The develop your career in child and family social work site aims to provide a single place for social workers to make informed decisions about career steps and progression.
As part of this we are developing the ‘Resources' (password: swletmein) feature to be rolled out in March 2024.
The feature will help child and family social workers find materials that will practically support them with their professional development.
From our user research the feature needs to provide support to:
child and family social workers whose development needs are currently unmet by the DfE-funded programmes
help social workers with upwards development into more managerial roles
Meeting the user need
Some of the typical comments we’ve heard from users are:
" I would like to see tools for social work, to give me information on how to do the things you have to do in the role including advice and support. I expect to be able to filter them by seniority, job role e.g. as a Team manager these are the tools you need. "
“I find in social work the progression prospects scary. A year after graduation you're a newly qualified social worker and are still just starting out and then two more years later you are a manager. This is scary because I work with these managers, and they just can't do it.”
Through user research we have identified a number of user needs the resources need to meet. The user needs that these resources aim to cover are:
best practice: improving how social workers practice in their area including exemplars of best practice
resolving cases: helping social works deal with specific or unfamiliar cases
specialist development: gaining expertise or qualifications in a specific area of interest
everyday counsel: advice on typical challenges that social workers may encounter
The content for resources itself will be developed by Research in Practice who will be working with Virtual hubs.
However, we will aim to understand how social workers will be using the resources as part of their journey and the most useful way to navigate around the resources through user testing.
The feature should aim make it easier for social workers to use these resources in the typical use cases and content. In the long term the feature should hold content in a way that is scalable to hold a growing library of resources. Therefore, the following needs are also to be addressed in our design work to ensure that social workers have a productive experience:
how might social workers want to search for resources and view the results of their search as content grows
how might social workers want to use the resources as part of their own routine
Our approach and design considerations
We initially started with desk research, examining how other government services manage their resource repositories. Drawing insights from this research, we proceeded to construct a prototype featuring a filterable resource list.
Our initial assumptions led us to incorporate the ability for users to sort resources by both topic and format. Additionally, we introduced the capability to filter resources according to career stage, ensuring that users can easily access content most relevant to their professional journey. This will also allow us to integrate these resources into the ‘Career stages’ section of our website.
We explored the use of tags within this page. These tags are used to categorise the type of resources so social workers can quickly and easily navigate the content on each page. We also deliberated over the option to sort and filter the resource list, offering three choices:
sorting by the newest resources
the oldest resources
the most viewed resources
Our collaboration with the Virtual Hubs team and Research in Practice were particularly important during the design phase. To ensure that our platform can effectively host their resources, we attended collaborative sessions to gain a deeper understanding of their resource requirements and expectations.
Given the collaboration of efforts, it is imperative that our content adheres to the GOV.UK design system and is accessible to our users.
Our initial design process revolves around creating templates that accommodates a diverse range of content formats. These templates are being developed to seamlessly incorporate content such as PDFs, images, videos, audio files, and materials that could be organised into pages while maintaining their presence within a single resource.
Next steps
Our next phase involves comprehensive testing of functionality and layout with our users. This essential step will help us refine and optimise the user experience. Furthermore, we are working on sourcing real content to replace placeholder text in order to make the repository more informative for users during the testing process.