Application supporting statement - Head of User-Centred Design (unsuccessful)

Overview 

I have longstanding experience of working across the portfolio of the User Centred Design practice; with this broad spectrum of knowledge and experience I am ideally placed not only to have intelligent conversations within the UCD practice, but also across the whole of the IT&D function, and act as a bridge and translator where necessary. 

The working practice of myself and my other two colleagues in the Forms and CXM wing of the Online Service Delivery team was to provide a complete end to end service to clients of initial Gateway scoping, business analysis, user research, solution design, production, testing, and handover training to users. 

I especially have longstanding experience of providing that service using an iterative approach which whilst not closely following the currently recognised named Agile methodologies the council is now adopting have indeed followed the Agile principles of establishing and delivering core requirements to deliver a Minimum Viable Product to allow the user to have an early sight of the work they have commissioned in order for them to better ensure the product they have specified the requirements of really is the product they actually need. 

My requirements gathering especially focusses on determining the outcomes the client needs from their product, and where requirements specified in terms of how they want their product to work fully tested to ensure that’s their Real Requirement rather than a perceived requirement based on experience of other products. 

I have a particular affinity for Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles for Good Design – Good design: 

• Is innovative, 
• Makes a product useful, 
• Is aesthetic, 
• Makes a product understandable, 
• Is unobtrusive, 
• Is honest, 
• Is long-lasting, 
• Is thorough down to the last detail, 
• Is environmentally friendly, and 
• Is as little as possible. 

Recent work 

Recent significant pieces of work using the core Jadu CMS/XFP/CXM suite which I have delivered include: 

• Foodbank referrals - a system whereby citizens phoning the Contact Centre in financial hardship can be issued with an immediate voucher code which they can then take to a foodbank rather than having to make an appointment with a Neighbourhood Office adviser, 
• Domestic Abuse – a system separating reports of Domestic Abuse from the main Antisocial Behaviour reporting system into their own system, which captures the information specific to DA from reporters separate from the generic ASB reporting, and which allows the DA team to allocate and manage DA cases to specifically trained advisors and investigators who are ringfenced to that service. The purpose of this piece of work as well as improving the service to citizens is also to enable the service to apply for a national accreditation of good practice. 
• Business Grants – In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic I designed and built a system using the core Jadu functionality to enable affected businesses to apply for the various business grants which were made available. My design modularised the approach both to improve the experience for citizens and to enable modules which can be reused by other systems, thus saving work for the council. For example, the initial Business Grants application process I built stored the details which pertain to the business itself (e.g. business name and address, business sector, company registration details, etc) in a separate CXM case from the application, and the applicant was issued with a Business Details reference number which allowed them to apply for subsequent grants, or indeed will allow them to interact with the council on any other matter, without having to supply the same details again. As part of the process of logging payments paid out for grants, I created a further Payments CXM case which is available for us to use for any other payments logging we might wish to record, whether outbound or inbound. And because it was clear there were going to be further grant schemes from the initial one I built the system for, I also created a module to separate the generic parts of any grant scheme from the specific parts of any specific grant scheme. These modular aspects function transparently to both citizen and staff users, whilst the service to both citizens and colleagues is improved by making it simpler for the team to reuse and extend existing functionality for new systems rather than having to build anew from the ground up every time. In total, the business grants system I created was used to process 55,832 individual grant payments totalling £181,955,620. 
• Jadu microsites – using the Jadu Galaxy and Blog functionality I’ve created core (with colleagues populated the content) new microsites for a number of internal and arm’s-length clients, taking the default Galaxy and Blog HTML templates and adapting the core design and colour scheme to be in line with clients’ existing visual identities, and coding the css into the templates to implement them. 
• Supportal dashboard – in order to make our own lives easier in the team I have used the Jadu CXM API functionality to take our support requests logged with Jadu and display them in a manner which makes it easier for us to manage them, and to hold our supplier Jadu to account for processing them in a timely manner. At the top of the page I use Google Charts functionality to provide an at-a-glance visualisation of the current state of open tickets, with a bar chart showing the proportions of tickets by priority, and a pair of pressure gauges indicating visually the number of open tickets and tickets waiting for us to respond; below that is a list of tickets waiting for us sorted in chronological order, and below that are the remaining open tickets sorted in priority and then chronological order.   

