People Street are currently commissioned by the Home Office to support the UCD team to embed inclusive research and design.
Brief
To deliver two different but complementary strands of work. The first strand is focused on offering an inclusive recruitment wrap-around service reaching the most under-heard communities in the asylum space.
Strand two is focused on better understanding digital exclusion through an ethnographic, community-led research discovery followed by usability testing of a prototype.
Delivery/Objectives of strand 2
Research with communities experiencing digital exclusion in an effort to better understand how barriers interact and surface in the real world. The purpose of this discovery was to;
better understand each barrier,
appreciate the nuance at grassroots level,
explore how barriers are interlinked
Surface how barriers are expressed by communities experiencing exclusion.
We were also committed to learning about the coping strategies and mitigations people use to cope with the sharp channel shift towards digital since the pandemic. As well as listen out for additional barriers we hadn’t considered.
We used a participatory and iterative approach which included running all the research in community settings, using translation or running sessions in mother-tongue.
In total, thirty-five participants attended a focus groups. Five of these participants took part in check-in and sense making sessions which lasted 35-45 minutes each. A further 9 people took part in community-based Usability Testing.
The participant brief was intentionally intersectional to ensure we were reaching people most at risk of exclusion. For example, participants were culturally and linguistically diverse and represented communities from Nigeria, Namibia, Eritrea, Somalia, India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Ghana, Wales and England.
Half were asylum applicants, and half were non-applicants from racialised communities. Eighty percent had a smartphone, of the 20% who did not have a phone, half had a phone but it was broken or damaged and the other half did not have their own phone but had access to a device through a family member. Only 6 people had a laptop or computer at home. Twelve people had a tablet at home but only one said they use it.
