Listening to our users
As Tom said before, we’re working to help make the application process for funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund better for people. At the minute this involves a lot of listening to what people have been telling us, and talking to some people directly.
I recently joined the National Lottery Heritage Fund as a user researcher as part of a new team looking at how people interact with the us. My job is to spend time with our users and understand what the experience looks like right now, which bits are difficult or unclear, and then I’ll work with the rest of the team to see how we might make those better.
When I say users, I mean everyone who’s a part of the journey from starting a project, to applying for funding and all the way to completing a project. There are a number of different internal roles who all play a part in this journey and through it all there is an organisation which is trying to get something done.
There are also a number of groups of people who are interested in the National Lottery Heritage Fund, but aren’t running a project. They are all our users too, so we need to make sure we are meeting their needs as well.
At the minute we’ve done a lot of speaking to people already so we’re taking that learning in and speaking to people to help further our understanding of how people understand that process and why some of the things we have been told about are happening.
We recently conducted a series interviews with people who had received National Lottery Heritage Funding for their projects. Some of these were in person and some were done remotely. We used a number of different technologies to speak to people, using whatever they had a available from WhatsApp to Skype.
Spending time with people who use our services is always really valuable because we get to see what we’re working on from a new perspective. One of the people we spoke to told us about how they struggled to complete our online form because they live rurally and their internet connection wasn’t reliable or fast enough. They ended up completing the form locally and then copying it into online application when they could.
If that person hadn’t spoken to us, the problem would have been difficult to understand through our existing metrics. Using Google analytics, we can see how long someone spends on a page, but we can’t see why they’re only there for long enough to paste an answer from a document.
This is just a quick introduction into the sort of work I do, and why it’s so important to talk to people directly, not just study their activities separately from the context they are in. As I spend time with more people and learn more things, I’ll write further posts that will have deeper insights into the people we serve and the way they’re thinking, doing, feeling and hoping when they interact with us.
