Promotional material

Product design in BPDTS

Updated 30 April 2019

Our purpose

Working with other experts at DWP Digital we’re reshaping the digital landscape of UK government. Our people, our biggest asset, use their expertise to help build secure and intuitive digital services used by millions of UK citizens.

We design digital services ensuring they’re delivered to meet the needs of people who use them.

We use an iterative process to identify how digital services can be changed or introduced to solve specific problems. We work directly with people using the services to understand their needs and ensure what’s delivered meet the requirements..

Phil Middlemass, Digital Service Practice Lead, describes product design in BPDTS as:

Product design puts the user at the heart of everything we do.

Drawing on a range of engagement techniques we work hand-in-hand with DWP teams to understand what users want and how they interact digitally to define strategy, build feature roadmaps, visualise design and interaction and create content for complex enterprise digital platforms.

Our customer

With other experts across DWP Digital, we work together in multi-disciplinary teams to achieve shared goals. This unique relationship means:

• we’ve a detailed knowledge and understanding of DWP’s technology estate that is unrivalled in the market
• we understand and work seamlessly with DWP’s business processes, heads of roles and product design practices
• we can make long-term investments to build our product design community’s capabilities and services they offer
• our people’s expertise is valued and we’re seen and treated as a trusted partner at DWP Digital – increasingly taking on new, more complex and valuable things to do
• we have the agility of a small lean organisation, are able to respond quickly to external changes, deliver value for our customer and stay ahead of the game

Our people

Based in vibrant digital hubs across the country, we’re embracing agile ways of working to ensure what we deliver meets and exceeds our customer’s needs.

Our people want and need to keep up with fast paced changes in digital technology to be masters of their craft. An excellent range of learning and development is available to tap into, which helps our people to build their skills and develop their careers.

Every one of our people is different. We care about what’s going in their lives and want to help them be happy and healthy, both at and away from work. We value people for their differences and will do everything we can to create a positive, safe and healthy environment for everyone to be themselves.

We believe in celebrating successes together, and recognising and rewarding our people for their creativity and commitment.

Our services

Discovery

Understanding the ‘What?’ the ‘Why?’ and the ‘Who?’ – We define problems to solve for users, why does it need to be addressed and for who.

We don’t start building services during discovery, it’s an exploratory, fact finding phase to research what the user needs are, break down assumptions into hypotheses, understanding the policy or technology constraints we will have to work under and what are the opportunities to make improvements.

What we learn during discovery helps us work out whether to move forward with a service in an alpha phase. Moving into alpha means that the output from the discovery has decided that the benefits of looking further into the problem outweigh the cost.

Typical Product roles: Product Owner, User Researcher, Interaction & Content Designers

User Centred Design

We ensure user needs are at the very heart of the design process by carrying out a variety of research methods such as reviewing existing evidence (research data, analytics, call centre reports etc), interviewing and observing users or those who have contact with users within the organisation (case workers, agents etc).

Combined with research we use design tools & techniques such as sketching, GDS toolkit, and content design to create functional prototypes that can be tested with users and iteratively improved upon to understand the context in which a digital service will be used. Observing user interaction behaviour and translating user needs into effective service solutions.

Existing solutions and content are constantly reviewed and tested with users a through a process of continuous feedback and service improvement.

Typical Product roles: User Researcher, Interaction & Content Designers

Business Analysis

Enterprise Analysis

We support digital strategy services by defining vision and strategy for a business function via a variety of techniques such as horizon scanning and market research.

We work together with service designers to define business value proposition that helps streamline products and services delivery in-line with defined strategy.

We create business capability models and value streams to visualise operating models showing people, process, system and data view of business area.

We visualise current and target state of business operations using capability maturity assessment that are derived from strategy and outcomes. This also helps define required transformations to achieve the target state of operations.

Working alongside the enterprise architects, we deriving capability maturity roadmap for achieving the desired target state via techniques like gap analysis and business activity modelling. These roadmaps are aligned to the business strategy and delivers defined outcomes.

