What we do.

Through tailored, participatory programmes we help you improve life for customers on the margins.

Three Hands is a small, purpose-driven social insight agency. We help businesses to understand the real-life barriers their customers face, so they can create products and services that work better for everyone.

We bring in people with lived experience of challenging circumstances and experts from charities to provide deep, qualitative insight – what we call “data with a soul”. Their insights help organisations to better understand customer needs, meet regulatory requirements, and deliver more inclusive products and services.

Our focus is on marginalised customers: people facing life’s challenges, from disabilities and health conditions, to financial vulnerability and bereavement. Customers on the margins matter – anyone can become “vulnerable” at any time, and 49% of UK adults showed one or more characteristics of vulnerability in 2024 (FCA Financial Lives Survey). If you get it right for them, you get it right for all customers.

We combine lived experts’ and charities’ first-hand insights with our in-depth understanding of marginalised audiences, bespoke research design experience, and group moderation skills, to create powerful research projects. Our highly participatory approach results in memorable experiences and a sense of ownership over outcomes, generating business value and social value, hand in hand.

Here’s how we go about things.

Providing the ‘glue’ throughout is our Lived Experts Research Community, a group of over 450 people (and growing) whose lived experience, stories and ideas play a fundamental part in making our projects real, visceral and highly impactful.

ISSUES

Immersive insight


We help people from business get under the skin of issues that have an impact on customers and their experiences.

Some issues are societal – such as the gig economy, use of cash, fraud and scams, digital poverty, and loneliness and isolation. Others stem from individual experiences – like dementia, neurodivergence, unpaid caring, bereavement, and growing up in care.

We gather people with lived experience, and experts from charities that support them, to share how these issues affect real lives and what businesses can do about it. Insights are gathered through group sessions (online or in-person), in-depth interviews and, for large audiences, webinars and podcasts.

What makes it immersive? Business teams don’t just listen – they are invited to ask questions and explore angles of interest, making each experience highly engaging, memorable and impactful.

PRODUCTS & SERVICES

Inclusive Design

When design works for people facing challenges and barriers, it works for everyone.

We bring together people with lived experience of life challenges and experts from charities to critique and provide feedback on products, services, communications, customer journeys and digital features – all through the lenses of their circumstances.

Our most common approach is through Inclusive Design Panels – regular sessions with intact panels – but we also use live testing and one-to-one interviews to gather feedback. Product owners play an active part in the sessions, hearing feedback and ideas first-hand, and using it to make customer interactions more understandable, inclusive and accessible.

It’s a powerful, award-winning formula!

INNOVATION

Outside In-novation

Who better to work with when creating solutions for customers on the margins, than those customers themselves?

When there is an unmet market need and an appetite to fill it, we apply our ‘Outside in-novation’ methodology. It’s an innovation sprint over two to three days, involving a business team working closely with a group of lived experts and critical friends from charities.

It starts with immersion to understand customer challenges, moves onto ideation to generate new ways of serving customers, and finishes with the prototyping of the best ideas – with lived experts and charity critical friends providing feedback throughout.

We’ve helped businesses to come up with new ideas for serving older customers, better ways to communicate with customers with gambling problems and ideas to ensure life insurance products stay relevant in the changing world of cancer, to name a few examples.

ETHNOGRAPHY

Deep dives

Meeting people in their own worlds – their homes and the places they go – can uncover the realities of their lives that other research activities do not reveal, and shape a deep understanding of customer circumstances, behaviours and needs.

These ethnographic approaches include observation and interaction in homes, and on regular outings such as supermarket trips; at-home interviews; mystery shopping; video testimony; journaling and diary tasks – all managed by skilled and experienced researchers.

It takes place with members of our Lived Experts Research Community, who want their realities to be seen and understood. They’re up and down the country, they have lived experience of a wide variety of vulnerability circumstances, and they’re ready to help you understand their lives.

INTERNAL LEARNING

Presentations and workshops

Even though businesses are made up of people – people who might have experienced difficult circumstances themselves, and whose family or friends might face barriers – there is often a disconnect between the corporate world and the real world of customers.

Using video testimony, and our own expertise, we bring real customer stories – with all their subtleties and nuances – into team meetings, workshops and events in businesses.

The stories are powerful and “sticky”, and they help people, from front-line staff to senior leaders understand, and act upon, customer circumstances and needs.

Have a read through some of our case studies here!