10–24 August: Digital Service Design Weeknotes
This week’s weeknotes are from Ellie Craven, Product Owner for Open Programmes, and Jamie McGarrigle, Product Owner for the Investment Management System.
Building two-stage grants
This sprint has seen the team make good progress on the delivery round for large two-stage grants. This has included:
- Creating the delivery round application form on the grant’s portal
- Creating the functionality to support the internal processes including new fields, records, page layouts and the case paper.
We’re slowing down our pace of delivery with this work to make sure that we can share knowledge across the team, and make space for onboarding two new members of the Development team, Alicia and Adam.
Ahead of this sprint, Rosa (Service Designer) spent time working across the team to map the flows and journeys through the two-stage application process, and think about how and when these link to or trigger other journeys.
We used these flow maps during our sprint planning to help identify the work needed to build a complete, consistent and usable journey. We’ve also used these artefacts throughout the build work this sprint to make sure we’re talking about the same parts of the process as we work across the disciplines in the team.
This has enabled Abbie and Kerry (Content Designers) to work with Alicia, Adam and Paul in the development team on notifications and guidance triggered throughout the journey. Kasturi (Interaction Designer) has used the flows to help inform design work on new pages for the second-round application, particularly where those are providing signposting or navigation for users.
Testing designs for payments in arrears
In our last weeknotes, Abbie and Jack (User Research Project Officer) talked through the work to devise a prototype for applicants to report their progress and request payments for project costs they’d incurred.
In this sprint, Jack worked with Melanie and Rachel (on secondment from our Business Delivery teams) to test parts of this prototype with colleagues in Business Delivery. These colleagues review progress reports, approve payment requests, and manage queries from grantees, so they have a lot of valuable insight about what information we need to make a payment or get a sense of project progress.
After the first two sessions, the team adapted their session plan so that they could keep the sessions to their allotted time whilst making sure we gathered insights on all the parts of the prototype being tested. We talked about the value of this iterative and flexible approach in our team retrospective.
New training videos
We regularly analyse the feedback and support queries we receive from our users (both staff and external users). This gives us valuable insight about the areas we might need to revisit or improve, and tells us where users are struggling with the new service. In response, we’ve worked this sprint to add some new training videos to the staff KnowledgeHub.
These provide some extra detail and visual prompts for the parts of the service we’ve received most staff queries about in the past few weeks:
- Notifying users that they’ve been awarded a grant
- Managing the legal agreement
- How to check bank details and approve a payment
What’s next?
In our upcoming sprints, we will be building out the legal agreement journey for applicants for grants over £250,000. These are two-stage grants at our highest grant level, so some of the terms are different than those we’ve already built for smaller grant levels.
The application journey for these larger grants currently uses a configured front-end from Salesforce Experience, whilst the rest of the service uses a custom Ruby frontend built using the GOV.UK Design System.
This approach enabled us to spin up the Round 1 form really quickly when we needed to, and we’ve retained this approach for Round 2 to give users a consistent experience.
As we build out the post-award parts of the journey like legal agreements, payments and progress reporting, we need to think carefully about the user experience and our technical debt, so that we’re building the best possible service for our users whilst carefully managing our scope and our maintenance overheads of running two separate front ends.
We’ll look at whether managing post-award journeys through our Ruby frontend for all grant levels creates too much of a change for users who have so far interacted with Salesforce Experience, and we’ll consider our options for supporting users through that change, or keeping their journey consistent and in the same place.
