Supporting Breast Cancer Now to understand how they might best enable people to feel more comfortable and build stronger breast-awareness
Project aims:
Breast Cancer Now wanted support to co-create ideas that help 45+ year olds build healthy routines and prioritise breast-awareness.
Inclusively worked with Common Collective to deliver this project.
Project background
Breast Cancer Now already had a range of insights around the barriers to breast-awareness habits so we started by reviewing existing reports and creating hypothesis barriers. The main barriers were that people didn’t see it as a priority, that they often forget to look and feel their breasts, that they feel worried or confused about how to do it or what they’re looking or feeling for and sometimes put off getting support or attending screening.
We ran a workshop with the Breast Cancer Now team to prioritise the barriers that they felt this project should most focus on trying to address. We then ran research interviews and workshops to ideate and co-design potential resources to help people feel more confident and remember to check.
Research chats
We ran five chats with a diverse group of people to further explore potential barriers in more detail.
People told us that the feelings they had when looking and feeling their chest tended to be negative and some said that they had a 'mental block' to the behaviour. We also learned that when people do look and feel that they often didn’t do it in one go.
People wanted support to build their confidence, to feel more positive and to help them remember.
Co-designing potential future resources and reminders:
Based on the barriers and insights we created a series of early prototypes to take into co-design sessions and ran two workshops to further develop them with potential future users. We also ran a prioritisation exercise to understand what they felt would have the most impact for them in the future.
The outcomes and impact:
The ideas were further co-designed and refined. For example, from the co-design workshops we learnt that having choice over the channel of communication for information or a reminder can be really important, some people prefer text and others prefer a card through the door. We also heard that people needed reassurance that it was ok to contact the Breast Cancer Now helpline with any questions they had as they often currently worry about wasting people's time.
The project resulted in a variety of potential future ideas and resources that mapped back to the insights and barriers that we had set out to try and tackle. We plotted the ideas along a journey map as it was clear that often people might need more than one thing to help them feel confident and to remember and often people found that different things might work better for them than others. We also created an accompanying theory of change model for future resources to showcase what the needs it was addressing and how it will meet these needs and what the outcomes could be.
“We worked with Charley and Katherine who were fantastic and we would highly recommend them. We had a relatively short project time-frame, and Charley and Katherine were incredibly proactive in setting touch-points, identifying key internal stakeholders and timelines upfront to ensure the project ran smoothly from the start.
Charley and Katherine ran workshops for us with members of the public on sensitive topics. These were delivered and handled with respect which allowed for open discussion. Overall the project ran to time and to budget which we were really pleased with.”
— Lordi Tickell (She, Her, Hers), Public Health, Inclusion and Awareness Manager (Breast Cancer Now)
Thank you to the people who took part in the research - we really valued your honesty and sharing your needs. And to everyone in the BCN team who were great to work with.
Client: Breast Cancer Now
Services: Service Design, User Research, Design Research,Pprototyping
Team: Lordi Tickell and Manveet Basra, Breast Cancer Now, Charley Pothecary, Kat Jennings