Develop empathy for users
The whole team saw this as an opportunity to really make a difference to pupils' lives.
We came to develop empathy for:
- pupils who struggled during the pandemic through lost learning, disruption, and lock-down
- teachers who needed to trust the tutor and make sure they had a good relationship with their pupils
- school administrators who had to juggle a myriad of other school purchases
- head teachers who worried about all of the above, on top of the cost of living crisis
How we stayed motivated
- constructive feedback on designs
- no blame culture
- safe space to be heard
- important to hear from DfE client they were happy with the team
Building design work momentum
- get familiar with GDS and DfE best practice, GOV.UK design system before you start a project or project phase
- Slack as the primary communications area - @ing people into conversations or setting up adhoc huddles
- Figma as the primary design and user research prototype tool
- JIra boards as a way of documenting the progress within a sprint
- reduce meetings for more time to implement work
- freedom to ask if the design decision could go into MVP (even through we got handed the 'MVP red card' by the dev team a lot!) and post MVP deliverables
Communication and presenting Ideas
- keep people in the loop via appropriate communication channels, mostly Slack
- no shutting down of ideas
- asking the product owner or service owner what to get out of next sprint (managing expectations)
- developers involved in UCD - they attended design reviews and UR analysis
- checking dev feasibility
- never waiting to ask questions - always ask on appropriate Slack channel before you forget
- articulating design decisions with evidence or best practice
- documenting feedback from stakeholders and user research
- putting designs in flows to match service design to make sure we've covered everything
- annotating design concepts explaining how they work to stakeholders and developers
Accessibility considerations
- thinking about screen readers, order in which content is presented
- content design - writing in clear, plain English using simple sentences and bullet points
- make sure the content hierarchy makes sense - being informative, concise while offering guidance at the right time in the user journey
- best practice design for dyslexia and autism
- best practice design for dyscalculia and low numeracy
Getting design feedback from participants in user research
- tailoring designs for user research sessions (using real content and not lorem ipsum or square brackets with no content)
- designers note taking in user research sessions
- user researchers and observers debrief on how the session went, straight after each session - capturing ideas and observations
Designing for small screens
- focus on designing for mobile as thats where the highest bounce rate is
- prioritised pages with highest bounce rates to test ways of combating this
- prioritised most complex pages i.e. search results page - content heavy or pages with tables
- design for smallest devices (iPhone SE) - influences slimming down of content to save space
- design also for most popular devices (Android 13)
- can prototype in UR testing (download Figma app)
- mobile first approach in post-MVP screens that contained a lot of content or design
Check tech feasibility with developers
- dev team are very open to design
- QA tester gives feedback and makes suggestions
- setup a separate communication channel dedicated to presenting concepts to developers and checking if ideas are feasible for MVP
- did this by including flows and annotating how designs worked whilst explaining rationale
- important to keep developers in the loop to avoid unnecessary surprises
- lean UX was an effective way to turn around a volume of Uuser centred design work in a short space of time (from research to completed, tested design
- lean UX requires basic prototypes, so requires a departure from a perfectionist mindset and a minimalist mindset, ie creating the minimum needed to prove a hypothesis or test a concept
- lean UX requires URs, Designers and Service Designers to work as a team
- developers must be consulted on the designs to ensure feasibility and to allow developers to completed preparation work for the new features
- a clear steer needs to be provided around design priorities and scope
Product Manager needs to be involved in some of the ideation and certainly the finally review of the design before it goes to development, to ensure the designs are dev ready and fully meet user needs.
Work needs to go into ensuring alignment and coordination of the Lean UX squads – it helps to have a Service Designer who has the overarching view of the designs.