Sport Wales
Creating a more equitable and people-centred application scorecard process.
Sport Wales needed to make its application scorecard process for its Sport Wales Institute support services more equitable and people-centred. Cyber-Duck's experts worked seamlessly in partnership with Sport Wales' internal and external stakeholders, establishing their needs and pain points before developing the user personas, user journeys, and information architecture for the new service.
Cyber-Duck then employed its ISO-accredited user-centred design and delivery process to iteratively develop Sport Wales Institute's Alpha service. Finally, Cyber-Duck's discovery report sets out a clear, evidence-based strategy and roadmap upon which to deliver the MVP.
Objectives
Sport Wales is the organisation responsible for developing and promoting sport in Wales. Sport Wales Institute is a team of science & medicine practitioners and performance advisors, working under the Sport Wales umbrella to help Welsh athletes achieve success.
In support of Sport Wales’ new strategy, 'Enabling Sport in Wales to Thrive', the application scorecard process for the Institute’s support and related services needed to be made more equitable and people-centred (for both applicants and those evaluating applications).
But to achieve this, Sport Wales needed to better understand the needs and pain points of its internal and external stakeholders before synthesising these insights into a new, flexible service. Cyber-Duck was chosen to:
- Establish a clear, evidence-based strategy for change informed by extensive user research
- Test and refine this new approach with the organisation's diverse mix of internal and external stakeholders
- Develop and test new concepts to increase the value of the service beyond MVP
User-centred design strategy
To get to the heart of what Sport Wales Institute needed to accomplish, Cyber-Duck architected a bespoke, highly people-centred research strategy designed to bring the organisation's goals, drivers, and risks to life while identifying, validating, and prioritising its users' needs, behaviours, and pain points.
Further, Cyber-Duck's user research and user experience design experts applied tried-and-tested research methods — including stakeholder engagement, persona definition, and service map workshops combined with depth interviews — to elicit and validate the Institute’s requirements.
Through this research, Cyber-Duck found that Sport Wales' stakeholders see Sport Wales and Sport Wales Institute as being one unified organisation. As such, they expect to be able to find everything they're looking for on one website.
Whereas today there are different methods for applying for general funding and grants, Cyber-Duck established a unified information architecture for the new tool that will bring these routes together for the first time.
Alpha Prototype
Having established what the new service needed to be, Cyber-Duck set about translating two of the organisation's user journeys (i.e., 'applying for a new project' and 'evolution of a new project submission') into clickable prototypes.
To achieve this, Cyber-Duck employed its ISO-accredited delivery methodology — prioritising, testing, and refining the highest priority features. As an example, for Sport Wales' partners, Cyber-Duck tested their ability to submit new projects (under a multi-stage process) to gauge the effectiveness of the solution's self-serve capability.
Turning to Sport Wales' internal stakeholders, Cyber-Duck worked with them to quantify how this new, multi-step process would benefit them in terms of increased agility and operational efficiency.
Finally, Cyber-Duck tested the visual aspects of the new tool with Sport Wales' internal stakeholders — assessing the value of being able to compare projects on an objective, like-for-like basis before they're approved.
Results
With these insights, Cyber-Duck then put together a proposed visual style for the new tool and demonstrate its ability to support Sport Wales' decision-making processes — a strategic priority for the organisation. At its heart, this meant needing to find a way to afford equal weighting to submissions across different (athlete-, sport-, or system-based) groups before comparing the outcomes visually to mitigate any bias.
Cyber-Duck added lasting value to Sport Wales by establishing a sound, evidence-based strategy for this new service. Cyber-Duck then brought these concepts to life by iteratively developing a range of clickable prototypes. Finally, Sport Wales now has all the ingredients to make its application process for support and related services more equitable and people-centred.
Although our initial research and discovery work was focused on Sport Wales Institute, our methodology and findings can be applied across the wider Sport Wales organisation, opening further opportunities for improvement.