Participle is a UK social enterprise, which aims to transform the way public services are designed and delivered to individuals and communities. In 2008, they started a programme called ‘Life’ to support and empower families in chronic crisis, helping them to develop their capabilities and build the type of lives they wanted to lead. Participle engaged Headshift to help them create a collaborative, playful, protected online environment for the programme.
We worked with Participle to create a social platform, designing the social experience of their system from the ground up, within the constraints of dealing with such a sensitive set of issues. By interacting with both stakeholders and end users, we created an initial set of personae to inform our recommended use case development process, leading to a user-centric definition of features and interaction flows necessary for the platform to flourish.
We also worked with Participle as a development partner, responsible for the initial development of the platform, which has since been evolved by the clients themselves. By working with agile methods, and creating an iterative approach to development, the core project team were able to quickly provide feedback on a minimum viable product, creating a richer platform as a consequence. The platform has been live since 2009, and is still central to Participle’s work with individuals and communities.
