We started by learning about:

  • DfE as an organisation
  • digital, data and technology
  • roles and responsibilities
  • accessibility, data protection and cyber security

The design ops team shared insights from a discovery piece of work that identified an opportunity to support service teams to maintain complaint accessibility statements.

Reviewing accessibility statements

Through a review of accessibility statements for services with varying levels of compliance, we were able to identify the conditional parts of the statements. This allowed us to find out what data we needed to gather for our service.

We started to capture our insights and the needs of the service on a Lucid board. We completed training and workshops to understand the GOV.UK design style and more about accessibility standards.

Working with the prototype kit

We learned how to use the GOV.UK prototype kit and became familiar with the patterns and components on the design system.

Each of us then created a version of the prototype based on the requirements.

This allowed us to see how each of us transposed a low-fi paper prototype, the requirements and the high-level user journey map onto the GOV.UK prototype kit.

When we reviewed our individual prototypes by taking screenshots and putting them in Lucid allowed us to compare our versions and review them with other designers. There were notable differences in our approach, and we were able to identify elements from all of our versions that we would want to take forward.

Minimum viable product

We took our prototype to the user-centred design crew in our portfolio for a peer review.

After a service mapping session, we have arrived at an MVP design that we are now developing in Figma ready for testing with users.

Next steps

We need to conduct our first round of user research to understand our users more and what is needed for the service.