Government Digital Service

Company: Accenture

Year: 2014

Role: Interaction Designer & User Researcher

As part of the Government Digital Services redesign approach, I worked on three projects simultaneously for a government department. 

During the 9 months I worked on these projects I did the role of interaction designer and researcher, as well as training new researchers and designers who joined the team. Additionally, I helped set up the internal design community. 

The brief

The UK Government has a digital approach to create consistency and enhance the user experience of all their sites. In order to comply with the digital guidelines the different departments have created multidisciplinary teams with developers, project managers, designers, researchers, product owners, and copy writers.

The process

The Government Digital Service has very specific guidelines for the creation of the experience and our main objective was to align the existing processes to those guidelines. In the process we had to challenge policies and business requirements as well as providing guidance for the main stakeholders on user needs. 

In 2-week sprints we designed journeys and tested iteratively with actual users. All the prototypes were created using the GDS HTML and CSS resources, which gave the testing a more compelling feeling. 

We conducted multiple sessions of lab testing for which I prepared the scripts, conducted the sessions, and analysed and presented the results. I then transformed these into user requirements and used them to design the journeys.

The solution

From the three projects I worked on, I saw two of them go live in Beta while the other one passed the Alpha review and started Beta development. 

This was a fast-paced project full of interactions with different disciplines and backgrounds.