Meet user needs

1. Focus on the current and future wellbeing of people in Wales

Service teams should be driven by outcomes that benefit the people of Wales, not by lists of technical requirements. You should consider future generations and think about the social, economic, environmental and cultural wellbeing of Wales. Services should contribute to the 7 wellbeing goals of Wales.

Why this is important

The Well-being of Future Generations Act requires a new way of thinking about how public services are delivered. Public bodies must work to improve the wellbeing of the people of Wales and in line with Welsh Government priorities.

How to get started

Use the Well-being of Future Generations Commissioner’s resources to understand the broader impact of your service. The Framework for Future Generations gives questions to consider when designing a new service or planning a service change.

2. Design services in Welsh and English

Services in Wales must meet the needs of people who use the Welsh language in their everyday lives. You need to design and build services that promote and ease the use of Welsh and treat those who speak it equally with those who speak English. Read the Welsh Government guidance on promoting the Welsh language.

Why this is important

The Welsh language, Cymraeg, is integral to our culture, our heritage and our daily lives. It’s part of our identity as a nation. We must design services that give Welsh speakers the confidence to use them in Welsh.

How to get started

Make Welsh language content central to development of your service from the start. Do not start to consider Welsh language aspects of the service after the design process.

Test Welsh language content with users as early as you can. The Welsh you use, and the way users access a Welsh language service, need to form part of your usability test plan.

Design technical solutions with Welsh language user needs in mind. Consider Welsh language needs when buying software and services from vendors. Design specifications using these guidelines for a good bilingual user experience.

3. Understand users and their needs

User needs must determine service design, whoever those users are. User needs are more important than the way an organisation is structured or the technology it currently uses.

Look at the user journey from start to finish, understanding the different ways people use services, whether that’s online, over the phone or in person. Public services are for everyone, so you must consider accessibility.

Why this is important

Understanding users and their needs leads to better outcomes for a service. Doing first hand research with users reduces the risk of wasting time and money building something that does not get used or creates bigger problems for users. Learning about the people who use your service shifts the perspective from thinking about solutions to focusing on the real problems that need solving. It helps you to make evidence based decisions about the simplest and most cost effective ways to meet user needs.

How to get started

Before investing in a new digital product, you should:

  • work with a user researcher to do qualitative research with users to learn about their experience of the service, their needs and problems they’re facing
  • use secondary sources to learn about users, including web analytics, call centre data and front-line staff interviews
  • make sure the service helps users achieve their goal in the simplest way possible so they can succeed first time
  • continue to test the service with users as it gets developed, ironing out any usability issues at the earliest opportunity
  • build usability and accessibility requirements into the tender if you’re procuring a digital product or team from a vendor

4. Provide a joined up experience

Services that are not joined up are difficult for people to use. The services you deliver need to work seamlessly whichever way users access them, so they have a consistent experience. Organise internal teams to support the service and meet user needs.

Why this is important

You have to understand the user journey, and how the user passes between each communication channel and organisation, to design services that make sense and are consistent.

How to get started

Map the end-to-end user experience of the service, capturing where the user needs to interact with different digital and offline channels. Designers and user researchers should work with operations teams to review and make changes to these other channels as needed.

Take responsibility for working with other organisations for different parts of the user journey so the service is coherent and meets user needs at each step. Use user feedback and data from all channels to refine and improve the service and increase digital use.

5. Make sure everyone can use the service

There’s usually no alternative to using public services, so they have to work for everyone. Design services to be inclusive, making sure anyone who needs to use them can do so as easily as possible. Including users who are often excluded from services makes them easier to use for everyone.

Why this is important

Digital inclusion is making sure that people can use the internet and access services. Being digitally capable is important for accessing work, education, healthcare and public safety information. Groups most likely to be digitally excluded include people with lower educational or income levels, senior citizens and people with disabilities. The most common reasons people can’t get online are the cost of technology or broadband and a lack of digital skills.

The Equality Act 2010 says you must not exclude protected groups from accessing public services. The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 say you must make sure digital services conform to a consistent standard of accessibility.

How to get started

You should:

  • identify points where a service could exclude particular groups of users, and support these groups better
  • talk to excluded groups and recruit them in user research and testing
  • make sure services use the same vocabulary as users, to make things easy for anyone to understand
  • give assisted digital support to users with low digital skills or limited access
  • publish documents as HTML pages by default rather than PDF files, which are not as accessible and consume more data
  • make your digital services accessible to disabled users

To comply with the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018, digital services must:

Create digital teams

6. Have an empowered service owner

There should be a single empowered service owner who has the authority to make all business, product and technical decisions about a service.

The same person is accountable and responsible for how well the service meets the needs of its users, which is how its success will be evaluated. Find out more about service owners at GOV.UK.

