Co-editing, collaborating and listening: designing the UKRI Funding Service

By Damien Hatton, Simpler Better Funding Service’s Lead Designer

We are in one of the most important and exciting times in the history of research and innovation. The rate of discovery and technological advancement is astonishing, with unprecedented opportunities for the research community to create, develop and deploy new ideas and technologies.

To truly capture and pioneer these opportunities UKRI needs a modern, and user-centred digital service that allows applicants, research offices and universities all over the UK to apply for funding easily, consistently and efficiently.

UKRI’s Simpler and Better Funding (SBF) programme is building a new digital Funding Service that supports everyone involved in research funding, our goal is to create a single, consistent user-centred service that:

• reduces the burden of finding, applying for and managing research funding
• gives UKRI evidence to support funding the best ideas
• can respond and adapt easily to change

Testing and learning as we go

Our agile approach to building The Funding Service meant starting with launching the core capability and adding solutions.

We knew this was a limitation, so we put in place mechanisms to collect user feedback and inform our future development priorities. These feedback mechanisms include:

• User research: we conduct user research on a regular basis to understand the needs of our users and identify areas where we can improve the service.
• Help desk: we track the support tickets that we receive from our users. This gives us insights into the problems that they are facing and the features that they need.
• Webinars and online surveys: we host webinars and surveys to gather feedback from our users on specific topics.
• Feedback forms: we have feedback forms on our website where users can submit their feedback directly to us.
• Anecdotal feedback: we also receive feedback from our users anecdotally, through conversations with research councils and other stakeholders.

We gather and analyse this feedback data on a regular basis to identify the most common and pressing user needs.

Implementing a common theme

Feedback from all of these sources has consistently shown that the ability for multiple people to collaborate on grant proposals is the most popular request from users.

Here are some examples of user feedback:

• “It would be really helpful to be able to share my grant proposal with my colleagues and get their feedback before I submit it.”
• “I’m working on a large grant proposal with a team of researchers, so it’s important that we can all work on the proposal at the same time.”
• “I’m a research office administrator, and I need to be able to see and manage the grant proposals that my team is working on. It would be great if there was a way for me to collaborate with them on the proposals directly within the Funding Service.”

We’re currently developing a solution that will allow multiple users to collaborate on grant proposals. We’ve broken the task down to a number of deliverables that will eventually satisfy the many sharing and collaboration needs.

We’re solving the most challenging problems first. Our first goal is to enable research office administrators to make edits to applications once it has been sent to them for approval and submission. We’re using the learning from solving the biggest problems to solve other problems. Next, we’ll enable research office users the ability to collaborate on proposals as they are being created, in a draft state. And finally we’ll enable the ability for the applicant to invite others to read or edit their application online. With the aim that anybody from faculty heads, co-applicants, finance clerks or personal assistants can be invited to view or collaborate on applications at the applicants request.

This means:

In the first iteration of the RO co-edit functionality which we’ll be releasing in the week commencing 7 November all research office staff with a Funding Service account will be able to edit all sections of an application when in receipt of it for approval submission.

Meanwhile, in the second iteration, which will be released in the latter part of December  all research office staff with a Funding Service account will be able to edit all sections of an application at any time (including throughout the period where the application is in a status of ‘draft’).

Working together

We’ve been working closely with applicants and research office administrators to design solutions that meet their needs. Several rounds of design and research have led us to solutions that we are confident will solve the sharing and collaboration challenges that people have been having.

We’re excited to continue working with the research community to develop the UKRI Funding Service into a world-class service that supports research and innovation. We encourage you to continue to provide us with feedback so that we can continue to improve the service.