Power to the people: starting a user panel from scratch in local government
We’re on a pretty big journey at WMCA: kicking over our current public-transport website, which houses a growing collection (26 at the last count) of transport-related services, and starting again. With user needs.
Our team goal is to create the best user experience and lead in digital transport.
Why user needs and user research?
First of all, let’s look at why we should be starting with user needs.
Good design can be expensive, right? But development even more so. That’s why we need to reduce the number of changes, i.e. development work as much as possible. That’s why it’s important we know we’re building the right thing.
Let’s look back to the double diamond model: diverging and converging to allow time to discover what we need to do (user needs), deciding what to do (scoping) and designing solutions to meet needs, before developing/delivering the product.
When we overlay the Discovery-Alpha-Beta-Live agile delivery model, we have a lot more room to experiment and therefore innovate with different solutions. We permit ourselves to fail.
By failing early, iterating, and assuring we’re building the right thing, interacting with users throughout the process, we can reduce the risk of total redevelopment during Betas — or worse, our service launching and failing.
User panels
An excellent way to save time and money is to recruit a user panel — a group of users you can reuse for various discoveries or testing. You can build a relationship with reliable users who give helpful feedback.
Setting up our panel
We created a user panel — the User Testing Group — which started life when we were doing some market research for a campaign design surrounding disruptions to the transport network. We knew about the website project, so took the chance to start recruitment back then.
We approached our marketing team and asked for access to their email marketing platform, Campaign Monitor, which was kindly granted. We cleared a proposal for collecting data with our GDPR officers and ran a simple campaign on our social media: come and have your say on campaigns and digital products. We advertised the post in areas where the organisation does not usually get a decent response rate from in consultations.
We linked to a Campaign Monitor sign-up form and captured people’s mode(s) of transport, first three parts of their postcode and how they usually receive information about transport.
Initially, this generated a couple of hundred subscribers, which was great for testing the disruption campaign, but after that research was out of the way we needed to go bigger. There was a risk that we had recruited transport enthusiasts and experts, which could skew the results of future discoveries.
Our organisation is lucky to have a brilliant internal research function, who have accessed a lot of users and have their permission to recontact for further research. It also works with citizens under 25 through an engagement group and a board of young people set up to influence policy. Once all of these users were added, we had a combined email database of over 1,500 people!
How we’ve used the user panel
We use the User Testing Group to send out emails inviting users to participate in user testing opportunities. To date, we have run workshops; face-to-face interviews; remote prototype testing; and surveys — totalling 537 interactions in 6 months.
Another critical tool we use is Hotjar for quick feedback and heatmaps on our current website — we will also be utilising Hotjar on our beta site.
When you combine responses from both of these platforms, we’ve received over 15,000 replies. We are incredibly grateful for this level of engagement from users and don’t take it for granted.
Things to think about before starting a user panel
- What are we going to be researching? (How will you communicate the purpose of the panel?)
- Who will we need to talk to? (Where you will advertise the panel? Email? Social media? At the bottom of letters?)
- How will we keep the list? (Does your organisation have an email marketing platform you can use? Do you need to speak to your GDPR person?)
- How will we incentivise people to participate? (People respond if there is an incentive on the table — we’ll talk more about that in a future blog post)
- Who is going to maintain the user panel? (If you don’t have user researchers, somebody has to do it!)
This story is the start of a series about our project to rebuild the West Midlands’ public transport website, West Midlands Network with a user-centred design approach.
Please do leave your feedback and questions about our blog posts — or find us in the LocalGovDigital Slack.
