Designing content to achieve everyday equality

Scope wants to be the go-to organisation for disability information and support. We’re aiming to reach 2 million people a year, supporting disabled people and their families on the issues that matter most to them.

We want to make sure that people can access the information and advice they need easily – whether they are a customer of our services, are calling our helpline, or are looking for support and advice on our website.

This has meant re-thinking how we design and deliver our support and advice content. Our new approach has 4 central principles.

Content design

We design content to help people solve problems. Disabled people and their families are at the heart of our work. We ask them about their information needs and write content to meet those needs. Then we test the content with disabled people and their families and make improvements in response to what we find out.

Joining things up

Our policy team helps us plan content that supports our social change goals. Once the content is written, policy advisers join critique sessions to check and improve content before it’s published. We’ve built a great relationship with the policy team by working like this. And it means that the information and advice we give our customers is consistent with our public influencing work.

Evolution not revolution

We evolved our content design process during a ‘proof of concept’ project with a team of 3. We’ve used what we learned to scale up to a team of 9, delivering advice and support content on a much more ambitious scale than Scope has done before. We use Kanban, a workflow management tool, to optimise the flow of work through the process. The Kanban ethos encourages us to carry on evolving and improving the way we work.

Open and transparent

Our processes and policies are written down and open to all. We have a clear content strategy and style guide. We use a shared Trello board to map the progress of each piece of content, which means we can easily spot if something is getting blocked and do something about it. If we see ways to improve how we work, we say so and agree what changes to make.

This is a summary of how we’re evolving the practice of content design to achieve our strategy, Everyday Equality. We’ll share more about how we work and what we’ve learned as our journey continues. Watch out for more posts from our content designers, user researchers and the people we work with.

Visit our employment section to see the first results of Scope’s new way of producing content.