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Can you tell me a bit about your job title and your responsibilities?
I’ve been Head of User Research and Design at the Home Office since 2014, until very recently when the role changed and it’s just become Head of User Research. But that’s a good news story. My time so far has involved significantly growing and building a team of researchers and designers who are working across multiple projects and in multiple parts of the Home Office.
We’re just at the point now where we’re becoming four specialisms within that family of professions and I’ve spent a lot of time developing what was a very tiny team of what might be described as UX generalists into four distinct specialisms that now have their own heads of profession. We have a Head of Service Design, a Head of Content Design, a Head of Interaction Design and then myself as Head of User Research.
I think that releases us, and certainly releases some of my time, but it will allow the wider digital, data and technology community to really benefit from what those different professions can add. It’s been two and a half years of work to get that in place and I’m really pleased to say that I’m only the Head of User Research now.
How would describe what you’re responsible for within that role?
I’ve spent a lot of time recruiting researchers and designers, which has been one of the most important parts of the role to date. Government has been set on a new path by Government Digital Service (GDS) and we are now actively recruiting digital talent across all the professions, to come into government and work with us to build the services in-house.
It’s a radical departure from what was happening before, where things were largely outsourced in very big contracts to IT giants. Now the emphasis is very much on building these capabilities within the department and within government to have control over them. We end up owning the risk regardless of whether we outsource technical and digital delivery, so hiring specialists who are highly skilled and motivated to work with us has been key.
Training and development has also been important and we’ve put a lot of effort into establishing an internship programme, which is doing remarkably well. It’s a very attractive, paid internship where people get the opportunity to pair with industry experts allowing them to learn, grow and absorb. Our commitment is to get them to a level where they could apply for a junior role.
As well as that, I’m looking at how we work and best practice. That involves linking up with people at GDS, other heads of research and other research teams across government, and defining how we want people to work here. That’s important because it does seem to be different enough to the common experience in the private sector that it’s helpful for both very experienced people and those early in their careers to have some clarity around what good looks like.
The natural question leading on from that is what sets you apart?
I think one of the things that really sets us apart is that user research is involved strategically in government in a way that I’ve rarely come across outside of government. We feed into and inform decisions on a strategic level around public service provision, so rather than just thinking about improving a digital application, or a digital service or a website, we’re looking at the whole end-to-end service.
We do a lot of contextual research with real people. We believe that bringing the people who are using services face-to-face with the people who are making those services is the best way to make good services.
The other way that we differ is that we build things for everybody – you can’t get your passport anywhere else. We’ve got a huge drive around things like accessibility and assisted digital. We probably over sample those at the extreme edges of our society because we know that if you make a service work for people with access needs you’re going to make it better for everybody else.
If we want to move everything the government does into the digital sphere we have to make sure that it works for everyone. We’re not making a fizzy drink or a car website, we’re building things that fundamentally impact how people live their lives. There’s a huge responsibility that comes with that and we take it really seriously.
You don’t have the commercial aspect that some UX leaders will have, like sales, conversions etc. What metrics do you have to measure success?
We talk in terms of failure waste. By that I mean if a service is failing to meet the needs of the people who use it, you tend to see it come out in other areas and that’s what we look for, and how we measure what we’re doing. Such as when people don’t submit enough information for us to make a decision about their application. That can cause extra work for our staff, which we call failure waste. Reducing that extra work can be used as a measurement for success.
At times that can be really hard to do though, because the analytics data doesn’t exist in an easy format. We are working on improving the analytics side of things, because at the moment we’re building a lot of internal tools for staff. That means we can build tools that we can plug analytics into in a way that hasn’t existed before. We’ll be able to be a lot more accurate about measuring how live services are performing and also looking at how changes to those impacts elsewhere in the organisation.
The other advantage of building these tools in-house is that it’s helping us generate a lot of culture change because we’re involving the civil servants who use the tools in the design and build of them, which is a first. We’re generating a level of engagement with transforming government that’s never existed before.