Digital Service Design Weeknotes 24 August– 7 September
This sprint’s Weeknotes are from Rosa Fernandez Cerdan, Service Designer, and Kasturi Sithembaram, Interaction Designer.
Taking a step further in the co-creation process about the future of pre-application
A few weeks ago, we started a co-creation workshop series that help us to discuss what a good pre-application looks like and what a future pre-application process might look like.
The goal of these workshops is to bring together Heads of Engagement, Engagement Managers, Senior Engagement Managers, and others across the Fund to understand and agree on the goal of the pre-application stage, ensuring consistency within the organisation and also externally.
We’re bringing this right back to basics and thinking in broad terms about all the work that goes into the pre-application stage that isn’t always visible through the PEF and EOI form. We’ve found through research that different teams, as well as applicants, have varying expectations of the purpose and scope of pre-application.
During the first of the three planned workshops, we opened a board to collectively identify the factors that make pre-application a good experience for users and a successful process for engagement teams. After the workshop participants were asked to send a few cases of successful and unsuccessful pre-application identifying the reasons for (un)success.
The next step has been the synthesis in a visual document of the insights gathered in the workshop and linking them with the findings of the previous primary research done in order to identify accurate problem statements and design directions that will be the framework to follow with the next Workshop 2/3. We will refine the following 5 design directions before moving to the ideation step:
- Easy checking to see if the service is suitable
- Consistency in assessment to add the maximum possible value
- The need of support is not related to the amount of funding
- Flexible touchpoints and processes to embrace diversity
- Excellence in feedback and support to pre-applicants.
Facing one of the complex challenges of the MVP: legal agreements for funding large grants
There are sprints like this in which some decisions, when reviewing deeply for second time or when the implementation phase arrives, need to change. This is the usual approach when designing complex solutions. And is also the appropriate approach when there is margin to change before developing and implementing the designed solution, when that margin will be limited by extra costs or resources.
The challenge of this sprint was to build the journey for accepting the grant and agreeing the terms for £250,000 funding program and over in the service. Part of the complexity is because of the legal and finance requirements and checking needed before users can start the project.
In an attempt of having delivered the journey for the grants awarded in the decision meeting of September the previous decision was building this part of the service in Salesforce Experience instead of the Funding Frontend where is being built the new service. However, and after having a constructive discussion, we were convinced that, in the long term, this was a temporary solution that could bring more challenge in the short future.
The challenge was then how to take and agree on the new decision. For that we used a design method, the Weighted Matrix, which provides a way to manage potential design options by evaluating each design opportunity. This helped us to evaluate every option based on different features and accurate evidence such as:
- Usability for internal users
- Usability for primary users (grantees)
- Accessibility
- Testing and iteration
- Scalability and viability
The result of building finally the journey in the Beta service brought an associated challenge of building a manual process that helps Investment Managers to deal with the journey until is built in IMS. In a few days we have designed and launched in the Knowledge Hub a temporary guide to help staff to produce the Grant Notification Letter, the Permission to Start form, check the Permission to Start form and supporting documents, and confirm the grantee can start their project.
It is worth noting that all the team and other colleagues have been involved in this process and challenge: from the delivery perspective (Em, Delivery manager / Ellie, Product Owner); from the IMS and migration perspective (Jamie, Product Owner / Emily, Investment system Manager); from the design perspective (Kas, Interaction / Kerry, Content / Rosa, Service); and from the development perspective (Alicia / Paul / Adam).
Deploy Large grants application in Salesforce Experience
In our last weeknotes, Ellie and Jamie spoke about our approach to deploy Round 2 in Salesforce by mirroring the approach we took in Round 1.
While we appreciated the need to deploy it within the time scale due to business needs, we were adamant as a team to develop a journey that is inclusive and accessible. We learned a lot from user feedback and observations in Round 1. We took these insights and iterated some part of the journey in Round 2 of the Large grants applications.
We implemented the GOV.UK patterns and components in Salesforce as we know they have all tested patterns and best practice design solutions for user-focused tasks pages.
Implementing GOV.UK in Salesforce has its own challenges. Our developers were very meticulous in implementing these within a tight timeframe. They tested and retested all new features and fixed bugs. As a team, we did extensive accessibility testing to ensure all are in order. We did some bug fixings along the way. We are confident to fully deploy it early next sprint.
Prototype testing and analysing and iterating
As we are about to build the final part of our end-to-end MVP journey, we did usability testing for Reporting Progress and Get a Payment with internal users to gather feedback. Rachel Cull and Melanie Wong ran 5 sessions with various participants to gather feedback.
We ran the sessions virtually for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, all sessions were insightful to help us improve the journey and experience for the users. Jack transformed our low fidelity prototypes to Invision to ensure the smooth running of the sessions virtually. Each session took us about 30 to 45 minutes. We tested the Reporting Progress part of the journey.
After doing the tests with the prototypes, Rachel and Melanie together with research observers shared feedback and analysed all insight gathered during the sessions. Capturing what resonates within the team is important as this helps us generate ideas by identifying trends or patterns which are useful for iterating the prototype.
We did this by sharing observation notes and any interesting stories from the sessions. We then transformed these discussions into actionable next steps.
One of them was to iterate the prototype and improve the journey. We also created some tickets in the Backlog for future iterations. Melanie and Rachel also presented what they found during the sessions to the rest of the team during our Show and Tell.
