Design for success at The Open University

How strategic service design helps The Open University deliver long-term value for students and staff

The Open University (OU) has great expertise and creates vast amounts of valuable research. What it didn’t have was an objective understanding of what it was like to navigate OU technology systems – either as a student or as a member of staff. Using our design expertise, Equal Experts helped the OU step into users’ shoes and view its services from the outside looking in. As they focused on user pain points, teams started to see how to solve the user’s problem rather than the internally perceived problem, and the whole problem rather than multiple small pieces of it.

Designing a service in this holistic way is much more efficient, reducing cost, creating a faster, smoother experience for both staff and students, and ultimately improving everyone’s perception of the organisation.

Outcomes

Built a foundation

of user-centred design skills through partnership within the OU

Culture of leadership

embedded through design principles

Multi-channel

content strategy for student support created and delivered

About The Open University

The Open University is a global leader in higher education able to reach every adult in the United Kingdom – and many others across the world. Established by the Royal Charter and globally recognised, The Open University has pioneered distance learning for over 50 years, delivering exceptional teaching and outstanding support to students across the UK and the world. Its mission is to make learning accessible to all, and its teams have helped over 2 million students to realise their ambitions.

Industry

Education

Organisation size

10,000

Location

Project length

8 months

Challenge

Creating a culture to enable user-focused technological change

Like many educational institutions, the Open University had legacy IT infrastructure driven by large-scale system implementation and disparate project teams. As these internal systems dictate how students experience their interactions with the university and tutors, the OU wanted help to become a service-led, technically agile organisation that can respond to students’ needs effectively, increasing opportunities to retain and grow its student body.

The concept of using service design to enable the build of user-focused products (i.e., its services to students) was new to the OU. Our job was not only to help design a technical estate that would enable scale, but also to develop the service design capability of OU staff and support senior leadership to re-imagine the future of the OU as a service-led organisation.

Solution

User-centred, product-focused design

Before we did anything else, our design service team set about painting a vision of what design thinking could ultimately achieve for the organisation. Our ‘Future Backwards’ workshop helped senior stakeholders explore how the student experience could look, by co-creating a vision for the future as it might be 3 years from now. The key themes enabled digital teams to see how their focused work aligned to the broader strategic ambition of the OU.

Our main client stakeholder had worked with us previously on government engagements and was keen to establish the OU’s newly developed design principles. Key to this was the creation of multidisciplinary teams working in agile delivery, aligned to phases inspired by Government Digital Services (GDS), i.e., moving through Discovery, then Alpha and Beta phases before going live. This framework gave us an established, user-centred way of working which we were able to adapt for the OU, iterating over time to build confidence and learn what worked.

Embedding new skills into the OU

This was a cultural change as much as it was a digital transformation; we were helping to lay the foundations of a new way of operating for the OU. Defining and establishing new digital job roles for design, delivery, product and engineering functions was key, as was helping to upskill existing OU staff to fulfil those roles on a permanent basis. These roles were brought together in multidisciplinary agile teams with a focus on outcomes rather than outputs.

Equal Experts are experienced in guiding organisations new to this type of change. We first of all provided these roles as consultants, helping to define the structure of blended teams working alongside OU staff. Working together as part of a team helped us set the intent for an ambitious transformation whilst helping to identify strengths and embed the service-led approach. Running a buddy system with Equal Experts’ consultants pairing with OU staff across a range of roles eventually transitioned into OU staff being able to fulfil the new roles on a permanent basis.

Starting small

We used the student support service as a starting point, structuring the team to introduce the OU to the value of roles like service designer, user researcher and product manager. At the time, support for students came in the form of a simple telephone line with voicemail. It was inefficient, and students often didn’t get the support they needed, increasing the risk that they would drop out or defer.

User research insights supported the idea of an online booking system for appointments, with the aim being to increase efficiency, reduce the number of unanswered callbacks and help more students (including those with disabilities) find the information they needed quickly – all aimed at giving students time back to focus on study.

This was an end-to-end exemplar, from discovery, prototyping and user testing through to live production, and served as an example to the OU of what good looks like for designing and building a new digital service.

Ultimately, the results were positive, but it did take time to get there. This is why an initial phase can be so valuable; giving teams an opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t is an excellent way to set an organisation up for success as they design more services in the future.

Building iteratively to test design hypotheses

Next, we designed a service for the enrolments team, who have the challenge of facilitating the journey of a potential student from the point of consideration right through to registration and starting their course.

The OU team had already done a lot of great discovery work; our job was to help them develop that through the lens of user needs, with service ownership and design thinking embedded from the start. We supported their teams to take a holistic view of their digital services, and provided leadership roles to help establish cross-functional teams aligned with their goals.

Result

Satisfied students and happier staff

Our approach to service design identifies both internal and external user needs, serving multiple purposes and stakeholders. Instead of a constant stream of internal fixes, the OU is now set up to tackle problems from the user’s perspective. It saves time, simplifies workflows and just makes the product work better, so there are far fewer ‘fixes’ required!

After 6 months our design consultants were able to step away from buddying, passing the baton to staff working confidently in new product, design and delivery roles. Here’s some of the feedback from our client:

“I honestly think we are shifting the dial and EE has been a huge contributor to that.”
“I’ve learnt more from you in 1 year than in the last 20 years.”
“Just thought I’d thank you very much for your input to the invigilation project – they have been crucial in helping make the remarkable progress that we have made so far on this – must be a new record for the OU?”

Introducing GDS-inspired concepts to an organisation that hasn’t worked in that way before wasn’t without challenge, but as we leave the OU, they are now using product thinking in both the Enrolments and Curriculum product teams.

Helping OU teams to think about the end-to-end experience for students means they are now in a position to build user-centred products that free staff up from admin so they can support students better, and give students time back to focus on learning.

It worked really well and got us to a degree of pace that we wouldn’t have been able to get to otherwise.

The Open University