Summing up my Deloitte Digital Connect journey
Having heard all of the playbacks from my DDC peer group, one common theme was about the importance of user research. Hearing direct from the service users how they experience our services is absolutely key and can transform how we work.
I am particularly proud that I have gained the skills and the confidence to complete user research myself — I used to think that only a specialist could do this effectively, or that I was not best placed to. But having learned a lot about how to plan the questions and run the session myself made me feel better prepared to give it a try. And having now conducted some sessions myself, I feel more confident to do it again in the future with more users and different audiences.
Although I was worried about conducting the interviews, the key thing that I’ve learned over the course of the programme is that the challenging part is actually finding the participants — and particularly ones that reflect the diversity of our service users and those more hard to reach audiences. So I’m taking steps to work with our frontline services staff to get more access to those audiences and find out what they need to make our digital services more accessible and inclusive. This is not necessarily specific to the problem statement I started the programme working on — it’s a broader piece of work that we need to do to inform our digital services going forward, and it’s something I’m looking forward to working on.
