Imagine if you had a guide that showed you how to create apps and digital services that successfully help vulnerable people.
Imagine if funders had a guide that showed them how to fund the same apps and services in a way that increased the likelihood of success.
This guide is coming! It will be landing in your inbox in the next few weeks (sign up here). It should be especially useful to charities looking at creating apps and digital service enhancements.
While working on the guide James and I researched the most useful, awesome and popular articles on the Labs blog. We looked for those that had been most read, shared and lingered upon, in the context of how long they had been published.
What we found threw up some surprising and predictable results. For example, Mark Brown’s series of posts on making Doc Ready ranked really high, as did Sarah Amani’s article on building My Journey. However, neither of these were as popular as an empathy mapping article that we nearly didn’t publish. Hat tips also to some of last years golden design articles on MVPs, cool walling, paper prototyping and challenging assumptions.
Here’s the Top 10, with reasons to read. Enjoy and learn!
1. How To Use Empathy Maps To Make Better Services
Thanks to John @The Smithery for the inspiration for this one. If you’re serious about understanding how to design something that works for your users then you need to read this. Read.
2. Don’t Ask Young People For Solutions
Why consultation is not young people friendly, and tips on what not to ask your users from Mark Brown. Warning: this post will challenge and inspire you. Read.
3. Why Build a Minimum Viable Product?
Hold on there, cowboy! Reign in your ideas for multiple features and focus on getting one thing right first. This post will save you £thousands and make your product much better for it. Ignore and suffer. Read.
4. How To Make A Mental Health Service That People Like
Mark’s back with a new entry at number 4 that lays down the gauntlet to all poorly designed mental health services. That’s a big gauntlet, right? Save your service and read this.
5. Developing a Mental Health App: My Experience
My Journey was the first clinical mental health app launched in the UK. Here’s what the beautiful Sarah Amani learnt from the process. We can only try and follow. Read.
6. How Personas Help Charities Create Better Apps & Services
If you’re not using personas to improve your service or design your product then something could well be wrong in your project’s space time continuum. You really should be using them 100% of the time. Read.
7. 5 Big Issues For Your Health App or Digital Product
Solid and important advice from a funder who’s been and seen the problems faced by health apps. Billy Dann draws on Labs, Handi and Mindtech insights to present the issues you need to consider. Read.
8. How to Challenge Your Product Design Assumptions
We all have assumptions. Get over it and challenge them before you spend any money building your product or service. Don’t argue with me. Just put your energy into testing them out. It’ll save you money, time and hair. Read.
9. The Innovation Cool Wall: Where Cool and Practical Combine
The inspiring and very lovable Harry Harrold shares one of the secrets that earnt his team the right to run the Labs Process in 2012. Its so easy to use its ridiculous. No excuses for choosing the wrong idea any more. Sorry. Read.
10. The Magic of Paper Prototyping
We can’t believe its not higher but maybe that’s because it spawned a million copies. The original ‘magic’ article by Annabelle Davis shares the life-enhancing experience that taking part in paper prototyping creates. Read.
That’s your lot. Or is it?
There’s a few that didn’t make the cut but that we know you need to know about. We don’t want to overload you with these high quality but under-read resources now so we’ll reveal them next week!
