The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
Discovery phase for Dept formerly known as MHCLG
Working in the role of Senior Interaction Designer alongside Softwire’s Senior User Researcher and our client team at MHCLG, we undertook a Discovery phase to better understand the ‘Delta’ grants service. Delta facilitates the collection of data and grant payments for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
The service is accessed by both internal and external users and is classified as Critical National Infrastructure due to the billions of pounds it processes each year. By interviewing internal and external users across MHCLG and local government we gained insight into who was using Delta (and their purpose) what it’s pain points were and how it could be improved.
Research to understand users’ experiences of Delta, leading to the identification of user pain points and key insights, and the creation of four personas.
We conducted 60-minute interviews with 20 internal and external Delta users, ascertaining their role and how they used the service. In particular, we uncovered:
Users’ experiences of the grant set up, approval and payment process
Where do users experience key problems and points of service-failure
How Delta could enable users to more effectively manage grants
Identifying immediate improvements
Some of the outputs from MHCLG Discovery phase, including personas, a prioritised list of service improvements that could be adopted from GOV.UK Design System, and a roadmap of quick wins that could be applied to live service and medium term design and research plans (Alpha phase).
I made recommendations on how Delta’s live service could rapidly be improved and help overcome many user pain points within roughly six fortnightly sprints, using components from GOV.UK Design System.
Two examples of immediate improvements identified to improve live service using GOV.UK Design System
Taking our recommendations further
MHCLG secured funding to move forward with improvements to the service a few months after Discovery.
