Trusting all the experts
Collaborative working to improve access to childcare
In 2018, I changed roles at HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK tax office, from a user researcher to a service designer. After a year in this position, the biggest take-home for me is the importance of working with the experts within the service in order to get to a solution to solve a user’s whole problem — emphasis on working with.
It takes a community
At HMRC, we say that designing a service requires more than the person wearing the ‘service designer badge’: it takes a community. In order to design a service that works for end users, the key is to understand what the user needs are.
Once you understand the user needs and the pieces of government involved, you are well on your way to understanding what works, and what doesn’t work in a service. But, implementing change is difficult and almost impossible on your own. You need a community.
A good example of this is when I was working on improving access to childcare support, specifically: Tax-Free Childcare and 30 hours free childcare. I met many experts, including those from policy, communications, compliance and product owners, and it became quickly apparent that I would need to make use of their expertise to improve the service.
As we started to work together, we formed a service community.
“Service Communities are networks of people with different skills and from different professions and organisations, who are united by the service areas they work on.” — Service Communities team, 2019
Engage experts in the design of services
Collaborating with key experts doesn’t always result in getting the best out of them, or the best solution for the user. In previous attempts to bring experts together, I found roles got confused, and the unique knowledge or input of individual experts was lost.
Therefore, the main aim for the service community for Tax-Free Childcare and 30 hours free childcare was to make it easy for experts to share their individual knowledge, while letting other experts with different knowledge areas, share theirs as well.
We made sure every person involved had the time to share their insights as part of collaborative workshops and weekly show and tells. Additionally, we set ground rules to help manage emotive discussions around subjective topics. Our decision process was constructed before any collaboration, and was shared in a way that encouraged experts to contribute at every stage of the process. However, the end decision was always made by an expert in that area.
Depending on experts’ areas of expertise, it wasn’t always necessary to include every member of the community at every event, workshop or pair-writing session. As a result, sessions became more productive, and experts had an opportunity to present findings to the wider community later.
This process built up trust within the service community, which is hugely important in such a large, cross-governmental team.
Building trust
“We move at the speed of trust.” — Chris Govias, Chief of Design CDS, 2018
To get the most out of our service community we needed them to trust one another, to trust the experts, and to trust in the process.
On most projects I’ve worked on, experts are involved at key points, but once their insight and advice is captured, their involvement subsides. However, in this instance, I wanted them to be involved in every step from discovery through to implementation.
We relied on experts giving us their time on top of their day-to-day responsibilities, so it was vital to keep them engaged with the process and use their expertise at the most relevant times. To help each individual take ownership of the process and build trust, all communications were sent to the entire service community. We used a Trello board to share documentation, outcomes, user insight, design iterations, sketches and final designs.
As well as sharing our resources here, we also used it as a way to track comments and discussions. This meant that everyone could take part, and also allowed the appropriate expert to shape the final decision.
Allow experts to own their expertise
The outcome of our work is three, step-by-step user journeys for gov.uk which focus on the user needs, as opposed to policy.
These journeys have improved users’ understanding of what childcare support they are entitled to, and support a more holistic approach than simply focussing on whether individuals are eligible for a specific department’s policy.
Our approach created ownership of solving the whole problem across the service community we created, and also an understanding and respect for the individual experts and their knowledge.
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Marc O’Connor is a service designer from HMRC, working on designing services based on user needs, defining the strategy for a service or set of services.
