Portable ethical human-centred design toolkit

Creating a human-centred design toolkit for non-designers.

Problem 

Portable is a for-purpose agency that works with public service, healthcare, education and justice clients. In their 10+ years of experience, they noticed that many of the client teams they worked with needed theoretical and practical knowledge of human-centred design in order to effectively design services for the community.

Portable saw this as an opportunity to provide the common tools, resources and activities needed to run a human-centred design project in one place, accessible online and written in plain English so that people without formal design training could use them.

Solution 

I was the lead content strategist on this internal project at Portable. I worked with visual and strategic designers to create the first version of this online toolkit. I started by designing the information architecture of the online toolkit so that both a complete beginner and someone already with some design knowledge could navigate through the toolkit easy.

Next, I designed a series of content templates for the different types of pages that would be in the toolkit, such as educational and resource-sharing pages as well as workshop activity instructions and templates.

Finally, I worked with design strategists to write all of the content for the toolkit. We each took different aspects of the toolkit and then I did a final review and edit of the completed toolkit to make sure it was consistent in tone and style, written in plain English and easy to follow.

Impact 

The toolkit is now ready to be shared with clients. It can be used within specific projects or provided to clients as part of a broader human-centred design training that is being offered by Portable. The hope is that this online toolkit will help more organisations to design human-centred products and services safely with the communities that will use them.