School of Mima

The best customer or visitor services or experiences truly and thoroughly consider the needs, expectations and wishes of end users from their first awareness of your organisation, through the many touchpoints, to their last use of, or interaction with, your service. To understand and record these we need to thoroughly understand how a service looks and feels from the customer or visitor perspective. Journey mapping is an extremely useful tool for doing this effectively and it can deliver a range of side benefits as well. In this 2 hour session:

• Build out a comprehensive, end-to-end journey map from the perspective of your customers or visitors
• Record and highlight key successes and pain points in your service that can affect their perspective
• Record and highlight emotional highs and lows related to the identified successes and pain points
• Identify opportunities for improvement and refinement of your service or experience
• Develop the business case for change, to align internal teams and stakeholders

We are great believers in the power of ensuring everyone is starting a project or research work with the same level of understanding and thinking around accessibility and inclusive design. Our introductory training session provides just that, and aims to build technical knowledge and confidence, but also empathy in participants. In this 2-3 hour training session:

• Gain an understanding of disability, and the different access requirements people may have
• Explore how buildings and environments can exclude or include both visitors and staff members
• Develop a better understanding of the stakeholders you may need to engage with during an accessibility and inclusive design project
• Explore what steps you can personally and professionally take to create more equitable spaces and services

To be as successful as possible in serving customers or visitors it is important to understand them via a lens that encompasses their needs, motivations and pain points. When it is not possible to know all of your users individually, creating a persona to represent groups of them according to this lens supports consideration of them in both an efficient and effective way. Continuing through to then developing the design of a service or experience using the persona set helps to target interventions to best serve user groups. In this 2.5 hour session:

• Conduct research to determine which personas to develop
• Build a template for personas including demographic information, goals, priorities, behaviours, motivations, preferences, and pain points
• Begin to populate the template for one or two personas based on existing research
• Develop use cases related to the persona set
• Refer to and record use of personas at design decision points
• Provide evidence-based input to the business case for change

At Mima we believe in using the power of Human Factors principles to help your team’s understanding of human performance, including prevention of human error, reducing unfortunate incidents and elevating your workforce’s efficiency and effectiveness. This session is designed to equip your organisation with the essential skills and insights needed to thrive in today’s dynamic work environment.

• Prevent / mitigate against human error: proactively uncover the root causes of human error and accidents and equip your team with practical strategies from our customised learning program to mitigate risks, reducing costly mistakes.
• Enhance workforce performance, efficiency and effectiveness: streamline operations by optimising workflows based on human capabilities; understanding and addressing the physical and psychological factors that impact decision making leading to increased productivity, workable processes, and overall effectiveness.
• Promote a safety culture and better communication: create a safer work environment by instilling a culture of awareness and accountability, streamlining lines of communication, enhancing collaboration, reducing the likelihood of hidden failures, and increasing system resilience.

There’s more to accessibility and inclusive design than step-free access, automatic doorways and desk heights (as important as all those things are!) Too often, we forget to think about how an inclusive experience should actually ‘feel’, and the importance of reducing and removing operational barriers as well as physical ones. If you’re looking for a training session that will provide a culture change and mindset shift for your organisation, this is the one for you. In this 2 hour session:

• Understand what makes every visitor feel welcome, valued and respected and learn to recognise the diverse requirements and lived experiences that those visitors bring
• Spot and remove barriers that might prevent someone from fully enjoying their visit, especially for disabled visitors or those with access requirements
• Understand the importance of language and communication styles that make every visitor feel comfortable, included and confident in your space
• Be introduced to tools that will help you to take action and create positive moments for all visitors

Ensuring disabled people are not discriminated against whether as visitors to, or staff members at your organisation is not just ‘the right thing to do’: it’s a legal responsibility. This responsibility extends to those with other protected characteristics too. After learning the theory related to types of discrimination, the importance and impact of reasonable adjustments and much more, you’ll be given the opportunity to put your learnings into practice with a range of interactive activities. In this 2 hour session:

• Understand what the Equality Act is and how it relates to you and your organisation
• Develop a greater awareness of the nine protected characteristics and various types of discrimination
• Learn about the Public Sector Equality Duty and your responsibilities in relation to it
• Gain tools and techniques to support further consideration of, and action on, equity in your decision making