I was working for DWP Digital as part of a design team made up from the civil-service, BPDTS, and Accenture, as well as wider delivery team.

For a long time the department had been aware of issues with colleagues troubleshooting their tech problems and wanted to provide something which would reduce agent interactions and help colleagues to self-support. 

With over 90,000 colleagues, many of which citizen facing, it was crucial that the department was able to enable its staff to find the correct resources in order to provide correct and up to date advice to the public in job centres across the UK. 

As such the team embarked on the discovery of an omnichannel service, which would help to alleviate these issues for staff.

I was also involved in various other digital products with Digital workplace covered here.

Design and user-testing as part of a 6 strong design team. 

My role involved the creation of design recommendations which would be made off the back of thorough user-testing.

Designs included, mobile and desktop for customer facing, as well as agent-side desktop screens.

User-Testing was carried out both face to face and remote in locations across the UK, from Inverness to Exeter. 

As part of the multi disciplinary design team a lot of work was first conducted to understand the various user groups within DWP, to find out the different types of DWP colleague and what do they do.

What are their wants and needs within their role particularly for products within their digital workplace and where are the paint points across the user journeys they will make on any given day? 

Once we’d captured our requirements from the discovery phase, user stories and requirements could be created and prioritised by user need in order to help inform our MVP. 

The design team then used this MVP to help plan out its design sprints which would included user-testing via prototypes created in InVision.

Initially this project was a design proof of concept which would be pitched to senior stakeholders. 

On completion, delivery for an Omnichannel product was agreed and work began in earnest with BAs, development teams and other areas of the business for release. 

After the sketch iterations and wireframes were created, the designs were progressed further with the help of the Visual Designer using the Sketch software tool, we would later translate this in to clickable wireframe using InVision.

Our research helped inform the architecture for what would be a web-based platform, scalable to mobile and tablet.

Iterations of the design were progressed through various rounds of design critiques, reviews, show and tells with wider stakeholders and of course most importantly user-testing.

The tone, content, features, and navigation were all helped to be refined this way, whilst brand colours were influenced heavily by existing DWP colours, whilst adhering to gov accessibility guidelines. 

You can check out some of the user-testing reports created here:

• 'Digi' Omnichannel report from in-person user-testing in Manchester and Norwich

• 'Digi' landing page testing report from remote research

The COVID-19 pandemic sped up the urge to bring ‘DWP place’ to users in early 2020 and as such an existing platform called ‘Tech Now’ was re-skinned for it’s mobile version, this was a high-level decision, which wasn’t made without push-back from the design team.

As part of my work, I reviewed the design of the current tech now application providing best practice design in-put which would help to improve the experience and reduce the steps taken, such as adding additional comments to incidents raised. 

User-Testing was also a priority to validate as designs/changes prior to release.

The initial concept for a chat agent to help users grew in to what is today an omnichannel experience for DWP colleagues to self-serve across the online platform, chat-agent and tech bar. 

This was a first for DWP, with expectations for the ‘formula’ to be lifted and shifted to other public sector areas. 

Initial qualitative and quantitative feedback has been largely positive, however the development of “DWP Place” will continue in true iterative fashion as the product remains and research will be used to feed any required design changes. 

During my time with DWP I was also fortunate to be involved with many other activities for digital products, with the overarching aim of improving colleague experience, which in turn impacts and improves citizen outcomes. 

Other digital products include:

• Mobile team 

• Intranet support

• DWP Groups app

• DWP Chatbot

A heuristic evaluation of DWP intranet was led by myself and involved the product team and digital workplace UX teams to review the intranet and assess where improvements could be made. 

View the heuristic evaluation report (opens in new tab)

Design recommendations document for DWP Social intranet app

View design recommendations (opens in new tab)