Analysis for Transformation & Delivery

We drive the discovery of business situations by understanding and visualising the current state using various business modelling techniques. At this stage we explore the business and user needs, carry out root cause analysis, gather relevant information and analyse it to encourage data-driven decisions.

We evaluate and define impact of proposed change on the business and digital services as “trusted advisors” using various impact assessment techniques. This defines our key stakeholders and inform stakeholder analysis for further stages.

We enable the development of business case using options appraisal, feasibility analysis, investment appraisal, benefits identification and benefits mapping. We work together with architects to provide information for solution options that inform the product design.

We define scope for alpha phase of the change and transformation based on discovery outputs, impact assessments and benefits; which then helps create program of work with a clear delivery plan using agile delivery approach.

We improve business processes, products and services using business process engineering and continuous improvement techniques that facilitates “value-driven” delivery. We use innovation techniques to identify and pinpoint business opportunities that help deliver optimized and effective business processes.

We identify and elicit business needs to well defined business requirements following complete requirements engineering cycle that ensures traceability to technical design, testing and strategic goals.

In Agile delivery environment we own, research, define and manage product requirements and deliverables at all levels through business requirements engineering. We mediate between users, stakeholders and technical teams, communicating user needs and translating them into detailed product feature backlogs that feed into deliverable sprints backlogs.

User Research

Our user researchers plan, design and carry out research activities with users that help teams get a deep understanding of the people that use government services. This research informs policy, proposition, service, content and interaction design so that services work well for users and achieves policy intent.

Working alongside other UCD roles and Service or Product owners we use a range of user research methods appropriate to the different stage of the product life cycle or situation, in order to identify, prove or disprove design assumptions with users, find commonalities across target audience members, and recognize user needs, goals, behaviours and mental models.

We understand the social and technological context for government services and turn data into clear findings that informs decision making. Helping colleagues understand how digital technology is changing user behaviour, and the challenges and opportunities for government services. Typical Product roles: User Researcher, Business Analyst, Interaction & Content Designers

Product Management

Product Owners define, own and solve problems for single or multiple products or services. Managing products and services through the full delivery lifecycle, discovery through alpha, beta and live, with user needs front and centre.

As agile practitioners we can identify and compare the best processes or delivery methods to use, including measuring and evaluating outcomes. Helping the team to decide the best approach for successful delivery, managing and visualising outcomes, prioritising work and work to agreed minimum viable product (MVP), print and scope

We work directly with senior stakeholders up to ministerial level, able to articulate all aspects of service delivery to ensure stakeholder buy-in to the defined strategy, requirements, cost, and time frames. With the ability to challenge assumptions and direction that opposes or contradicts user needs or research outcomes.

Taking service ownership; financially, operationally, strategically. We realise the benefit and persuading others that a product is the right one to use and implemented to take full advantage of its capability, returning maximum value. Designing out operational processes to run digital services throughout their life cycle, overcoming operational constraints.

Typical Product roles: Product Owner

Inclusive services

Government services have to work for everyone our product teams consider the barriers different groups of users might face when trying to use a service, and how to address them. We think about inclusivity and accessibility from the very inception of a service idea.

We do this by recruiting user research participants who best represent service users, making sure we design for their needs and continually test services with them. We use research techniques that help to include harder to reach groups and look for points in a service that could exclude particular groups.

We work to government accessibility standards including; meeting AA level compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) as a minimum. Ensuring services work with commonly supported assistive technologies such as screen reader, screen magnifiers and speech tools.

Prototyping

We develop simplified experimental models of proposed design solutions used to empathise with user needs, test and validate hypotheses & design assumptions rapidly with users.

Designers work together with Researchers and Analysts to producing anything from simple sketches or storyboards to creative designs and interactive prototypes of digital interfaces. Testing design assumptions and usability.

Prototype feedback is used to allow Interaction and Content Designers to iterate solutions quickly, making appropriate refinements or wider changes in direction to create the best possible end solution.

Typical Product roles: Interaction & Content Designers

Contact BPDTS

Email bpdts.engage@dwp.gov.uk for more information about our services.