What does it mean?

Understanding the user and their needs is about more than simply identifying what they are looking to achieve by interacting with the service.

It is about understanding what the user is looking to achieve and how they are trying to achieve their objective. It looks at identifying the pain-points with the current process and their aspirations about how the service may work.

Building up as much of a contextual understanding as possible will help you deliver a service that addresses the fundamental user needs in a cost effective and sustainable way.

Taking this wider stance will allow you to identify unexpected elements around the user needs and will help inform when defining outcomes.

Having gathered a contextual understanding of the user and their needs we would always advise qualifying your findings.

Our Approach to Understanding Users and their Needs

User Research: Upon initiation the focus of our research is to identify who the users are and what they are trying to achieve. We focus on identifying what the current pain-points are along with how the user is trying to achieve their objectives. We look at the channels and devices they are using along with sentiment as to how the service may be improved.

Our approach to User Research is one that relies on continued engagement through all stages of the service delivery. Continued engagement means we can iterate the service design with users.

Typically, outputs from this stage would include;

• Detailed user personas;

• Experience maps (customer journey maps);

• User Stories, linked to pain-points;

• Discovery output reports, including data and sentiment analysis; And

• Recommendations for next steps, proceeding to Alpha.

Persona Development: Taking the information that is being gathered from the early phases of our User Research is used to create a series of user personas. The personas are used to support the continued engagement with the user groups and help shape the service design. We look at add as much contextual information to our personas as necessary to build up a broader understanding of their objectives.

Problem Statement: Part of qualifying our understanding and defining the service scope we create a standard problem statement. We typically use the SMART technique to construct our problem statements;

• Specific, related to the situation and not general;

• Measurable, ensuring there are means to measure the outcome;

• Actionable, what action do we think need to happen to address the issue/s;

• Relevant, linked to the core problem/s; And

• Time-bound, a defined period aimed at motivating people to achieve the objective/s.

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In addition to the above structure our User Research and Business Analysis activities provides valuable contextual insights into;

• Business Insights, what the ‘Cultural’ elements of the business can tell us about the problem/s;

• Criteria for Success, what needs to happen directly, and indirectly, to achieve the objective/s;

• Stakeholder Insights, what ‘People’ focused elements can tell us;

• Constraints, typically legislative and policy based restrictions;

• Risks, what risks are attached to the problems or what is the appetite for risk; And

• Scope, what are the parameters for addressing the problem/s.

As with all our work, the tools and techniques we use are conducted in the open and we encourage in-house users to engage where possible – knowledge transfer is a key component of our service delivery.

Mapping: At this stage we look to illustrate the high-level business processes that surround the area. A key consideration here is looking beyond the specific problem to help identify the up and down-stream dependencies elsewhere within the service journey.

Being aware of these elements, along with the contextual data gathered elsewhere, helps us identify and tackle the higher priority issues and risks when moving into a prototyping phase.

Supporting Data: Having created a detailed problem statement along with hypothesis we will gather and analyse supporting data, we will consider;

• Platform analytics;

• Customer feedback;

• System logs and reports; And

• Performance metrics.

The steps above are a brief and non-exhaustive list of the type of things we may do to help understand who the users are and what they are looking to achieve. Gaining a solid understanding of the user, their aspirations and frustrations at this stage supported with contextual information will help refine the service moving forwards.

Alignment: By default, we are aligned to the Government Digital Services (GDS) Toolkit and Service Manual. Our approach, processes and procedures have been designed to complement the standards and work in unison with GDS based service teams.

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