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Last update: 16 feb 2021
NOTE: copied and tweaked from gove.uk service manual : https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/
Introduction
Develop a deep understanding of users and the problem you’re trying to solve for them. Look at the full context to understand what the user is trying to achieve, not just the part where they have to interact with government.
Work towards creating a feature that solves one whole problem for users, collaborating across organisational boundaries where necessary.
Why it’s important
Understanding as much of the context as possible gives you the best chance of meeting users’ needs in a simple and cost effective way. Focusing on the user and the problem they’re trying to solve - rather than a particular solution - often means that you learn unexpected things about their needs. The real problem might not be the one you originally thought needed solving. Testing your assumptions early and often reduces the risk of building the wrong thing.
Fragmented services are difficult to use, because users have to do the hard work to make sure they’re doing what’s expected of them. For example, working out which of several similar schemes they’re eligible for. Or choosing the right form to fill in out of several near-identical options. That does not mean building big, complicated transactions that are not intuitive to use because they try to do too much. And it does not mean trying to fix everything at once. Start small, and deliver value to users incrementally and frequently. Just make sure the increments are part of a plan to bring related content and transactions together into a journey that makes sense to users, irrespective of which organisation they ‘belong’ to.
What it means
Sogeti Feature Teams learn as much as possible about the problem users need them to solve by::
- doing user research to understand what users need - and, where relevant, secondary research and analysis
- building quick, throwaway prototypes to test their hypotheses
- using web analytics and other data that’s available to enhance their understanding of the problem
- consider alternatives to creating a feature
- understand any genuine constraints that affect the feature
- make sure features are scoped according to how users think - not too narrow or too broad
- be able to explain how the transaction they’re working on will join up with other things into a journey that solves a whole problem for users
- take responsibility for agreeing how this user journey will work with organisations responsible for different parts of it
- work in the open so that people outside the organisation know what they’re doing - increasing the potential for collaboration and reducing duplication of effort (for example by publishing business cases, mission statements, research findings, user experience maps, maps of existing services and product roadmaps showing plans to develop new features)
- work towards minimising the number of times users are to provide the same information (while respecting users’ privacy)
- work across organisational boundaries where that’s necessary to solve a whole problem for users