DesignOps conducted research across all service design roles in DfE to help validate our user needs and find pain points we can address through accessibility and inclusive design guidance and training.
First step was to share an accessibility survey across professions and leadership in DDT. This research will inform all our design and content decisions.
What we learned
We had 83 responses and gathered the results in a spreadsheet.
We then took each of the 4 main question areas, which were:
- challenges
- learning and development
- guidance and advice
- what professions do to consider inclusive design
And created themes for each. For example, process guidance and teams trying to do the right thing.
We pulled the results from the spreadsheet into a Figma board as it was easier to see and manipulate the data. Then colour coded each profession and grouped feedback based on profession and theme within the 4 original question areas.
This gave us 4 question frames on Figma with themed feedback in each, grouped by profession.
The 4 areas were:
Challenges: what challenges do you experience in your role when it comes to creating or maintaining accessible products and services?
Learning and development: what learning and development related to accessibility and inclusive design would be beneficial for you?
Guidance and advice: what guidance or advice on accessibility and inclusive design would assist you in your role?
Inclusion: what steps, if any, do you take to consider inclusive design in your role?
Our next step was to look across all 4 areas to analyse themes, to create higher-level, cross-question themes.
The higher-level themes we identified were:
leadership and culture
awareness
standards and assurance
training and learning
tools
guidance
Using these themes, we pulled out answers from across all 4 question areas to give us profession groupings across the themes.
We did 3 things with this data
This gave us themes for what people find challenging, things they already do, training they would like, support they might need, and where they are with their knowledge of accessibility and inclusive design.
We wrote 22 user needs for professions across DDT.
We reviewed our original user needs created during discovery, which were based on what we learned through projects, for example, creating the Service assessment service, to validate these needs.
We wrote 5 business requirements for any design solutions.
We now have a bank of 25 user needs, and 5 business requirements, which we’ll create acceptance criteria for and use as a starting point to design a manual and training to meet our goal.
Our goal is that all products and services DfE provide to end users meet legal and moral obligations for accessibility and inclusivity.
What's next
We’ll share high-level findings, insights and data with Heads of Profession.
We’ll also share findings at a cross-community meet-up. Where we'll run a card sorting exercise to get feedback on the proposed information architecture of the manual to meet identified user needs.