RNID
Designing a jobs service for users with hearing loss
SUMMARY
I worked with 13 classmates in the Content Design London Academy to create a jobs-focused digital service for UK charity RNID. I delivered a fully content-designed page on the Access to Work benefits scheme.
MY ROLE
Desk research
Content design
Writing
TOOLS
Mural
Google Docs
Whimsical
CLIENT
RNID is a UK charity that supports individuals with deafness or hearing loss.
DISCOVERY PHASE
Respecting preferred language
We met with RNID to learn about their vision for the new digital service. Then we got straight down to individual desk research. I started my research by exploring language and self-understanding around hearing loss. I visited discussion boards, including subreddits, to gain insight into several questions:
How do individuals with deafness and hearing loss describe themselves and their condition?
What do we need to understand about their experiences to be responsive and respectful in the language we use?
Next, I took on questions specific to the subject area of this brief.
What concerns and frustrations do job seekers with hearing loss have?
What challenges do employees with hearing loss face in the workplace?
What questions do employers have around providing an equitable environment for employees with hearing loss?
Exploring the stories people shared on these boards was humbling and informative. One of the most represented concerns was around disclosure. Job seekers worried that mentioning needs would prejudice their chances of being hired. When do you let a prospective employer know that you need work adjustments? Others were looking for or sharing hacks for working collaboratively through hearing loss. Whatever we’d create, we’d need to make sure it would directly address users’ practical, emotional, and legal concerns.
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Online forums can straddle the line between public-private spaces. Research with human subjects guidance in the US asks us to question whether someone might reasonably expect privacy, even in a public context. In this case, the fora that I visited were meant as spaces of interface between those with hearing loss and those without.
DESIGN PHASE
Understanding the journey
With research behind us, we moved on to journey mapping. Understanding users’ concerns and needs drove us, and we’d need to wade through all of our anecdotes and quotes to get there. Sometimes users would surface the same concerns in different ways. So which quotes exposed the same challenge? How could we identify commonalities without marginalizing edge cases, which need our care and attention?
We collaborated on Mural to map user journeys, from job searching to onboarding to advocating for their needs at work.
Moving from abstract to concrete
The user needs we identified from our journey work would serve as our goalposts. All the rest of our work would align to them. We were ready to be ruthless—if content wasn’t directly serving a need, it wouldn’t make the final cut. Acceptance criteria made those needs concrete and actionable for us. What will the user need to know or be able to do to take the next step toward their objective?
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User need
“As a deaf employee, I need to understand what ‘reasonable adjustments’ are, so that I can know if I am getting the support I am entitled to.”
Acceptance criteria
This need is met when the user...
- knows what qualifies as a reasonable adjustment
- knows if they qualify for the protection of "reasonable adjustments"
- knows if their employer/future employer is obligated to provide reasonable adjustments
- can contextualize/compare reasonable adjustments with "second mile" adjustments
- knows how to access further information on reasonable adjustments
- knows how to request reasonable adjustments at the workplace
- knows how to appeal for reasonable adjustments if workplace resists
WRITING PROCESS
Getting it out on paper
Having done the prep work, drafting content went smoothly. Writing was about far more than the words, though. I thought holistically about the page I was drafting. The words were a vehicle for both information and tone, while the layout was a kind of map for the user—directing their focus and guiding them with waypoints down a path. I leaned heavily on headlines, callouts, and lists to serve content in a simple, structured way.
We participated in several group content crits to improve our copy.
We drafted in a single Drive folder, each on our own doc, so that we could read and comment on each others’ work.
I used Whimsical to wireframe my content. I wanted others to see it spatially, with higher-fi layout and components.
TAKEAWAYS
Presenting our work
We presented our work at a public, promoted show-and-tell Zoom session on June 9, 2021. Our clients, RNID, were on-hand to react to our work. CDL presented us with a high-fidelity prototype of our collective work.
Where I’d go from here
This work was very much a learning experience for us. While I hope that RNID will be able to use some of the content we developed, we won’t have a say in where it goes from here. What I can do, though, is share a few thoughts about how I would refine (and later evaluate) the content if I were asked to ship the work we did.
Heuristic evaluation. We adopted content components that already exist within the RNID ecosystem. We didn’t take the time to validate them all from a UX perspective. I’d do a heuristic review to ensure that the building blocks (and how they’re used) are confirming to tenets and conventions of good UX.
Alignment with RNID voice. I think we all did a good job trying to speak with the RNID voice. But we were 14 individuals, so some editorial work would be needed to align our content properly to voice.
Readability testing. I’d run all of our contributions through a readability scoring process (Flesch-Kincaid or ARI) to ensure that they come in at an 8th grade reading level or simpler.
Usability testing. I’d do a number of usability tests with our prototype to make improvements before sending the digital service out into the world.
Evaluate success with metrics such as engagement. Finally, I’d see how well our content was performing through various metrics, including engagement. Our acceptance criteria are ready-made tactical performance indicators to probe.