3 May 2022 to 16 May 2022 weeknotes: Research into 40% advance payments, design of completion report journey and developing the IMS portal

Research into 40% advanced payment for projects awarded between 10k to 100k

Over the past several sprints, Jack, our junior user researcher has been conducting research into the Heritage Fund’s current 40% advance payment journey for projects awarded between 10k to 100k. This research involved speaking to 3 of our investment managers and 2 grantees with the aim to gain a deeper understanding of:

• How the 40% advance journey starts
• The information we ask our grantees to provide and why we ask for it
• How do grantees complete the 40% forms in the journey
• The checks our investment managers conduct

This research has now been completed and has revealed many interesting insights, pain points and potential improvements to be made. The next step in this process is to hand over these insights of our current 40% journey to our User-centred Design team (UCD) so that these insights can be incorporated into the design and development of our new 40% journey in Funding Front End (FFE).

Design of Completion Reports Journey

As mentioned in our last weeknotes, the research into completion reports is complete and our UCD team has moved to start designing what the completion report journey will be in FFE. In our most recent sprint, our interaction designer and our content designer has been hard at work creating the first of 3 different completion report journeys and are making great progress. The design of the new completion report journey is still very much a work in progress but below there is a sneak peek of some of the potential improvements that the UCD team is currently in the process of designing (Image below).

Caption: A before and after screenshot visualising the improvements the UCD have made to the Approved Purposes section in the completion report journey

Developing the IMS portal:

Adam:

• Reused the existing bank details screens so they could be used in the arrears payment journey.
• Developed a way for people to view their previously submitted payment requests and progress updates.
• Made numerous changes in response to issues found during testing.

Paul:

• Developed a summary page to show spends under £500 that have been added.
• Developed the journey for spends over £500.
• Developed the way we capture Digital Outputs.
• Developed the way we capture Funding Acknowledgements.

Testing

The team worked together to extensively test the progress update part of the arrears journey. The team recorded any problems for Adam and Paul to fix. This is an ongoing process and the team will continue to test the approved purpose/outcome and spends parts of the arrears payment journey when development is complete.

Data zaps

Occasionally resolving a customer need involved making a direct change to the IMS Portal database. The most common examples are when an organisation’s name or main contact needs to change. Until we enhance the IMS further, Adam and Paul will continue to apply these data zaps in response to support requests. We did 23 of these datazaps in the last sprint. We also monitor Sentry to proactively address IMS portal errors when they occur.