Digital Service Design Weeknotes
29 June — 12 July
This week’s weeknotes are brought to you by Emily, our Grants & Investment System Support Manager, and Melanie and Rachel, our two secondees.
We’ve worked differently this sprint, with our main focus on achieving one key goal; to improve navigation on our application forms. This has involved working collaboratively as a whole team, bringing everyone’s skills and experiences together, through planning, prototyping and developing.
Reviewing and prioritising user feedback
Since launching the service UK-wide, we have received a lot of helpful and constructive feedback from users, both internal and external. We have been collecting and collating all these comments and questions, as well as our responses, which has allowed us to see recurring themes and patterns.
A clear theme from the feedback so far has been navigation within the application portal. As a result of this evidence, we decided that this would be our priority and the main focus of the sprint.
To kick off this work, we got together as a team to review all the feedback relating to navigation, and which we categorised further into sub-themes. This included things like the need for a ‘back’ button, the option to view all the application questions in one go and being able to answer questions in a different order.
Once we knew what users wanted, we were able to create a series of ‘problem statements’ to help us fully understand the specific problems or user needs.
Once we had these ‘problem statements’, we voted as team on which would be our priority to resolve and how we would go about it. We decided we needed to create a question-and-answer summary page to;
- Allow users to see their progress
- Show users all the questions up front
- Enable users to print and share a copy with colleagues
- Make an accessible read-only copy available after submission
We also hoped this would potentially help users understand that their progress was being saved throughout the form.
After this, we spent some time independently researching and sharing potential solutions and methods, before coming together again for a prototyping session.
Prototyping session
We experimented with a new methodology for this. We used the technique of ‘mob programming’ which is the idea of gathering several colleagues around one screen, at the same time, to work on a focused issue. What’s important here is that whilst everyone can participate in the discussion, only one person can make changes (a ‘driver’) who is directed by a ‘navigator’.
We did this virtually, using MS Whiteboard as our pen and paper. We were able to create a visual representation of what a new page, to view application questions and answers, would look like by the end of two sessions.
We used:
- the feedback received so far
- examples of best practice
- existing, tested patterns from other services
to determine how to display content, where to place buttons and links, word choice, whilst weighing up the complexity of implementing these in the remaining time available.
We were curious to review how the team felt about this new method of mob prototyping. The feedback so far showed that its valuable to all look at the problem together, pooling perspectives and ideas. Bringing together different disciplines in this way means that we can see first hand what goes into refining a design and the complexity that can sit behind even a simple seeing change. However, some of the team felt that the timing of the session was a little late in the 2 week sprint, so it felt like going backwards or slowing down. This wasn’t a universal experience though, so this helps highlight the different types of skills and experience within the team.
In future we will use this feedback to keep thinking about ways to include everyone in the team in our work.
Updates to Journey Roadmap
We’ve been in a period of change freeze after working hard over the last few months to launch Small, Medium and Large grant applications on the IMS. During this period Ellie, our Product Owner, has been reviewing and planning upcoming work for the team. This involves careful balancing of the different strands of work that are needed to continue improving the service, alongside applicant and staff feedback on the current MVP service. Although the MVP does allow applications to be submitted and assessed, we are receiving a lot of feedback around how to improve this further.
The roadmap has been updated to reflect this. It is published internally on the Knowledge Hub for staff to see the upcoming priorities for the team, a timeframe, and the reasons for their importance. We will also be making an external version of the roadmap publicly available so that our grantees and applicants can better understand our work and how their feedback fits in.
Turning feedback into action
On that theme, at the end of last sprint, Emily and Ellie recorded a show and tell demonstrating the lifespan of a feedback ticket or query. They explained the process of tagging each individual ticket, then pulling these off Hornbill (our IT ticket system) and analysing themes and patterns. This is done by using the tags to determine which issues were raised the most frequently, thereby highlighting a rough priority order in which to address them. Emily produces graphs and spreadsheets of this information on a regular basis which are then taken to a meeting with the Product Team for discussion. At that meeting, the issues are turned into cards on our team planning board on Trello and any urgent fixes are sent straight to the to-do list for the current sprint.
Creating video tutorials on how to create list views for staff
One piece of feedback that came to us via a staff support session, and for which we’re seeing an increasing number of tickets, is how to create a personalised list view. Staff were asking to filter the existing lists views so that they could see just their projects, or just their case papers for example. Jamie and Emily have responded to this need by recording a series of four videos of how staff may wish to organise their lists, and how to create each one using filters.
