Description

Undertaking ‘customer research’ to learn the full context of what the user is trying to achieve, not just the part where they have to interact with the Council, and continue to get feedback on designs, through to deployment, and beyond.

Rationale

Building successful products and services that meet people’s actual needs will mean that they will be used; ‘failure demand’ will be reduced, so that intended outcomes and cost-savings are achieved.

Tracking the ‘customer journey’, can find opportunities for making joins across council services and other Somerset partners, so that information is collected once, and delivery is coordinated.

Implications

The ‘users’ of a digital service should be defined, and segmented, for example

• Digital Customer
  • residents, visitors, local businesses, workers, families, carers, minorities etc
• Digital Council
  • employees, home-workers, visiting officers, members, managers, contractors
• Digital Place
  • partners, community assets, voluntary, employers, investors

Tools / Methods / Resources

• user research, secondary research and analysis
• co-design with users
• user centred design
• build quick, safe to fail prototypes to test hypotheses.
• build representative ‘panels’ of key user types, to give feedback to proposals
• analyse data to understand actual use patterns

Maturity / Check List

• Have the ‘users’ been determined?
• Have user needs been understood and addressed?
• Have opportunities for joining up the user’s experience been explored?
• Can users provide feedback, and suggest improvements?
• Can take-up/success/failure be monitored over user groups?