Stroke Association UX case study

User research steers digital product development

The Stroke Association is the UK’s leading charity dedicated to conquering stroke. It provides vital support services, campaigns for better stroke care and funds research to find better treatments.

The charity turned to us for UX research to inform the development and extension of My Stroke Guide, its digital self management tool.

Challenge

Before extending availability of its My Stroke Guide tool, Stroke Association wanted to gain deeper insight into the support stroke survivors and their ‘inner circle’ of family and friends needed.

User research: what we did

We started the user research with a diary study, with participants recruited from across the UK. “We definitely got a lot of value from this part of the exercise,” Laura Richards says.

Then we conducted individual and contextual paired interviews with survivors and their supporters, enabling us to build up a richer picture of stroke survivors’ needs. Our in-depth user needs report provided a detailed analysis of the research.

The key findings were summarised in a presentation we used to facilitate a user needs workshop. “Offering to do a workshop at the end, rather than a standard presentation, was a nice approach,” says Laura.

Benefits

In addition to providing insights on user needs, the research also delivered highly specific and in depth understanding relating to each of the main features of Stroke Association’s My Stroke Guide website. This equipped the charity to weigh the potential impact of changes, against the ease and feasibility of implementation.

Laura Richards says, “In addition to immediate actions for the product team, the research has also informed our long term vision, with valuable insights and greater understanding of stroke survivors. This will be incorporated into the longer term strategy of My Stroke Guide.”
Workshop

Our post research workshop proved valuable to the Stroke Association. Getting teams in a room together enabled everyone to engage with the research findings, and proved a productive environment for agreeing priorities and actions and responsibilities. The research was also beneficial in helping the charity build the business cases for sponsorship and partnership.

“The success of these types of projects really depends on the engagement you get from your internal teams. System Concepts did a fantastic job,” Laura concludes.