GIVECREATIVE

Helping Local Charities and NFP's By Giving Your Time.


Creatives Who Come Together Can Make a Real Difference


As designers, we have the unique skill set to assist in giving shape and form to voices of the under-served, disadvantaged, and unequal. We can help amplify that which must be heard.


Many small local charities and organisations struggle to effectively communicate the important work they’re doing in the community. To get their voice heard.


So, we’re creating a movement of local creatives to help them concentrate on what they’re good at.


Our aim is to allow charities and not-for-profits concentrate on what they are good at: helping others. We take care of the creative and the marketing, so they can do what they do best.


Whether you’re a charity that needs support or a creative person who wants to donate time to a good cause, get in touch and we’ll pair you up to make a real difference.


Benefits for charities, CIC's or NFP's.

On-demand digital services

Our collaborative and flexible design and marketing teams are formed exclusively to build your digital projects, overseen by professional project managers and business advisers.

Learn to work with Digital Providers

Our collaborative and flexible design and marketing teams are formed exclusively to build your digital projects, overseen by professional project managers and business advisers.

Strategic support for digital services

Our collaborative and flexible design and marketing teams are formed exclusively to build your digital projects, overseen by professional project managers and business advisers.

Grow with digital

Our collaborative and flexible design and marketing teams are formed exclusively to build your digital projects, overseen by professional project managers and business advisers.

Benefits for Creatives

On-demand digital services

Our collaborative and flexible design and marketing teams are formed exclusively to build your digital projects, overseen by professional project managers and business advisers.

Learn to work with Digital Providers

Our collaborative and flexible design and marketing teams are formed exclusively to build your digital projects, overseen by professional project managers and business advisers.

Strategic support for digital services

Our collaborative and flexible design and marketing teams are formed exclusively to build your digital projects, overseen by professional project managers and business advisers.

Grow with digital

Our collaborative and flexible design and marketing teams are formed exclusively to build your digital projects, overseen by professional project managers and business advisers.

Support when you need it

From fellow researchers

As a member, you will be provided with a dedicated consultant who will be your main point of contact for continuous support and consultation.


You also receive full access to our Help Centre and Support team for any day-to-day requirements.


Our team of academic and industry experts will make sure your on-boarding is successful and you’ll benefit from being able to speak to someone who knows your research, the challenges you face, and your long term objectives. 

Interaction Zone

Interface and UI Design

Discovery Zone

Design-thinking and human-centered design processes

Creative Zone

Hot desks and collaboration

Research Zone

User Lab - Biometric Research

Learning Zone

Workshops, Presentations and Lounge and Learn for coffee and networking

Transformation Zone

Digital Transformation, Legal Information

User Zone

User Selection and Management for research and testing.

Visual Zone

Real projects, expertly managed by our team
A business or organisation often knows far more about its customers than it realises. The problem is this information is distributed across the entire organisation. The trick is uncovering it and making it a valuable resource for growth.

For example, the customer service team may well have records of the common questions they get asked when customers call them. Equally, salespeople spend time with users every day and so understand a lot about them including the objections they have to buying. Then there is the marketing team who will have done market research and built personas, and the IT department that will have access to analytics and understand how the user is trying to interact with the business.

Before you do more research, check that you have access to everything the organisation already knows about its customers.  Doing this will not only make you much more informed, but also help you to identify gaps in your knowledge which you can fill with user research.

When it comes time to fill in those gaps in our knowledge, at the User Centre we have an enormous range of techniques available for you to use.

What We Should Seek to Learn From User Research

How well do you know your users? It is a question we ask all the time, and many businesses rarely feel they have a good handle on who their users are and what they want. That is where we can help.


But the problem is that user research feels intimidating or is viewed as a time-consuming and costly exercise.


The most important thing to remember is that even a little user research is better than none. If nothing else it will demonstrate the value to you and your stakeholders. Hopefully, that will encourage further investment in it later down the line.


No matter the scale of research you decide on, working with the User Centre will enable you to unpack your customers' behaviour and achieve effective research at your own pace.

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What do we want to know about our users?

Before we jump into user experience techniques we need to begin by answering a more fundamental question – what do we want to know about our users?

The User’s Journey

An interaction does not happen in isolation. It is a part of a larger journey.

The user passes through many steps before and after interacting with your business. Understanding these steps is crucial to designing a good experience.

The User’s Questions

Most user’s come with questions they need answering.

Those could be as broad as “does this company provide the services I need” to specific questions around how your offering works.

If we do not know those questions, we cannot meet their needs effectively.

The User’s Objections

Many of the questions the user has are concerns or objections.

They are reasons why they might be hesitant to take action. We need to know these objections so we can address them.

The User’s Tasks

Users don’t only have questions; they also have things they want to do.

That might be buying something, or contacting the company. To support these tasks we must be clear about what they are in the first place.

What Influences the User

Users do not decide to act in a vacuum.

A range of things from reviews to your competition influence their behaviour. We need to uncover these influencing factors so you can address them.

What Interactions the User Has

Users don't interact on a single level.

Users interact with a company in many different ways. They use online channels like social media, as well as offline, such as a call centre.

