Everything we do starts with user needs.
We believe that good design and development decisions need teams that understand why and how people use the service they’re building. Services that are built with reliable insights into users’ needs and behaviour are more inclusive, more effective and resilient in the long term.
Our research practice aligns with the GOV.UK Service Manual. It’s built into every stage of the work we do. For example, we recently built a platform on GOV.UK for government departments and agencies to build their own campaign websites. Working with the Government Digital Service (GDS), we identified an overarching user need in the discovery phase:
“As a civil servant
I need to be able to create, manage and monitor a campaign website
So that I can deliver an engaging, cost-effective campaign without relying on help from GDS or a developer.”
From this, we built a prototype of the campaigns platform and tested it with communications teams across government. Through tailored workshops with the wider campaign teams and GDS we designed the end-to-end user journey from onboarding and support to performance analytics and archiving.
The service is now in public beta and being used for campaigns such as Fire Kills and Floods Destroy.
We start research by defining and prioritising what we need to learn or prove.
To get the most reliable outcomes we mix and match most suitable methods. These vary from interviews and contextual studies to usability testing and bespoke workshops.
We think it’s important that everyone is involved in user research, that includes developers and project stakeholders. We also encourage clients to be involved in analysis.
We continuously review and adjust the way we do research to ensure that we’re always gathering useful findings. We use roadmaps and user stories to continuously review our progress.
Throughout projects, we present what we’ve done, what we’ve learnt and what we recommend based on those learnings. Depending on the type of research we can also produce outputs such as user journey maps, ideas for further research and assisted digital plans.
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The NHS is the fifth largest employer in the world with around 1.7 million staff, and its jobs website handles 300,000 vacancies every year. As the central component of all NHS recruitment, the NHS Jobs site is part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure. It handles over 4.5 million applications per year.
Read NHS Jobs case study