Over the last three years, we have been busy working on various areas to improve our services. The number of people that need our help keeps dramatically increasing, so we streamlined the digital experience for people that want to access our services – and redefined what counted as an emergency, so we can answer more urgent calls.
Now, we want to expand our digital offer so that we can help more of the people whose situation is not … Read more
At Shelter, we fight for people’s right to a safe home. This could mean us providing legal representation against someone’s eviction in court, providing one-to-one advice via our helpline or hubs, or lobbying the government against estate agent fees, which we successfully managed to ban last summer ✊🏽.
UX time is shared across all parts of Shelter, whether that be campaigns, services, or fundraising, each with different priorities and deadlines. This means it can sometimes be quite hard to balance … Read more
Co-production brings people who use services together with the organisations that provide those services to shape how they should be delivered. It’s valuable both for organisations and for the people who use its services – and that’s why at Inspiring Change Manchester (ICM), it’s at the heart how we operate.
A few years ago, the word co-production might’ve been mentioned in passing. Services and organisations might have put some service user representation on panels at events or may have asked … Read more
As we described in a previous post, a key finding of our initial design research was the lack of clarity around Shelter’s service offering. One of our aims is to simplify the experience for users seeking help from Shelter. The Local Services redesign has been a challenging – yet useful – project that has helped us move closer to this goal.
Last year we were asked to look at the part of our website dedicated to displaying … Read more
As a service delivery organisation, we face constant demand pressure on our already overstretched services. This isn’t going to change any time soon – so it’s essential we optimise and improve the way our clients engage with our services.
Previously, we talked about redefining what ‘urgency’ means to different people, and how it could impact their experience of using our housing helpline service. We introduced our emergency helpline number, which gives service users the option to decide how important their … Read more
The housing enquiries people come to us with vary from minor landlord disputes, to homeless families facing a night on the streets. That’s why we decided to examine how we could make sure our housing advisers help callers to our helpline who are in the most urgent need.
This also gave us the opportunity to see how we could improve our self-help services – like our advice webpages – for users who don’t necessarily need to speak to an expert … Read more
Following a review of our services back in 2017, we began to think about why and how people access our help. We were keen to understand if there was anything we could do to improve the way our website users find the help they need.
We started by looking at the in-depth analysis produced by our researchers, and tried to pinpoint some trends. We also considered the expectations our website users would have for the kind of services we provide, … Read more
As the first service designer here at Shelter, it’s been vital for me to prove the value of service design throughout our work. I’ve had the opportunity to deliver a significant step forward in the quality and quantity of advice we provide to thousands of people each day, so thought I’d share how this all came about.
Our national helpline is open 365 days a year, offering expert advice to anyone struggling with housing and homelessness-related issues. In 2016/17, our … Read more