Why this is important

A service owner is responsible for the end-to-end service, which may include many products and digital and offline channels. A few people might be responsible for a service but a single person must be empowered to represent the needs of users.

How to get started

You should:

7. Have a multidisciplinary team

Teams are how we build services. Each one should be a diverse mix of people, experience, expertise and disciplines.

As well as having the right mix of skills and experience for each stage of designing and building the service, your team should be able to change over time. You also need to know how much a team responsible for continuous improvement of the service would cost.

Why this is important

You’ll need the right skills within the team to make effective decisions and deliver quickly. It is not always possible to have dedicated roles when organisations are starting out on their digital journey. But it’s important to understand the diverse range of skills needed at different stages of development.

This will include a mix of digital skills, such as:

  • user research
  • service design
  • content design
  • product management

You’ll also need subject matter experts. These could be business or legal experts, or practitioners such as social workers or teachers, depending on what kind of service you’re building.

How to get started

You need to:

  • understand the purpose of the different disciplines needed within digital teams and set up teams with this in mind
  • think about the need for other skills, for example, procurement, legal or business experts, and make sure they’re available to the team when needed
  • make sure these experts and the development team work together daily to understand and remove constraints

If there are no people with these skills within your organisation, you need to buy specialist digital support, best accessed through the Digital Marketplace or Sell2Wales. This helps build internal capability and skills through working with experts.

8. Iterate and improve frequently

Use an incremental, fast-paced development approach to get working software into users’ hands as early as possible, as often as possible. This will help teams rapidly iterate, based on user feedback.

Why this is important

Services need to evolve as user needs become better understood. Getting a service in front of users as early as possible gives the team feedback on the things that work and the things that need to change. Being able to continuously improve the service means you can respond to changes among users or in technology or government policy.

How to get started

You should:

  • use Agile ways of working to support incremental delivery
  • use prototypes to test new ideas with users, to find out cheaply and easily what helps to solve the problem
  • release a functioning product that meets a user need as soon as possible – start with the smallest version of value (a minimum viable product) to get it in front of users and test it, then iterate and iterate again
  • do regular usability testing with users to see what’s working and what improvements need to be made
  • think about how the service will continue to respond to changing user needs 

9. Work in the open

Make the services you build, and the techniques used to build them, as open as possible.

As you develop a service, your team should communicate the decisions they’re making and share what they’re learning. You should also share code and design patterns as freely as possible to help others building public services.

Why this is important

An open and collaborative culture within and between public sector organisations helps to share knowledge and deliver consistent services.

How to get started

You should:

  • be visible within and outside your organisation – hold regular ‘show and tells’ and blog about the journey, not just the end result
  • celebrate successes and be open about learning from things that haven’t worked so well
  • publish source code, data and other artefacts where it is safe to do so

Use the right technology

10. Use scalable technology

Use the simplest, most appropriate tool, and avoid being locked into contracts for specific technologies.

Let your team use the tools that work for them. Encourage them to use tools that meet open standards, are cloud-based and are widely supported.

Why this is important

Technology choices have a huge impact on how organisations create, iterate and run services. Technology must not hamper teams’ ability to work cooperatively.

How to get started

You should:

  • make user-led technology decisions, ones that enhance the team’s ability to meet user needs
  • develop services in common software languages
  • take advantage of cloud-based, open technologies and break dependency on inflexible and expensive systems
  • if you need to buy technology or services from a vendor, include these digital service standards as part of the procurement process and ongoing supplier management

11. Consider ethics, privacy and security throughout

Digital services must protect sensitive information and keep data secure. You should address ethical issues associated with all digital services at every stage of their development.

Why this is important

Public services hold personal and sensitive information about users. Services must be secure to maintain users’ trust.

How to get started

You should:

  • consider the intended and unintended consequences of the service on users – if there are negative consequences, think about how these will be solved or influence decision-making
  • identify information security and privacy threats to the service and resolve them so systems remain secure and protect privacy
  • make security testing part of your maintenance routine

12. Use data to make decisions

Constantly measure how well services are performing for users. You should use performance data to prioritise improvements. Where possible, that data collection should be automated and real-time, to make it as objective and easy to collect as it can be.

User-test iterative changes to services. Senior leaders should also take part in research on a regular basis, so they understand the user experience.

Why this is important

You need to understand what data will help you to meet the needs of users. Data tells you more about the service and can be shared among relevant organisations to improve users’ experience.

Monitor the performance of the service to know it’s still solving the problem for users. Real-time analytics show how users interact with the service and whether there are any problems that need to be fixed.

How to get started

You should:

  • think about what data you already have and how it could improve the user experience
  • think about what data you can get from others or share about your service to better meet user needs
  • define performance metrics upfront so you know what good looks like and how it will be measured
  • monitor the behaviour of users in real-time through analytics to determine how well the service meets user needs
  • use performance data to make decisions on what needs to be improved