You may be signed up to this way of working, but your colleagues aren’t. That’s ok.
We think three of the principles are particularly useful to help you get your colleagues on board.
Start with users and keep them involved. Researching with your user group means you will have direct experience that you can draw on. This is useful evidence to show your colleagues what challenges your service users are facing and where their needs aren’t being met.
Take small steps and learn as you go. Building small parts of your product or service and testing them with users is often the most valuable thing you can do. It can show that the approaches behind these principles can cheaply and quickly create things that improve services users lives.
Build digital services not websites. It’s easy for people to fixate on the technology. Instead, talking about the service the technology is enabling gives you opportunities to show your colleagues how what you’re building can integrate with and support their existing work.
Of course it’s always good to backup messages with nice visuals. Print out these principles and stick them above the kettle or on a wall as a reminder and to get people talking about them.
Your checklist
Start with user needs, and keep them involved
I have researched directly with my user group to understand their needs from their perspective. This means understanding their behaviours, attitudes and needs. For example, I’ve conducted semi-structured interviews with users or undertaken or contextual research
I have a plan to continue to engage with my intended service users over time, such as conducting usability studies
Things you might have:
User needs based on user research
Personas
Jobs to be done
A research plan for ongoing usability testing
Tools you can use:
User needs – the Government Digital Service has great guidance on identifying and writing up user needs
Personas – there’s lot of guidance on the web, this is a helpful overview on Personas
Jobs-to-be-done – this Harvard Business Review article a is useful introductory article, more practitioner-focused information can be found on these dedicated sites jtbd.info and jobstobedone.org
Usability testing – Nielsen Norman group have many good resources like this introduction, Steve Krugg has published two very helpful introductory books
Contextual inquiry, or shadowing – there’s a good introduction here
Form software such as Typeform or Google Forms can be helpful for signing up users for research and gathering short bits of information
I mapped out where users will come to my product from, why they will come, and what they will get from interacting with my product
I have mapped out their journey through my service
I have thought about where they are going after they have finished with my product, and what I need to give them to so that their next step is as easy as possible
Things you might have:
A competed flow of where the user is coming from, what steps they undertake while involved in your service, and where the go immediately afterwards
Tools you can use:
Service Blueprints to map out both user, frontline and back office functions in a service
User flows to understand steps through a specific service
User journey maps to understand a user’s journey through a service, including things like their emotional state
Google Analytics to track how users interact with the online components of your service, and where the drop-off points are
I and my team are accepting that my first plan will almost certainly not be the right one. The expectation that the nature of the service will shift over time has been communicated to senior sponsors
I have identified my key assumptions and have a plan to test them, for example through a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or RAT (Riskiest Assumption Test)
I know about, and am using techniques like agile or kanban to manage the development of the product or service
Things you might have:
A good system for tracking your development process, e.g. a Trello Kanban board
Scheduled processes in the team’s diary, such as sprint planning meetings and sprint retrospectives
A way to track your assumptions, such as a Knowledge Kanban
Tools you can use:
Lean Startup and Agile processes to ensure they’re following a user-centred, iterative approach
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