Designing a Service for a Public Sector Organisation
In a nutshell, this project involved:
1. Getting to know future users of a service, in-depth
2. Co-design of a service. This included: developers (to ensure technical feasibility), business (to ensure business feasibility) and the client product owners and stakeholders
3. Building a prototype and using it as the source of truth for developers.
Due to very short time lines and high time pressure to build and deliver this service, developers were building pages as soon as they were designed in co-design workshops including the client and service team. Then, based on user testing of the built pages, they could be changed according to user feedback.
The design approach used here was the double diamond approach. As such, we started by understanding and empathising with the future users of the service.
The best method to do this was to run remote user interviews to understand the perspectives of the people that would be using the service. We asked questions and had long conversations with the users about their experience performing the task that our service was there to help with. You can see the notes (blurred and anonymised for confidentiality) below.
Interview notes
Once all the research was put together in one place (a Mural board), the raw interview notes had to be synthesised into findings.
Those findings were prioritised and played back to the team.
As designers, we worked closely with the developers and business analysts on the team to get an MVP service developed that demonstrated the value of the service, based on our in-depth knowledge of the users, in just a few weeks.
I created a clickable prototype for that service as shown in the video below (blurred for client confidentiality). This prototype was built using the GOV.UK prototyping kit, which is very helpful as it tells the developers the components they need to use from the GOV.UK Design System components library. This was the source of truth on what we were building, that developers could refer to and build the pages quickly and accurately.
The ways of working between designers and developers was to have a clickable prototype as the source of truth on what to develop. The prototype was up to date on content and functionality, so it could be linked to in stories worked on by developers.
