Kingston & Sutton Councils: a digital transformation

Client: Kingston & Sutton Councils

Length: 10 months

Key contributions: user research, UX/UI design, information architecture, digital transformation, training and mentorship.

Overview

Kingston and Sutton Councils wanted to transform the way they approached service design and delivery - moving from a traditional waterfall approach to a more agile, human centred design approach. Starting from the ground up they wanted to build internal capabilities across user research, service and interaction design, delivery and product management to deliver better services for their constituents whilst delivering on business needs.

Objectives

• To build internal skills, capabilities and buy in across digital and design disciplines in order to design and deliver services in a more human centred, agile way.

• To support the delivery of key projects - particularly the new Kingston.gov.uk website - using user research and service design to show the benefits they can bring to constituents and the business.

The team and my role

The team consisted of a user research lead (me), senior service designer, delivery manager and senior business analyst.

As the user research lead on the project my responsibilities included conducting a skills gap analysis across the existing digital team, mentoring and coaching council staff in user research and service design activities, building awareness and support for user research and service design across the wider council and leading on user research for exemplar projects such as the new Kingston.gov.uk website.

Whilst on exemplar projects I would work as part of small multi-disciplinary teams, with a junior researcher shadowing me in order to upskill and learn how to design and run research themselves.

Challenges

• No existing in house user research, interaction design, service design, product or delivery practitioners

• Little to no understanding of user research and human centred design or the benefits they could bring

• Limited resources to bring about cultural and delivery change

• No service blueprints, process or journey maps for the website redesign

• Website redesign already in Beta by the time I was asked to join the project to bring in user research and service design principles

• Inadequate data capture or analytics across the website and services

Approach

Skills gap analysis to understand the starting point

In order to understand what roles and skills already existed across the digital and IT teams I conducted a skills gap analysis - comparing the existing roles and their related skills and responsibilities to the digital, data and technology roles outlined by the Government Digital Service. This enabled the team to better understand what roles and skills already existed within the councils and how they might map to roles such as user research and service design. To supplement this analysis I also conducted staff surveys to guage what skills they felt they had and their confidence levels in each, as well as the areas and new roles they might be interested in learning more about.

Role matching

Once the skills gap analysis was complete, we worked closely with managers and staff to help them match people to their new roles. I also worked closely with the service designer and delivery manager to design the shape of the multi-disciplinary teams these new roles would form across digital projects so that they could work in more agile, human design centric ways.

Mentoring and upskilling

For each person moving into a new role, my team and I paired them up with mentors and skilled practitioners to shadow and learn from. This was done by myself and through the recruitment of additional consultants in key roles. During this time I also established two communities of practice for user researchers and service designers to set staff up for success by providing them with support networks and safe learning environments. The communities of practice had weekly meet ups with sessions such as lunch and learns, peer reviews, lean coffees and more. I also reached out to other Local Authorities to establish a cross local government network to help the councils see how other organisations were applying user research and service design across their services. This resulted in monthly meet ups, secondments and much knowledge sharing between multiple councils.

Leading by example - Kingston.gov.uk

For the first exemplar project I was asked to join the team working on the redesign for Kingston.gov.uk to bring user research and service design principles to the forefront of the redesign. The aim was to create both a better user experience and to alleviate pressure on the contact centre with enquiries about services offered online. This was tricky for a number of reasons: the redesign had already been going for a significant period of time; there was a tight deadline to get the website launched in a few months; there was a steep learning curve to build internal understanding of, and buy in to, the benefits research and design could bring. My approach to the project was as follows:

Using data to prioritise services

The first thing I had to do was decide which, of the dozens of services offered across the website, we would prioritise and look at first. I started off by triaging several data sources to make this decision - service usage volumes, service revenue and customer feedback on the existing website to understand which services were causing them the most pain and annoyance. In doing this I was able to draw up a prioritised list of services I felt would have the biggest impact on user experience and business requirements (reduced contact centre time and running costs) should they be reviewed. Once I had done this I then facilitated a workshop with the project team, customer success team and senior leadership to play back my methods, insights and recommendations, and enable them to collaboratively decide which services to focus on based on the data and evidence provided.

Setting the standard with a heuristic evaluation

Once the services had been prioritised, my next step was to do a heuristic evaluation of the redesign as it currently stood. I mentored a junior researcher in how to do this so we could both conduct evaluations across the website and services. Throughout the evaluations we looked for clear violations of: visibility of system status, match between the system and the real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition not recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design, error recognition/diagnostics/recovery, help and documentation.

As we worked our way through the evaluation I ensured we tracked issues in a digestible way - highlighting where the issue was found, which heuristic was violated with screen shot examples and recommendations for improvements. I set up regular play back sessions with both the website team and service specific teams to show them the results of the evaluation and talk them through any questions they had to ensure a shared understanding and common approach.

Co-designing what ‘good’ looks like

After the heuristic evaluation was complete I set up multiple co-design sessions for the web team and service areas to review everything from the content to the look, feel and functionality of their services pages. This helped build confidence and buy in to our process and built up their own knowledge and understanding of the design principles we were trying to integrate into the services and website.

Test, iterate, test again

The next stage was to conduct usability testing across the services we were working on - I designed and moderated multiple rounds of usability testing with customers across the borough to understand what was working, what wasn’t and to surface what their core needs were. We worked in a cycle of testing, iterating the designs and functionality based on insights and then testing again to validate the changes we’d made. This was done for several of the key services - such as report a fly tip, request a waste bin and report a dead animal - with a junior researcher shadowing me until they themselves were able to design and moderate research independently.

Outcomes

• Digital transformation: Kingston and Sutton councils now have flourishing user research and service design practices. Since 2020 they have been slowly moving away from traditional waterfall approaches to service design and delivery towards human centred and agile design and delivery. Teams now work in multi-disciplinary teams and take projects through discovery, alpha and beta to ensure they understand who their users are, what their needs are and how to design the best possible services for them and the business.

• Website redesign: the new Kingston.gov.uk website launched late 2020/early 2021 and received an increase in positive customer feedback at this time. We also saw up to a 10% reduction in call centre enquiries across the key services which had been redesigned and tested during the website redesign project outlined above suggesting users were better able to self-serve online without having to call up.

Next steps

• Digital transformation: I remained in place as lead user researcher until a new Head of Research was recruited to head up the growing community. I provided support and guidance to them throughout their recruitment process to build the practice and have continued to provide mentoring and training to junior researchers on an ogoing basis as of April 2022.

• Website redesign: having trained and mentored several researchers whilst working full time on the project I left them with key in house capabilities to continue this work, and a roadmap of additional activities and recommendations for continuous improvements to the Kingston website. Through my ongoing mentoring and training work I provided support and strategic guidance to the researchers working on the Sutton website redesign also.