Places, Spaces & Faces
“There wasn’t a chair for me. We were there for three hours and I just had to stand next to the bed. It felt a bit weird, like I shouldn’t really be there.”
The experiences, needs, preferences, family set-ups and life circumstances of all the dads we spoke to as part of this project were vastly different. Some dads attended all antenatal appointments, others none. Some took shared parental leave, and others worked 6 day weeks and were not afforded any time off. Some dads craved contact and socialisation with other dads, whilst others felt anxious at the thought of this and preferred to access things from the comfort of their own home.
Unfortunately, this means that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that we can take to including and supporting fathers. We know however, that on their journey to becoming a parent, dads ‘bump into’ all sorts of parts of the system. That might be attending a 12-week scan, it could be going to antenatal classes, reading a letter their partner has received about an appointment, searching online for tips to help with pregnancy sickness, attending the birth, chatting to their sports coach about how the birth experience was for them or being present at a health visitor check-up.
We also know that everyone across the system is working tirelessly with an ever-increasing level of need and limited resources. So, before we jump to action in this seemingly impossible situation, we want to show you something that dads created with us during one of our exploratory design workshops:
The overarching sentiment of these dads, was that they just wanted to be involved and included. With that in mind, we’re going to think about dads’ journeys through systems and how we can use the idea of ‘touchpoints’ or ‘points of contact’ to make tiny tweaks that transform experiences. There are two ways that you could go about this, depending on your role and you aims:
Thinking about dads’ journeys through your service and where they come into contact with places and people in your service. This approach is probably most suitable if you are aiming to understand the details of how dads experience your particular service and improve the quality of dads’ experiences within your system.
Thinking about dads’ journeys through the ‘perinatal system’ as a whole. This approach is probably most suitable if you are working across multiple services, working in collaboration with leaders in a number of areas of the system or working in strategic roles such as commissioning or service planning.
Of course, you could always try both!
Dads in Kent recognised that there was vast variability in their family structures, working patterns, personalities, personal beliefs and responsibilities. There was no single place that all dads interacted with the system, because every dads’ life was different. However, all of the dads we had spoken to had come into contact with the ‘system’ at some point in the perinatal journey.
If you’re looking for practical ways to transform dads points of contact with your system, check out The One Minute Interaction resource created by dads in Kent and available to implement in your service.
Get Practical
Get a pen and paper and physically map out a ‘dad journey’. Think about the very beginning of the journey - how a dad finds out about your service, what text and images they see, how they make an appointment (if they do) etc. Move all the way through the journey, including thinking about what spaces dads enter, who they come into contact with and what happens in those interactions. Now you have identified all your ‘touchpoints’, think about how dads might feel at each of those touchpoints.
If you would like some structure around creating this map, you could use a User Journey Map template. Even more helpful is involving dads to understand their journey and how different points in their journey made them feel. How can those touchpoints be transformed to give dads an excellent and inclusive experience?
We can’t say what this will look like for your service, every service is different, but we do know that thinking outside of the box is normally key. Who are the people you aren’t involving? What are the spaces you are not thinking about? Think about every single touchpoint. Can a receptionist be on the lookout for dads to interact with? Can the design of a waiting room be re-thought to encourage dads to interact with each other as they wait for their partner or co-parent to come out of an appointment?
You could reflect on what makes an excellent experience of a service for you. Try to do this with colleagues and if there are dads working in your service, put them at the heart of this exercise. You could try using the Exploring Client Centricity tool, focussing on creating a positive experience for dads that come into your service.
Now create your action plan. You don’t have to do everything at once and you don’t have to get it right first time. Great design is about trying things, observing how they go and modifying accordingly, it’s a constant learning process.
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User Journey Map - Supports you to establish a common understanding of all a the touch points with a service and a person’s experiences at those points.
Exploring Client Centricity - This exercise promotes collaborative exploration and reflection around an organisation’s approach to its clients. This tool can be used to think specifically about dads as ‘clients’.