Situation

The programme was nationally critical and under close scrutiny, and the push for delivery to meet the roadmap and roll-out was strict and clear. 

User research and design had to be carried out to support the fast-paced delivery of multiple products, to ensure timings were met.

Action

I collaborated with senior leadership and discipline leads daily to discuss feature prioritisation and UCD resources needed to deliver them.

I created and shared a UCD roadmap, mapping resource availability and tasks to complete against product and feature delivery.

I managed this roadmap meticulously, constantly reviewing to flex and reassign or recruit resources to ensure programme delivery timings were met.

Outcome

Senior leaders and wider stakeholders became aware of the volume of tasks being managed by the UCD team. They began to consider UCD more in their planning. 

Product owners and delivery teams could track UCD progress and engaged more with the design process. 

UCD was seen as more as an integral part of software development, and less of a hindrance.

Programme roadmap commitments were met, with products releasing on time.

Situation

The overarching programme roadmap was ambitious, and delivery focussed. Leaders were under scrutiny to ensure delivery release timings were met.

Research and design had been allocated as bare minimum and business requirements were driving design. Programme roadmap planning had not allocated enough research and design to inform user-centred feature development. 

To carry out necessary UCD work to de-risk product releases, we had to find the time and get senior leaders' agreement. 

Action

I managed the UCD roadmap carefully to see where we could assign resource to UCD.

I carried out a review of all previous research and found additional insights to inform design approaches.

I challenged assumptions that a costly and complicated feature was required. I ran a workshop with senior leaders, and using insights from the research review I suggested that the functionality was unnecessary. Our researcher then swiftly surveyed representative users.

Analysis proved the functionality could be scaled down.

I then presented an alternative, targeted research plan for necessary features and tasks including accessibility research and testing. Leaders agreed.

Outcome

I managed to fit necessary research and design work into out roadmap, without risking delays, due to:

• careful project management
• reuse of research 
• reallocation of design work to necessary beneficial features

We were able to carry out targeted user research, and an internal accessibility audit. We followed this with an external independent review.

This previously unplanned work raised standards and increased usability and accessibility in line with Government Service Standard.

Situation

20-25 content designers from multtiple suppliers and internal teams were working on a digital transformational programme. There was no over-arching strategy or governance.

Designers were working hard to meet product delivery timings, but they were working in silos and content research findings and content design approaches were not shared more widely.

This resulted in an inconsistent and fragmented user experience, and a lack of efficiency as work was being repeated. 

Action

I set up fortnightly informal drop-ins to encourage content designers to share work and discuss issues. These quickly grew into a meet-up.

As the meet-up grew more popular we organised peer-review sessions and content crits. Content designers shared research and testing insights and we collaboratively agreed on common content and patterns and created plain English content libraries.

We also agreed a list of outputs per agile stage to meet Service Standards, and shared among all teams, bringing increased understanding and consistency.