If you didn't get chance to be involved in this workshop, you'll be invited to our 1:1 sessions early next year where you can preview our new page designs and share your feedback before they are launched. You'll get £50 as a thank you for taking part. Please sign up here and one of our team will be in touch!
Finding information is a daily pursuit in our lives. In our personal lives, we may need to identify what that light that’s popped up on the car dashboard means or how to make use of the red cabbage forgotten at the bottom of the fridge. The same goes for our professional lives, we may Google or increasingly use AI tools, to find the answers to challenges we face at work or get more detail on a particular topic.
Our Knowledge Hub
At Homeless Link, we have a treasure trove of insight and guidance on every aspect of homelessness provision and support in our Knowledge Hub. But I often compare our Knowledge Hub in its current format to a library where the returned items have been put back on a shelf, waiting for re-categorisation and filing. If you know what you’re looking for or someone has sent you to a specific place, then you will find what you’re looking for, but if not, it can be hard to find things.
What I want our Knowledge Hub to be instead is the perfect bookshop, the carefully curated and presented bookshop of our dreams where things are logically organised whilst also offering serendipitous connections and overlaps (think of the Libreria bookshop in London). I also want the Knowledge Hub to be informed by the people who most need it and to offer the most value to the sector that it possibly can – it needs to be the go-to place for staff working in the sector and for them to find the information they need in the quickest and most accessible way.
Design With Us
Our Design With Us project has this as its key aim. We started our journey with user insight over a year ago, working with Do Good Research to run 1-to-1 sessions to better understand how users interact with our Knowledge Hub. In this first round, we recruited people from across the homelessness sector and took them through a range of scenarios using our Knowledge Hub, and we quickly saw some of the blockers for users finding the information they need. Something that kept coming up repeatedly was the limitations of PDFs.
We heard from users that they are often looking for information in the exact moment of needing the answer, crisis mode sometimes, and they are looking to get information as quickly as possible. There are also obviously the times when they may have more time to engage with longer-form pieces, but even then, they are scanning, looking for the information that they are most interested in. It became increasingly clear that organising pages around single PDF downloads and listing individual Knowledge Hub entry pages for PDFs was a blocker to our vision for the Knowledge Hub.
We have done a lot of work over the last year to find ways to tease content out of PDFs and onto webpages, but this has only shown the limitations of the current way of organising content within the Knowledge Hub and the blocks we have available to us for content to live in on the page. So, we need a new way to do things.
Card-sorting and filing - interactive workshop
Last Friday, we ran a workshop with staff recruited from the sector. We ran a number of card-sorting exercises i.e. asking participants to put sticky note labels with topics on them into categories that made sense to them and then challenging them to come up with a name for that ‘pot’ or ‘bucket’. I love observing this sort of session and seeing in real-time how people piece things together, how they make linkages between things in ways that I had never thought of. Homelessness sector staff are always incredibly reflective and think broadly about the themes of their work and I was left with an even greater sense of purpose for this project, and a vision for how we can start thinking about a more user-focused information architecture for the Knowledge Hub.
Screenshot from the Miro board:
We are taking this insight into the next stage of our project where we will be building new working prototypes of webpage block/components and in early 2026, we will run 1-to-1 sessions with users to test these prototypes.
If you are interested in being involved, then please sign up here - you will be paid for your time, and I hope it will be a really exciting project to feed into.
We will keep sharing updates and insights from what we are doing, and we hope that we will soon start to see this new era of the Knowledge Hub coming to fruition. Nothing is ever finished and this user-centred approach is one we want to embed into our everyday approach to Knowledge Hub content, so there will be more opportunities to be involved in the future – so, watch this space.
Testimonials from our workshop:
“Really well managed and it flew by in a small group - good communication”
“It was interesting and engaging -nothing was boring and felt very easy/like I wanted to join in”
“It was surprisingly playful and engaging!”
