Understanding User Needs to Improve Digital Services
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In this workshop we’ll be looking at: Customer needs versus business needs – what are the differences? Creating user stories to capture customer needs Using Personas to test service design scenarios Using Customer Journey Mapping to identify the good and the bad parts of processes
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Understanding User Needs to Improve Digital Services
- 2. What are your priorities for us to cover today?
- 4. “When designing a government service, always start by learning about the people who will use it. If you don’t understand who they are or what they need from your service, you can’t build the right thing””
- 5. User needs
- 6. “User needs are the needs that a user has of a service, and which that service must satisfy for the user to get the right outcome for them.”
- 7. 1.Are more likely to be used 2.Get the right outcome 3.Cost less to run
- 8. Exercise: User need or business need?
- 9. 1. Running an advertising campaign to increase the number of people signing up for online council tax billing
- 10. 2. Providing advice about how to insulate your home and grants that are available
- 11. 3. Gathering data on how the council interacts with its customers to see all the overlaps
- 12. 4. Introducing a residents parking permit scheme in a neighbourhood
- 13. 5. Opening the council contact centre for 24hrs a day
- 14. 5. Providing residents with information on how to pay their council tax
- 15. 1.Who users are 2.What are they trying to do 3.How their life influences this 4.How they use services
- 16. User research
- 17. “Treat any opinions or suggestions that don’t come from users as assumptions that have to be proven by doing research”
- 21. User stories
- 22. As a [person/role] I need [something] So that [I can do something]
- 23. As a British person I need a passport So that I can travel abroad and prove my identity
- 25. 1.Sound like a real person 2.Be based on evidence 3.Focus on the problem
- 26. As a customer I need 24hr bin collection So that my bin is always empty and clean
- 27. As a staff member I need my pay reduced So that the council can afford to employ more people
- 29. 1. Introducing a residents parking permit scheme in a neighbourhood
- 30. 2. Providing residents with information on how to pay their council tax
- 31. User personas
- 35. 1.Photo, name and age 2.Occupation 3.Circumstances 4.Goals and needs 5.Frustrations 6.Quotes
- 37. •John is 53 and lives with his wife Helen in Barton. They’ve just become grandparents for the first time. •He works as an accountant for a local food manufacturing company. He’s been working there for 22 years. •He developed rheumatoid arthritis 10 years ago and struggles to walk far. •He wants to be as independent as possible
- 38. •Jenny is 25 and lives with her parents in Rose Hill. She’s about to move to supported accommodation for people with learning difficulties •She has a job working in the local supermarket and has been there for a year •She often needs help to understand complicated things and can get frustrated when they don’t make sense to her
Editor's Notes
- Before we start it would be good if we can get you used to using Jamboard (check everyone has it in browser) So we’re going to go to page 2 using the navigation at the top of the window
- So through this I’ll tend to say User rather than Customer. What’s the difference? Does it matter? For public sector services, people using them often don’t have a choice. Things like rubbish collection, applying for benefits or planning permission only have one organisation delivering them. So they are service users. Social care services call theirs clients For some services, like building control, you do have a choice, and you spend money with them too, so they are more like real customers This doesn’t mean we care any less about the people using our services, we just might not monitor the same things to see how well we are providing them in the eyes of the people using them So you can swap out Customer where you see User if it makes you more comfortable. User also fits on a slide easier!
- This is a quote from the Government Digital Service It’s centred around designing and building online services, but the same is true for other services It gets straight to the heart of why they focus on this so strongly in what they do – get it wrong and things won’t work properly And the thing they focus on all the way through is…..
- We’re going to start by looking at User needs So what are they? Thoughts?
- Here’s the official Government Digital Service definition of user needs. When they say ‘service’ here they don’t mean a service area It’s about satisfying the person and making sure they get what they need – the right outcome. What do we think about that? What might the benefits of user needs be in designing a service?