Understanding where our products and services fit into these interactions is essential.

How the User Is Feeling

State of mind is an aspect of user research often overlooked, and yet it plays a big part in how a user views your business.

Our state of mind impacts our cognitive load and the time we are willing to invest in a site.

The User’s Ultimate Goal

When a user comes to your website or uses your app, they are usually trying to achieve something.

They have a goal that they want to reach. Understanding that goal helps us to accommodate better the user’s needs.

Give Sponsors Reasons to Join

Tell visitors a bit more about your campaign and explain why they should join. Is this a once in a lifetime opportunity? A special event with influential speakers? Or maybe there is limited space, and you want visitors to know so they register now to secure their spot.
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Surveys

Surveying has long been a tool of market researchers everywhere, and we use them in user research too.

Mapping

An empathy or customer mapping workshop helps you to know your users. But, it also provides deep insights into their journey and the various issues that arose during it.

Participatory Design

There are lots of opportunities to include the user in the design process. That provides all kinds of insights into their goals, questions, tasks and pain points.

Usability testing

Usability testing provides valuable insights into the user. It helps us understand their mental model, tasks, questions and general approach.

The fact that usability testing provides insights both about the interface and the user, makes it an efficient use of time. 

Interviews and In-Field Studies

Interviews are the backbone of user research. There is only one thing that beats meeting people in person, and that is to meet those people in their homes or place of work. Going to users rather than having them come to you makes all of the difference in the world.

Social Media Monitoring

What do you do if time and access are limited? Social media can provide fascinating insights into users and what they want. Noting what people say about your company online gives insights into their questions and frustrations.

Site Monitoring

We can also look at how people are using our sites.

What are people searching on?
Which pages do they spend the most time engaging with?
What route are they taking through the site?
What screen elements hold their attention?
All these things and more give you insights into how the user is thinking and what they want.

The other massive advantage of site monitoring is that you are observing real users, completing real tasks. Unlike other user research techniques, users are unaware of your presence and so are not influenced by you.

Give Trainers Reasons to Join

Tell visitors a bit more about your campaign and explain why they should join. Is this a once in a lifetime opportunity? A special event with influential speakers? Or maybe there is limited space, and you want visitors to know so they register now to secure their spot.
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01 INTRODUCTORY

Introductory workshops are for entrepreneurs who are new to the subject of design for business. These workshops typically include step-by-step instructions on how to get started and learn its fundamentals.

After attending, you will be able to execute basic tactics related to the topic.

02 INTERMEDIATE

Intermediate workshops are for entrepreneurs who are familiar with the subject but have only basic experience in executing strategies and tactics on the topic. These workshops typically cover the fundamentals and move on to reveal more complex functions and examples. 

After attending, you will feel comfortable leading projects.

03 INSPIRED

Our advanced workshops are for entrepreneurs who are or want to be, experts on the subject. In it, we walk you through advanced features of this aspect and help you develop complete mastery of the subject.

After attending, you will feel ready not only to execute strategies and tactics but also to inspire others how to be successful.

3 Ways You Can Visualise User Research

For user research to be useful, it needs to become a part of every decision you make, and that means it needs to be visible when making decisions. Unfortunately too often user research is confined to some report in a drawer or a slide deck that somebody presented once. We need to do better.

As a bare minimum we should be producing empathy maps.

Create Empathy Maps

In many ways, empathy maps are like personas. They focus on a fictional or real person and describe various traits about that person. While personas focus on demographics, an empathy map is about tasks, questions, pain points and experience.

Empathy maps are easy to create, but they suffer the same danger as a report. They can end up in a drawer and never referred to again.

To avoid this problem, I recommend turning your empathy maps into designs that you can display on the wall. By turning them into a poster and ensuring they are visible, you increase the likelihood of them getting consideration.


Map the User’s Journey

An empathy map is a snapshot of what we know about the user. It is a summary of their behaviour. However, in reality, behaviour changes over time. The questions people ask, the tasks they are trying to complete and even how they feel will alter depending on where they are in the buying process.

To reflect this idea of the user being on a journey you can create something called a customer journey map. That represents the stages a user passes through in their experience. It also highlights different critical characteristics about the user at each of those stages.

What information you capture about the user as they go through the journey is up to you, but often it reflects similar criteria to an empathy map.

Once again, this needs to be visualised in a way to ensure that everybody takes user research into account during a project. But if you want to adopt a truly user-centric approach, you may wish to use story cards.

Adopt User Story Cards

Most projects have some form of specification that outlines what the project will deliver. That typically focuses on functionality and content. But what if you started from a different premise? What if you started from the user research and specified the project based on user needs?

User story cards allow you to do precisely that. They define the project as a series of statements about the user and what they want to do. Each statement consists of three parts:

The audience.
The task.
The objective.
So for example, a user story card for this blog might be:

I am a digital project manager. I want to sign up to the newsletter so that I can keep up to date with the latest user experience design techniques.

A single project will have many audiences, with each audience wanting to do many different tasks. The result can be a large number of user story cards.

However, by framing the project with story cards, you embed the user research into the final deliverable.
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