Prioritising user centered approaches as an in-house Service Designer

Welcome to the second article in our blog series, written by Rosina Richmond, Service Designer. We’re sharing an inside look at our experiences as in-house service designers at Citizens Advice.

If you are reading this blog it’s likely you either work in, or have some interest in user centered design — hello! The focus of this blog is to talk about how we encourage the prioritisation of user centered design (UCD) within the organisations we work for.

For us, this is in the context of working as in-house service designers in a complex charity organisation, Citizens Advice, and what part we play (or attempt to play) in that process. There are things we find challenging, some of which are out of our control — but I want to share some examples of where I have used an approach to encourage the prioritisation of UCD in our work, in order to be truly responsive to the needs of the people our services are helping.

Some of the barriers we face when trying to prioritise UCD are:

• Adequate budget, time and resources dedicated to understanding our users.
• Access to users, and opportunities to engage with them in meaningful ways.
• A shared understanding of the value of UCD work.
• Appetite and engagement to make recommended changes to services based on user needs.

How do we combat these challenges?

Bringing user stories to life to influence change of a service

Bringing user stories to life can be a good method to encourage change to services based on real client needs. One example of this is on a project looking at how users of our website navigate our advice pages and try to find answers to their problems, specifically when their problems are complex and intersecting. I worked alongside a senior user researcher (Laura Fitch) who undertook in depth interviews to understand people’s experiences. This was alongside website observation testing to see how users interacted with our advice pages when thinking about their specific problem, and how they might go about finding the answers they need.

We created user journeys to bring peoples stories to life for the content and website teams we were working alongside, the journeys highlighted how the language being used on how to apply to benefits was confusing and led to people thinking their situation wasn’t ‘bad enough’ or that they wouldn’t be eligible for any support.

By sharing a real person’s story we were able to build empathy and understanding across the stakeholder group, and were able to turn those insights into tangible actions and changes to the service. In this case by testing new content on the website to ensure who might be eligible for benefits is more clear, and de-bunking some of the myths and stigma around seeking support. You can see the updated webpage here: Citizens Advice — If you need financial support

Supporting our network to connect with their users in a meaningful way

One of the other barriers we face is how we can access users and engage with them in a meaningful way. At Citizens Advice we have a vast network of local offices who see a range of clients. They also frequently engage with other charities or support networks in their area and as a result have an incredible understanding of what people in their local area need and the problems they face.

I recently worked on a pilot that aimed to set up 5 different local interventions to support people. It was a partner project between Citizens Advice and Trussell, the food bank charity. The aim was to find people earlier in their journey and prevent them from getting to the point where they need to use a foodbank. As part of this work we were keen to engage people with lived experience to help co-design the pilots, however our resources were limited (budget, time, access to users). We adapted our design approach and decided to share tools and ideas on how to do this work, the local teams then led on the engagement using their contacts and the trust and connections they had with their clients as they iterated their pilot designs. This was a way of prioritising user centered design but in a more hands off format, offering support if needed but respecting the local relationships already in place. The result was that teams really wanted to do the lived experience engagement and built it into their plans, and are more likely to use this approach in future projects.

Reflection

These are just 2 examples of where I’ve prioritised UCD during my time at Citizens Advice, but it isn’t always a straightforward process and we’re constantly learning. On the next blog one of our Senior Service Designers, Debs, will be talking about how we can gain buy-in and support for our work.