Designing ways to help users falling out of the process
How the project team is using convergent and divergent thinking
We’re now at the end of Week 4 of our 11-week project designed to help the 25% of people currently eligible for Universal Credit, but failing to claim it.
The outcome we’ve settled on for the project is to:
Demonstrate that we can improve the ability to make successful online Universal Credit claims for eligible applicants who may be struggling with barriers such as digital skills, language, or mental health.
The funders, digital agencies and charities involved in this project are included in our introductory post. This post outlines the process we’re using to ensure this project meets its outcome.
The double diamond process model, shown above, is an established way of ensuring projects include both divergent and convergent thinking. There are four phases to the approach:
- Discover — divergent idea generation
- Define — convergent idea evaluation
- Develop — divergent concept generation
- Deliver — convergent concept evaluation
More about the process and why it tends to work so well can be found in this excellent post by Ola Möller.
We have broken this down into a weekly overview (see below). Right now, we are coming to the end of the Discover phase, within which have gathered existing data, interviewed users, and mapped stakeholders.
Next week, we move onto the crucial Define phase which takes us to the middle of the double diamond. It is at this point we will know which problem to be solved should be our priority. Then, we can then think about how might we develop ideas and prototypes to help solve that problem.
One thing we have identified already is that too many people fall out of the registration process due to a lack of confidence about the Universal Credit process. We have some quantitative data about this, but also qualitative data from the users we have interviewed.
It’s difficult not to ‘solutionise’ with projects like this, but there is something valuable about sitting in ambiguity long enough for specific problems to percolate around the project team. One thing that is particularly valuable with this sector challenge is using, as Woodrow Wilson famously said, “not only all the brains that [we] have but all [we] can borrow.”
Thank you to the charities for their engagement with the project so far, and for the user research participants who have been so willing to share their experiences around what can often be quite a fraught process.
If you have any questions about the project, or expertise to lend us during the short 11-week process, please get in touch: hello@dynamicskillset.com
