麻豆约拍

Jane Murison is Head of User Experience & Design (UX&D), looking after the 麻豆约拍 Design Research practice, as well as Children’s, Knowledge & Learning and User Experience Architecture. She explains the new process for agencies interested in working with the 麻豆约拍.

We are excited to be able to offer the chance to join our 麻豆约拍 Digital Design Research roster, which will replace our existing 麻豆约拍 Usability and Accessibility Roster next year. We also have separate rosters for Digital Design and Digital Services, which you can .

We want to build strong and productive long term relationships with agencies of all sizes, capabilities and research specialisms to support our user experience and design processes.

The new roster aims to help the 麻豆约拍:

• Improve the quality of our design research, and of the products and services we make.
• Provide value for money.
• Drive the innovation and creativity of our design research.

We will select 3-8 agencies to join a roster with a life of 2-4 years, effective from May 2016. Over that time we expect to reward £3.5 - 5 million in contracts. The pre-qualification questionnaire is available now on  (log in required).

If your agency is selected, you will work on all of our digital products and services, including:

• 麻豆约拍 iPlayer.
• News.
• Sport.
• CBeebies and C麻豆约拍.
• Bitesize.
• Cross-product experiences like Live and A/V and the Global Experience Language.

More than that though, the agencies will help us form our understanding of our users on the road to new products and innovations.

What kinds of agencies will we select?

We want many different types of research agency to apply. You will need to be able to carry out excellent task-based user research as a minimum, and we expect all agencies on the roster to be exceptionally strong communicators (in order to deliver findings with clarity and to influence our projects). Beyond that, we are hoping to see great research generalists and specialists on the roster - agencies that have pet passions, unique offerings and a strong focus on quality in their practice, agencies that can inspire us to try a broader range of methods and approaches to research.

We also care about your staff development, and your contributions to strengthen the research industry in the UK. We hope to select agencies based in many different locations, since our projects will be based in Salford, London, Glasgow and Cardiff and we need to represent the needs of users from all over the country, and all over the globe.

What will it be like on our new roster?

We want to build strong and creative working relationships with our research agencies, so we intend to change the way we commission work compared to the way we’ve run our design research roster in the past. We want to be a great client to our research agencies.

Instead of commissioning each project separately, we will create longer-lasting work packages of capability-based deliverables (for example, diary studies, or rapid task-based research), with input from both sides contributing to create the best research possible for our User Experience and Design teams.

We will award these work packages roughly twice a year, selecting agencies from the roster based on their short responses and pricing.

What is the selection process?

Joining the roster is a two-stage process. Firstly Pre-Qualification Questions (PQQ), after which we select at least 10 agencies for an Invitation to Tender (ITT). This link to a  outlines it in more detail, and shows you the scoring criteria we will use.

First you complete our Pre-Qualification Questions. There are a few housekeeping questions on Bravo about your business, and then we’d like you to prepare 3 A3-sized sheets which illustrate your capabilities and experience. These sheets are the main way for you to shine - it’s your chance to differentiate your offering and skills, so please think carefully about what examples you use and how you communicate them to us.

Each sheet should be A3 in size, referencing at least one case study labelled in the header with your agency name, and which of the following competencies you’re covering:

• One sheet showing evidence of your qualitative research work.
• One sheet showing evidence of your visual communication skills.
• One sheet showing evidence of a research specialism of your choosing.

Then include the client name and date the work was delivered in the footer. Please keep it brief – no more than 400 words should do it.

Next we will ask a shortlist of at least 10 companies to participate in the Invitation to Tender. A week in advance of a visit to your agency, we will send you a research challenge brief. On the day, you will give a credentials presentation, answering a few pre-defined questions we have (about stuff like how you approach projects with clients), and you will deliver your response to our brief. We will pay you a small fee in recognition of the work you had to do for the challenge. As part of this brief, we will also ask you to facilitate research with participants (that we will recruit for you), and to send us a video file of this facilitation.

We want to give you as much opportunity as possible to show what you can offer us, and we hope our process will do this, whilst keeping the amount of work you and we need to do to humane levels!

How to get started

First you need to register on the 麻豆约拍’s e-tendering service . Then, throw your hat in the ring with the Design Research Roster PQQ by 21 January 2016.

If you have any questions about the process, after looking through our , you can submit them on Bravo Solutions by 7 January 2016.

Good luck!