- Services designed around users and their needs: are more likely to be used help more people get the right outcome for them - and so achieve their policy objectives cost less to operate by reducing time and money spent on resolving problems
- We’re going to do a short exercise to test out how well you can recognise if an initiative is a user need or a business need I’m going to show a number of scenarios, and I just want you to shout out if you think they are a business need or a user need
- Business need: it is aiming to reduce council costs and there is little direct benefit to the customer
- user need: this will help residents save money and energy
- business need: this will help the council organise its work better but doesn’t meet a direct user need
- both: users may benefit from improved parking arrangements, the council may benefit from fewer parking complaints and increased revenue It’s worth saying at this point that staff are users too. In any scenario there may be lots of different users with different needsm
- neither – this is an example of what someone might ‘want’ rather than a real ‘need’ that can be evidenced There may be a few people that would like this, but the need is more likely that they can be able to contact the council at odd hours. User needs isn’t about giving people everything they say they want
- both: user needs to be able to pay bills in a way that suits them, business need of improving income to the council
- To deliver a service that meets your users’ needs, you have to understand: who your likely users are what they’re trying to do how they’re trying to do it now how their life or work influences what they do and how how they use and experience existing services The way we do this is through User Research
- User research is the way that we pin down those user needs, rather than just invent them or take a guess Although sometimes you need to make some educated estimates, you need to build them up from evidence. And the way this is done is through a number of initiatives that grouped together are called user research
- So keep this statement in mind whenever someone suggests that customers would want to do something – we need evidence to support this
- We’re going to watch a short bit of this video about the Government Digital Service and their view on user research There is some jargon in here but focus on the attitudes and approach
- So there are lots and lots of methods of finding out more about your users You can use different techniques at different stages of designing a service. Discover would be at the very start, before anything else is done. ‘Discovery’ is normally the first phase of an Agile project designing anything new, or trying to introduce a change to an existing thing Listen is at the other end, where we see what people think about something we’ve already done Quite often, we tend to focus just on the right hand side techniques Sending out a survey to ask how we’ve done Looking at how many people use a service, or how many web pages they’ve looked at We haven’t got a hope of doing all of these, so we are going to focus on a few that are used a lot
- So these are the three we’re going to cover today (but not in that order)
- So what do you do once you have all this user research, and better information about user needs? One way is to use User Stories. This is a way of capturing a requirement and the reason for it all from the perspective of the person that it is aimed at These follow a really simple format
- Not complicated is it? But it can be really valuable as a way of checking back to see if you are actually delivering anything of value
- Here’s an example of a user story
- Here’s an example of using it within a technical specification for some software. It shows user needs both for a customer AND for an internal user (as a business need)
- So the rules of writing a GOOD User story are; Make it sound real – not just an invented sentence that no one would really say Be able to show how you know this is a real need. If you pluck it out of thin air the likelihood is there isn’t a need at all Focus on the thing that people want solved Let’s have a look at a couple that wouldn’t be consider good examples
- What do people think of this? Is it a reasonable user need? Look for: more a Want than a need. Not a reasonable expectation. Not a real problem. No evidence that anyone has asked for this
- Seriously?
- OK, let’s write some better user stories We’ve got some templates that you can use to write these out. Write as many as you can from as many perspective, making sure you use the three rules; Sound like a real person Be based on evidence Focus on the problem You need to be on Jamboard page 3 for this
- both: users may benefit from improved parking arrangements, the council may benefit from fewer parking complaints and increased revenue
- both: user needs to be able to pay bills in a way that suits them, business need of improving income to the council
- A persona is a fictional character representing a group of people. They’re based on research collected from interviews with real stakeholders (such as service users and employees). The persona will group together people with similar service needs and common behaviours. They’re different from marketing profiles or segmentation, which usually classifies people according to age, ethnicity, gender or socio-economic status. They help to convey the findings of user research and help people to empathise with different groups of stakeholders. They’re a useful tool in many stages of the design process and can be used to help review existing services or innovate new ones. If you construct them from your user research then they will better reflect the customers and the communities you are serving
- We’re already seeing personas creep into our work at the council Did everyone see this at the Staff Conference? This is the Customer Service team using personas to think about the different types of staff member they have, and their characteristics, so they can plan how to manage and develop them
- And the Clarks have been showcased at three events I’ve been at now! This from the Staff Conference again Using a family, their different needs and problems, helps us personalise the people that use our services. How they affect them, how they access them. All from the perspective of the individuals concerned
- This is a set of corporate personas developed at Companies House covering all aspect of the services they offer Over time they realised that while these were a good start, they got more value when they focused on generating them for a specific service
- These are the kind of things that you might put on your personas. Adding a photo helps make people ‘real’ and gain empathy But there’s no hard and fast rule – use whatever makes sense to your use of them
- Let’s have a try at using these in practice We’re going to look at two personas and see how each of them using a council service might be very different You’ll need to be on Jamboard page 6 for this
- Here’s a cut-down version of a persona about John. We’re going to try him out on one of our scenarios from earlier “Getting advice about how to insulate your home and the grants that are available“ What are some of the factors we’d need to consider about John that could affect how we deliver the service to him? Look out for: So is going to be as a good level of literacy Likely to be OK with IT/web Not able to visit our offices given mobility issues Would like to self serve as he wants to be independent
- And here’s Jenny, a very different person “Getting advice about how to insulate your home and the grants that are available“ What are some of the factors we’d need to consider about Jenny that could affect how we deliver the service to her? Look out for: Communication is going to be an issue – she may have a low reading age or require Easy Read format Her parents may need to act as advocates for her May need to visit her house to discuss
- User journey mapping, or user experience mapping, is a tool to use when you want to get information about how well a service or interaction with an organisation works from a customer’s point of view There are different ways of doing this; Customer services are using it to map out complaints (and compliments) from the data they have – calls made, letters exchanged – to build up a picture of events and how customers reacted to them. They are finding this an excellent way to drill down into failures to identify root causes, or even to build on the successes of compliments Other sorts of user journey mapping are based on interviews with customers, where they are taken through a process, asked at each stage what they did, the channels they used, how it made them feel. This is the approach we’re going to look at today
- This is an example of a user experience map drawn up by user research consultants that worked on a project I ran last year This image is an extract from a map on people using a Revenues and Benefits service Can you see how they’ve identified the user needs in this for each step? Also, the emotions expressed are important – these are the areas you’d need to focus on in improving or redesigning a service To get to this point, a lot of work was needed to write an interview script, recruit people to take part, make them welcome, record their conversations and then digest it into this map. So it can be a lot of investment, but you can also get a lot out it in terms of real learning All the resources from this project are available publically (I’ve put a link here) but we’ll be including them in the information we put out on the intranet too
- Let’s have a try at using this in practice We’re going to look