One year of User Research at the Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS) in Wales

In September 2022 I joined the Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS) as our first permanent user research hire. It’s been a busy year so I wanted to take the time to reflect on all our team has achieved, my learnings along the way, and to think about what’s next.

CDPS is on a mission to make Welsh Public Sector services user-centred, and to do that we needed a team of talented people! We have grown massively in the last year; when I joined the UCD Team was made up of myself, Joanna Goodwin our Head of UCD and Osian Jones, our Senior Content Designer. Fast forward to now and our UCD team has grown to 14; 5 of those being our amazing UR Team.

The Welsh Public Sector is generally further behind UK central government departments in its digital transformation journey and maturity, so we have been starting a lot of things from scratch and learning as we go. This has been both exciting and daunting at the same time but I’m proud to be part of a team who is so driven to make positive change in the Welsh Public Sector and all that we’ve achieved this year.

What have we achieved?

Built a Research Ops function from scratch

Being the first permanent User Researcher at CDPS meant there was very little in place in terms of research processes, templates or tools; otherwise known as Research Ops. I wanted to make sure we approached this in a strategic way, to not try and do everything at once, but to get the foundations in place. So as well as drawing on mine and the teams’ experience, I did a lot of reading and absorbing of insights from others to define an approach and strategy to our Re Ops. I won’t go into loads of detail here as this deserves a blog post of its own, but to highlight some key achievements we have:

• Created a Re Ops Strategy for 2023 built on our team’s needs
• Set up Consent Kit as our UR CRM — to support GDPR compliant participant data management, enable us to be more efficient with our consent collection and research invitation process, and to build our own participant panel
• Reviewed and purchased the MVP tools our team needed
• Created research templates suitable for our context (including Welsh language documents for external facing processes)
• Started work on a ‘diverse by default’ participant recruitment approach
• Created an MVP participant panel of 300+ participants
• Created SLT approved guidance and policies including a ‘User Research Privacy Policy’ and ‘Incentives Guidance’
• Organised and received training for all of the UCD team on ‘Trauma-Informed User Research’
• And loads more that I will write about again!

All of these tasks have enabled us to do quicker, safer, and more robust research, which is important as we look to continue scaling our impact across Wales.

An output from a workshop with our User Researcher’s which informed our Re Ops Strategy 2023

Delivered research insights across the Welsh Public Sector

We have delivered impactful research findings and helped build digital capability in a large range of projects across Local Authorities, NHS Wales, Welsh Government Policy teams, and for Arms Length Bodies. Just some of our projects have included:

• Taxi Passenger Safety Discovery
• Cost of Living Content work
• Digital Maternity Cymru
• Service Standards for Wales
• User Research Community of Practice

We select the methods that are appropriate for the project, making sure our research is time-efficient, cost-effective and relevant. Where possible and relevant we have aimed to learn from people in their environments through methods such as ethnographic research and pop-up research to observe the barriers they face. It has been exciting to see our talented team out in the field, learning from people in their contexts.

Yana, one of our user researchers, interviewing a parent in a hospital about maternity services for our Digital Maternity Cymru project

User Research is a relatively new profession in Wales so we’ve wanted to lead the way in demonstrating the power of learning on the ground whilst making sure it is safe and ethical to do so. I’m glad we’ve managed to do this and we will be exploring ways through ReOps to maximise the power of this method.

The team out researching for our Taxi Passenger Safety Discovery project

Built a User Research in Wales Community of Practice

In April this year we launched a Community of Practice called ‘User Research in Wales’. We now have 117 members, and 12 core members from organisations across Wales who support the coordination and leadership of the community. We conducted research (how meta!) to first understand our user’s needs and it has helped us stay focused on delivering exactly what our members need. The community is for anyone in Wales who works as a user researcher, or who does research as part of their role to support them in doing research. We have seen the benefit of keeping our membership requirements fairly broad, as our goal is to develop the User Research profession in Wales and we want people with different backgrounds and experience to understand the role and to want to contribute to making public services user-centred.

