Kinship

The Problem

Kinship care often begins in crisis — when grandparents, aunts, uncles, or family friends suddenly take on the care of a child. These carers face complex legal, financial, and emotional challenges with little guidance and almost no dedicated support.

The challenge: How might we build a digital hub that gives kinship carers immediate, personalised support from the very first moment of crisis?

Impact

The two alpha concepts — a personalised guide for scenario-specific information and a live chat for immediate one-to-one help — gave carers a way to feel recognised and supported from the very first moment they reached out.

My Role

• Interviewed carers and stakeholders across every stage of kinship care
• Synthesised interviews, surveys, and analytics into the four-theme framework the team prioritised from
• Mapped hypotheses on the impact–effort–testability matrix that selected the alpha concepts
• Co-created the lo-fi prototypes for the personalised guide and live chat with the team

Process

Our discovery phase was extensive and grounded in real stories. We synthesised findings across four themes: experience stages, support and information needs, service touchpoints, and preferred communication channels.

Discovery Challenges

The scope was initially very broad, requiring careful refinement:

• Complex multi-channel touchpoints spanning websites, social services, and legal processes
• Prioritising synthesis findings for what could realistically be tested in alpha

Solutions

From our research, we identified five key need categories:

We used an impact–effort–testability matrix to prioritise hypotheses based on crisis relevance, feasibility, and testability.

Key concepts delivered

A personalised guide — Scenario-specific information for new carers unfamiliar with their rights and available resources. Meeting people where they are in their journey.

Live chat support — Immediate 1:1 support for urgent questions, reducing the anxiety of navigating the system alone.

Final Design

Proposal A — a sentence builder that lets carers describe their situation in plain language to find tailored guidance.

Proposal B — a quiz flow surfacing scenario-specific information based on the carer’s answers.

Proposal C — live chat entry point on the Kinship homepage for immediate one-to-one help.

Key Learnings

• Transparency builds trust: sharing findings openly — even when they challenged the client’s assumptions about what carers needed — kept the partnership leaning in rather than defensive.
• Remote discovery works when it’s structured: distributed workshops succeeded because every session had a tight frame — vision first, then evidence, then ideas — not despite being remote, but by design.