Start with a problem, not a solution
Many products, services and websites fail because they do not meet a need or solve a problem for a user. Often service areas come up with a solution without taking the time to fully understand the issues within the website, product, or service.
Across the Digital team, we follow an agile process which is based on four stages:
User research occurs predominantly in the discovery phase to inform the following three stages. This means we start by identifying the user groups of the service area and conduct research with those groups to understand what they need. Alongside this, we dive deeper into the needs, constraints, and strategy of that service area to ensure we align these against the needs identified.
The discovery phase is about building a deeper understanding of what users need so that we create solutions that make accessing our services and products more usable.
User research continues into the other agile phases in order to inform the continuous development of the innovation. User Testing allows you to test prototypes and ideas with your users before you refine and launch them. This testing is important to ensure users’ needs haven’t changed and that the solution we’re developing fulfils their needs.
The discovery is there to ensure we are continually testing our assumptions of our users as a council. A product, service or website built on assumptions will eventually fail because it has not been created based on what users need but on what we presume they need.
For more information on the discovery phase, take a look here: How the discovery phase works – Service Manual – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
