Doing Service Design at the National Lottery Heritage Fund
By: Kerry Lyons
Tags: Content Design, Funding, Heritage, Product Management, Service Design

Digital Service Design Weeknotes

June is here and we continue to work our way through the roll out of the new service, Get a grant for a heritage project. This week our weeknotes are written by Kerry, Abbie and Melanie with a strong mix of user-centred content design and cross-Fund collaborating. Without us all working across The Fund as a team, we couldn’t build a user-centred service. Here, we talk about how we’ve done it this sprint:

It’s been a long sprint this sprint. Three weeks to be exact. And we’ve been busy. We’ve built out the payment journey so that grantees can get paid. We’ve started to build out the legal agreement part of the service, that starts with grantees being awarded their grant, reading and agreeing to their grant contract and terms and conditions of contract.

We’ve also:

Collaborated with legal colleagues

We’ve worked closely with our colleagues in legal as we build out the legal contract part of the service. This has involved collaborating on shared documents and many Teams calls to work through the content together. In content design, we do something called pair writing, which is usually two brains — or more — working together to create content based on user needs. It often involves a content designer, and a subject-matter expert. This is how we worked with our legal colleagues to help to take the content in Permission to Start for small and medium grants and build it into the service. We worked towards making the content clear and easy to understand for our grantees. This involved us taking the current Permission to Start process and content and all the parts that make up agreeing a contract with The Fund and building an MVP (minimal viable product) version of this into the flow of the service. This is the part of the service where grantees receive and agree their grant contract, after they are awarded a grant.

Built payments into the service

This work involved the team taking an overview of the service flow for the payments part of the journey. We did this by looking at the flow created by our service designer, Rosa.

Snapshot of a Miro board showing sketches of individual pages of the payments journey

We agreed things like, what pages in the service need to be included, what the purpose of each page is, navigation, where users have come from, where they are going to next, what do they need, what does the organisation need. Once we knew the answers to these questions, content design worked closely with Jo, our user researcher, and Rosa to build out the content, thinking carefully about what we are asking people to do and what they need to know. Each page starts as a blank piece of paper — literally a blank piece of paper sometimes — and then, with the user need, or the purpose of the page, or content at the top, we start to build out what information is needed, and how it is presented and where.

We created a low-fidelity prototype in Miro, which consisted of each page in the payment part of the journey and marked it up for our developers Stu and Paul. This means that we noted what is a H1, H3, H3 for example, what content styles need to be, is it hint text, or normal text. In this way, when they build the pages into the service we can make sure that the content and design is accessible, consistent and clear.

Updated the website routing page for Small and Medium Grants roll out UK-wide

From Friday 28 May, applications for all Small and Medium grants across the UK started coming through the new service. As we open the service up to more applicants, we needed to make sure the website reflects the options users have so they can find what they need.



People will need to use the application portal if they already had funding from us for a project, so we still needed that on the routing page. However, we expect these numbers to reduce as people finish their projects, so it doesn’t need to be the top option.

We considered the readability guidelines to write the content and used HTML to mock-up an example of what the new page would look like once built into the website. We worked with the Welsh Language Officer, Liam, to offer the content in Welsh as well as English and made sure we linked to the relevant Welsh pages for those following the journey in Welsh.

HTML mock-up of the new routing page showing 2 navigation options. One to the new service, Get funding for a heritage project, and one to the application portal for previously funded grants

We worked with marketing and communications digital team to coordinate the updates for Friday 28 May ready for launch.

Said hello to our new interaction designer

We welcomed Kasturi (Kas) to the team. Kas will be developing the how of using the service; the link between the user having a task to complete and enabling people do the task in the smoothest and most efficient way. Before joining the Fund, Kas worked with the NHS on projects including developing digital infrastructure and flows to help people access different prescription services.

We’re looking forward to working together to build the Get funding for a heritage project service and adding another member of the user centred design part of the team. We asked Kas some questions to get to know her:

Why are you interested in the work you do?

I enjoy engaging both the creative and analytical parts of my brain. I love solving problems. Fuelled by my passion for people, places and new experiences, I would like to bring a level of empathy and attention to detail that’s critical to making intuitive user experiences.



I am a strong advocate of inclusive design. I want as many people as possible to access our services and use them. User-centred design techniques make this possible by understanding the reality of people’s lives.



I have previously worked in similar roles in the Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Services and the NHS. I believe my experiences will add to all the excellent work already being carried out by the Fund and enable more people to benefit.

What’s your favourite film & TV show?

I love films and TV shows which are fast paced, full of thrillers and suspense and are engaging throughout.

Do you have a hobby?

I love walking and listening to podcasts. And most times I do them both together. I am very lucky — I live near the Quayside, Tyne Bridge in Newcastle — so it is easy to convince myself to walk along one of the most beautiful parts of the country. I know I am biased!

Said hello to Alicia, our new senior developer

Alicia has been our contracted Salesforce developer since the end of 2020 and is very much part of the team. You might have even seen her in our show and tell videos explaining what Salesforce can do. Soon however, we will be saying goodbye to contract Salesforce developer, Alicia, and hello to senior developer at the Fund, Alicia! We asked Alicia a couple of questions to get to know our new (but not so new) colleague.

Why are you interested in the work you do?

Being a Salesforce developer is like being asked to solved puzzles all day for a living, sometimes it’s a riddle or crossword or Rubix cube. There’s always a new puzzle to solve, which is fun. Working at National Lottery Heritage Fund, it’s great knowing that all your efforts have wider social value. I recently discovered my local park has received Heritage funding as well as several other bigger projects in my hometown Preston!

What’s your favourite film?

Maybe it will always be my favourite film, I watched The Matrix as a teenager and it’s been my favourite ever since.

Do you have any pets?

A sweet little working cocker spaniel called Isla. She’s a bit camera shy but pretty much always sat next to me while I’m working.

Officially rolled out the large grants service

We launched the large grants service through Salesforce Experience UK-wide on 13 May. Whilst we were confident that the technical side of the service was working, we had to ensure that communications for staff and applicants were also ready, as the deadline for large grants application submission was 28 May. We created a three-step journey by email for the 41 applicants we were expecting to submit for this deadline, to access the new service and submit their application.

The first email we wrote was sent by staff to notify the applicant that we will create an account for them so that they can access the application form. The staff member then emailed our Product Owner, Jamie and Central Team Manager, Sinead, who created a new account for the applicant. The applicant was then sent an automatic email with a link to their account, an instruction to reset their password, and information on how to start the application.

Although this was a manual process as we needed a quick solution to enable access to the service, in future iterations we hope to automate and simplify this for applicant submission so that it is similar to how other grant level applications are received.

We also worked to make an accessible version of the application form questions, which helped staff to answer applicant queries, available on the Knowledge Hub.