Interaction designers are essential parts of service teams that want to meet user needs. They work closely with the entire project team, especially User researchers, Service designers, Content designers and Software developers.
Below are some of the activities carried out by Interaction and Service designers in Defra.
What is it? - Providing specialist Interaction design input into options assessments and procurement activates, focusing on inclusive and accessible options that work for all users.
An Interaction Designer will:
- Input into the procurement process helping create requirements to make sure the product meets both design and accessibility standards
- Making sure the design meets user needs
- Reviewing each tender against usability and accessibility standards
What is it? - Work as part of a multidisciplinary team through Discovery, Alpha and Beta to make sure we deliver the right thing using a design test and iteration cycle. Interaction designers will work closely with Content designers to prototype ideas to test and make sure all new products are designed to meet user needs and are inclusive.
An Interaction Designer will work in all phases of a new product development lifecycle.
- build knowledge of the subject and understanding the policy intent (work with stakeholders, policy and subject matter experts)
- understand how users interact with any current service
- help the team to identify and investigate pain points or problems with any existing service
- create high level user journey maps
- make plans for Alpha ('How might we statements', hypotheses and assumptions to test)
- prioritise assumptions identified in discovery for testing
- facilitate design and mapping workshops with the team
- design and test multiple solutions to make sure we build the right thing
- decide on high-level to be user journeys (online, offline etc)
- test ideas quickly with low fidelity prototypes
- identify existing patterns that could be reused
- make sure the service is inclusive/accessible
- prototype detailed interactions, components, screens etc
- iterate designs based on analysis and feedback
- iterate and refine existing design patterns where needed
- create new design patterns where needed and share with wider Defra and XGov communities
- make sure the service is inclusive
- help the team test the service with assistive technology
- help the team to create a plan for assisted digital users
- use feedback, analytics, and call centre data to identify areas for product improvement
- iterate and test designs with users
What is it? - An interaction designer makes sure any additional features are designed to meet user needs, design standards and accessibility legislation. They also make sure new features are aligned to the service vision and add value for users.
An interaction designer will:
- understand how users interact with and are affected by any new feature
- design and test prototypes to make sure new features are usable and inclusive
- create reusable patterns and components that can be rolled out across Defra
What is it? - An interaction designer updates products in response to changes in external components, legislation or services that the application depends on.
An interaction designer will:
- understand how changes will impact users
- design and test prototypes to make sure new features are usable and inclusive
What is it? - An interaction designer works on legacy applications making sure products are inline with current design standards and accessibility legislation.
An interaction designer will:
- work with existing product users to improve usability and efficiency
- create designs to test with users working within legacy technology constraints
- help the teams to understand and meet accessibility legislation
Services as end users would know them transcend delivery or product teams. Service designers work across a programme of work to design the interactions and building blocks that make a new service. The service designer may support multiple product teams to provide insight on how to achieve desired outcomes in a measurable way.
What is it? - Working with the business and policy upfront to understand what we have, what we might need to do and why. This stage is about establishing the problem/costs/issues that you want to look at. Including the people and skills you are likely to need for discovery. At this stage we need to define the problem(s) and the desired outcome(s).
Questions to answer:
- Who are the users and stakeholders?
- Do we understand their needs?
- What underlying challenges do we need to address?
- What already exists internally/ externally?
- What do we want to achieve?
- How might this link to the wider digital strategy?
- What areas might we need to look into in more detail?
- What is the scope we want to explore in discovery?
Circa 5 days effort
A Service Designer will:
- Facilitate sessions involving key stakeholders/ users
- Understand and frame the problems you want to solve
- Help you sketch out a vision
- Create an agreed set of outcomes
Circa 4-6 weeks effort
Understand the policy intent and the needs of users to help design the policy and generate ideas for how it might be enacted.
A Service Designer will:
- Conduct initial stakeholder/ user exploration
- Document insights
- Facilitate idea generation
- Run co-design sessions to test and build on hypotheses
- Create prototypes to test policy
10 -12 weeks
Working alongside policy, business analysis and architecture to understand the main business drivers, problems to be solved and desired outcomes before moving to Discovery.
A Service Designer will:
- Identify the main business drivers
- Gather existing insight about the users of any current service and high level pain points
- Gather existing insight about user needs
- Identify subject matter experts and key stakeholders
- Align proposed work to strategy and programme vision
- Work with Policy to define the problems we are trying to solve
- Work with Policy to define the outcomes we want to deliver
- Work alongside a Business Analyst to understanding the people, processes and data involved in any as is process
- Analyse failure within services and identify root causes for that failure. Identify opportunities for cost reduction and improvement within an existing service.
- Create as is user journeys, highlighting pain points, dependencies, areas for improvements and hypothesis to test
- Create service prototypes, and design touchpoints
- Work with the team to provide recommendations for how to take the work forward
- Frame and create problem statements for discovery
What is it? - Services as end users would know them transcend delivery or product teams. Service designers work across a programme of work to design the interactions and building blocks that make a new service. The service designer may support multiple product teams to provide insight on how to achieve desired outcomes in a measurable way.
A Service Designer will:
- Identify the main business drivers
- Work with the team to define the problems we are trying to solve
- Work with Policy to define the outcomes we want to deliver
- Create as is user journeys, highlighting pain points, dependencies, areas for improvements and hypothesis to test
- Develop a strategic vision for the service
- Design the interactions and building blocks that make up the service
- Create service prototypes to test ideas and assumptions
- Influence performance reporting so we measure and target improvements to things that matter to users
- Lead on ensuring that interactions and user journeys across the programme are rational and consistent
What is it? - Service designers work with existing programmes to help connect discrete digital projects to deliver a joined up service vision, provide cost efficiencies, and increase the effectiveness with which end-user benefits are delivered.
A Service Designer will:
- Align and lead communication with service managers, product owners and policy colleagues to define user journeys and articulate the vision for products and services
- Visualise/map existing products and processes, highlighting inconsistencies, inefficiencies, dependencies, pain points and dead ends.
- Visualise/map relationships between different products or sub services
- Identify opportunities for service improvement and cost reduction
- Identify opportunities to align internal processes
- Identify opportunities to align our services with user journeys and tasks
- Lead on ensuring that interactions and user journeys across the programme are rational and consistent
- Understand user needs and track interactions across departmental and organisational boundaries
- Influence performance reporting so we measure and target improvements to things that