’s a change in context – consider changing your content

Occasionally, hitting or missing our metrics isn’t so much of an issue. Because the metrics themselves don’t matter so much to us. Sometimes our company’s goals might change and sometimes the world around us might change.

Again, once you’ve figured out how this change is going to affect your content, work out how big the impact will be. Is it a permanent or temporary change? Will it affect your competitors too?

And not all change is bad. Yes, adapting to it could be a massive resource drain stopping you from doing what really matters. But it could also be a massive opportunity to attract a whole new audience and revenue stream.

Whichever it is, once you’ve understood the size of the change you can work out how much time and resource to dedicate to it.

3.Making sure you’re keeping it lean

One thing us digital folks sometimes struggle with is confusing governance with being a bottleneck, and treating it as an enemy of the agile process. And admittedly, our plan to retire workflow process does seem a bit waterfall-y at a first glance. But it doesn’t have to be.

Instead, when reviewing your workflow ask yourself “what’s the minimum thing I need to build to move from one phase to the next?”

You might have a massive site redesign to plan, but rather than tackle the whole site audit, why not run a rolling audit of each area of the site? Can you update the content for one small sub-section of the site at a time, rather than do everything all at once? And is that stakeholder who demanded a place at the table for every editorial meeting really vital to the content’s success?

Answering these questions helps shift the perception of governance from something that impedes the progress of your content to something that actively supports it. Because it forces you to focus your attention on what drives the most value with the minimum effort, in a way that’s scalable. And that sounds pretty agile to me.

Go forth and govern

At Cancer Research UK our digital strategy relies on us giving people the tools they need to manage the long term success of their content, which is where good governance really shines. Because if we can make our processes more efficient, it gives us confidence that the right people are doing the right things at the right time. That we do have the right measurements in place. And that we’re being as lean as possible.

This all means we can spend less time worrying about the day-to-day management of our content. And more time focusing on making that content as good as it can possibly be.

Chris Flood
Content Strategy Lead