Some of our members on a Teams call for one of our virtual community meet-ups

We run monthly virtual community sessions where we host presentations on UR topics, facilitate discussions to understand how others approach certain situations, and we ask members of the community to contribute. In November we ran our first ever face-to-face event, where we ran workshops to showcase how important user needs are, and to understand how methodologies are impacted by different scenarios. We also ran an unconference style session, where we discussed how AI might have a place in user research and how to navigate the complexities of participant recruitment in Wales.

Welcoming our members to our first ever Community face-to-face event

If you’re interested, you can join the community here.

Established an Ethics Committee

At CDPS we are fortunate enough to work on projects for social purpose, which often requires researching with seldom heard and marginalised groups in Wales. We are a passionate team of researcher’s who work hard to represent these groups in our work, but we were acutely aware of the responsibility this work poses and needed to make sure we approached this work in the right way.

We have been grateful to work closely with the amazing Katy Arnold recently, who has supported us to establish an internal Ethics Committee. An ethics submission must now be submitted for any user research undertaken across the organisation, so that the Committee can discuss any risks or questions they might have about a research project and make sure it is being conducted in an ethical way. This has been a fantastic addition to our ways of working; I am already seeing our team’s confidence grow and feel a sense of reassurance in knowing we have dedicated time to review proposals and make decisions accordingly.

The team undertaking our Ethics training refresher to support us in setting up our CDPS Ethics Committee

What have I learned?

This year we have achieved a lot, but I learned I can’t do everything at once (much as I would like to)! I tried to create a manageable strategy for Research Ops but on reflection, it included too many different objectives at once. It would have been better to focus on one area at a time (i.e. participant recruitment) before moving to the next focus to make sure we could complete tasks fully before picking something new up.

Another key learning for me is that “good enough” really is good enough a lot of the time. We have so many ideas as a team, we would never get anything done if we aimed for perfection every time. So it’s been good to challenge myself with thinking about what the MVP versions of our goals are, rather than focusing on the ‘perfect’ version. That being said, we still need to continue to iterate things as we go because that ‘good enough’ will change and need to be improved as we continue to learn.

We are so lucky to work in a profession that literally enables us to design things that work well! It’s felt a bit overkill at times to do user research to build internal processes/ resources for user research, but it has worked and has meant that our efforts have paid off with everything we’ve built or done, as they have been grounded in user needs. Taking the extra bit of time to do a small piece of desk research/ have a couple of calls to identify people’s needs has given us so much confidence and grounding to get things right. We will continue to do this moving forward.

Lots of good stuff exists already — you don’t need to (and shouldn’t) reinvent the wheel with everything. We will be reusing and repurposing a lot of the amazing guidance built in central gov departments because it is really good. We will also make note of the original sources and be sure to share any feedback that we learn to help them further improve their work too. This is the value of communities and I am very grateful for the user researcher’s who work in the open and help lift others up, it has helped me no end this year.

What next?

This year has been about forming and getting the foundational processes, tools and templates in place to support us to do good user research. Next we will be looking at solidifying our processes and continuing to improve our ways of working to make sure we’re working even more efficiently. We will also be looking to support our wider colleagues across CDPS with their user research needs; now that we have an Ethics Committee in place, we will be in a much stronger position to advise and make timely decisions on how to approach individual situations, as well as to support more projects to be user-centred.

We plan to build a research repository and an insights library. We want to ensure our research insights can be found and re-used across the business and that we are sharing what we learn about our users in a way that is sustainable and ethical. We have grand ambitions to scale this for the rest of the Welsh Public Sector in the future, but our initial focus will be starting small to get things right for us first.

We will continue to run our User Research in Wales Community and plan to move towards a collaborative approach so that the community can work together on shared issues in Wales. We’d love for the community to create guidance and outputs which we can all use, to minimise duplication and curate “best practice” together. It has been great meeting such inspiring and talented people, and I can’t wait to see how the community evolves in 2024!

I’m also going to try and write more — I learn a lot from other people’s articles so this is me holding myself accountable to contribute too.

Gabi Mitchem-Evans is a senior user researcher at the Centre for Digital Public Services. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.