2.4. Activities to do
2.4.1. Researching with users of the service
Researching with users is the most important part of Discovery.
There are many ways to approach researching your users. In Discovery we recommend:
- Doing contextual research with people who are using the service in their real-world environment.
- Interviewing users about their experiences with the service, where they started, and identifying all the points where they interacted with the service (touch points) and the pain points they encountered.
- Doing lab research with users of existing services, observing how they start using the service, where they find out information.
- Stay away from using surveys, focus groups or online interviews during the Discovery process.
- Everybody in the team should be involved in user research, meeting and observing users. Our recommendation is that each member of the team should observe at least 2 hours of user research every six weeks.
Every week, the whole team should get together to discuss what they’re learning from the research and the user needs that are starting to emerge.
2.4.2. Mapping the user journeys
Informed by the user research, there should be an ongoing process to begin mapping out the user journeys. It’s important that these are journeys of real users that you’ve met, not an ideal user journey or a map of existing business processes.
This starts in a low-fidelity form, on a whiteboard or on paper, and gains more detail throughout the course of Discovery. By the end of Discovery, you should have a comprehensive map of users and their interactions with different parts of government (and potentially other organisations too) as they use the service.
When mapping, it’s important to use only the user research from Discovery to inform this, rather than existing research completed in the past.
It’s then possible to map the user research, touch points, pain points, and existing technology against their user journey.
2.4.3. Researching how the business works
Doing research with internal users in the organisation will help discover some of the internal pain points with current processes and give insight into the viability of potential options for Alpha.
This can include:
- Business process mapping
- Listening to calls to call centres, and observing how staff respond to them
- Visiting shopfronts where parts of the service are provided
- Mystery shopping to see a user’s perspective of accessing the service
From this research, you may wish to map the internal user journeys of staff dealing with the users of the service. This will give you a better understanding of how staff support the service end-to-end, and highlight the systems that they interact with.
2.4.4. Mapping the technology and data
Understanding the existing IT systems, data stores and in-flight programmes of work will give the team greater visibility into how Alpha opportunities could fit into the existing technology landscape, and inform the longer-term roadmap for the service.
By the end of Discovery, the team should be able to answer most of these questions:
- What are the existing systems in play?
- How do they work? What technologies do they use? What are their limitations?
- Which agencies own each system?
- How do they interact with each other? Where are the dependencies?
- Are they hosted on physical hardware or using cloud providers?
- Who currently maintains each system? What capabilities do these teams have?
- What are the disaster-recovery and backup processes in place?
- How often are changes released? What are the release and deployment processes?
- What’s the short-, mid-, and long-term plan for each system?
When exploring the flow of data between systems, the team should consider:
- What information is being stored?
- Where are the canonical sources of data? Where is data duplicated between systems?
- What is the data quality like? Where are there gaps in information?
- Where does data enter the process?
- What are the security and privacy considerations around the data?
- In what format is the data stored? Does the data follow any international standards?
Mapping these systems, data and responsible agencies against the service map will give the team a complete view of where user needs are currently being met by technology.