Research and Development 

As background tasks, when time has been available, I have been working on a number of self-directed R&D projects which are intended to help citizens as well as the council: 

• Location-based service requests and reports - further to the Supportal dashboard above, I am exploring the CXM API to display (suitably anonymised where appropriate) recently reported cases on a map to citizens, e.g. flytipping, missed bin collections, and street problems, in order to enable citizens to both see if an issue has already been reported and to see how well we perform at resolving these issues, 
• Auto-geolocation of location-based reporting – many location-based reports such as street problems and flytipping are often accompanied by a photograph. Given on most modern mobile phones the photograph will have the location the photograph was taken embedded into it, why do we still make citizens enter the location on a map? I have been exploring the possibility of extracting the location data from the image, with a proof of concept created and further work needed to extract the information from the default iPhone image format, 
• Self-updating content – there are a number of pages on our website which feature content according to a timetable of dates, such as the School Term Dates page. I am at the early stages of exploring how I could create a widget which could enable content editors to designate the dates in the content to enable – where appropriate – the next relevant date to be highlighted and dates in the past to be hidden by default, to make it easier for users to see what’s important to them first whilst removing the need for content editors to be frequently updating the page manually, 
• Automatic personalisation – many years ago a number of websites experimented with personalisation; these experiments mostly failed because they were clunky for users to use and offered little benefit. Some research I was doing which has been put on hold was into automatic transparent personalisation – with users’ permission - to help users without them needing to work for it themselves. For example, determining their location to see if they likely needed resident-focussed content or visitor-focussed content presenting to them, determining the weather and time of day to see what leisure-focussed content would most interesting to them, and keeping track of their most visited service pages to surface those to them automatically. 

Accessibility 

I have a strong commitment to ensuring technology can be used to include users rather than exclude them, and have been a strong advocate for improved web accessibility during my whole web career. 

With two colleagues I recently ran a session for the divisions Community of Practice group, in which my focus in the session was to talk about Inclusive Design, where rather than providing an accessible alternative, the design of the service or system is accessible by default, about the need to be especially proactive about consulting users with accessibility needs rather than making assumptions about their needs, and about the need to go beyond mere compliance by thinking imaginatively how we can make services we think might not be possible to fully accessible. 

Another piece of personal research and development I have been working on is to see if it’s possible to render graphs in a way which users of screenreaders can perceive, by rendering them as sound rather than images. I am also a regular user of the Widgit symbol-supported communication tool for people with learning difficulties and people whose first language is not English. Some of my Widgit symbol work used to be on a previous version of the Birmingham City Council website. 

Data-driven 

I use data to inform the decisions I make and the decisions I’m advocating others to make. 

In a Manifesto for Local Government DIgital Services I had been working on I used web analytics data to support a proposition of mine that the paradigm for standard local government website home pages across the sector – of looking at data to show the most popular services on the home page of the site – is a misapplication of the analytics data we in the sector are using to inform our decisions, because by using web analytics data to populate the home page with popular services I think it’s possible that we are paradoxically creating website home pages which are of interest to the least numbers of our users. I would propose a further line of research to explore this further and to explore how we can use that data to create more useful and useable home pages and user journeys through our sites. 

When the sector was starting to express concerns about the annual SocITM Better Connected report, in conjunction with the LocalGov Digital Steering Group I developed the Council Website Usability Dashboard, which is a crowdsourced usability testing tool enabling council website managers to gather qualitative and quantitative data about the usability of their sites in order to improve them – that can be seen at https://council.usability-test.org.uk/ ; at the time of writing 695 users have between them run 2364 individual tests against 70 council tasks. 

Standards and strategies 

I’ve written a number of standards and strategies over the years. A long time ago I was the author of a national Internet standard, the Guidelines for Naming UK Usenet Newsgroups. More recently, I have created the standard form design principles which creators of web forms in BCC are supposed to follow, and the standards for capturing and storing common data between forms and CXM. 

I was the author of the content strategy which was implemented for the previous version of the BCC website before Jadu, which included in it standards for content design, page design, and information architecture; this was developed in consultation with citizens at a number of commissioned focus group events and with sector peers at a number of sector events. When that content strategy was superseded by Jadu’s content strategy I edited my original document to make it more generically applicable to any council (and indeed adaptable to any similar organisation to a local authority) and published it at https://www.perfect-curve.co.uk/post/102/a-content-strategy-for-local-government  

Working in the open 

I have blogged about a lot of my work in the past, where appropriate – whether that’s documenting specific work I have been doing with the council on specific projects, attending sector events (most notably LocalGovCamp and UKGovCamp, but other events as well) and documenting my learning from them, or expressing opinions about my analysis at any given moment of where the sector is and where it should be. My collected writing in that regard can be found at https://www.perfect-curve.co.uk/tag/localgovdigital  

Sharing the credit 

“If I have been able to see further, it has been because I have stood on the shoulders of giants” 

Whilst it’s part of the role of a leader to use their expertise and experience to have a vision and convince others to follow that vision, it’s also part of their role to acknowledge that the people they are supposed to be leading are also experienced experts with experience and vision, and to consult appropriately; as well as convincing people outside their team of their vision, a good leader will seek convince their own team of their vision as well, as well as soliciting the opinions of the members of their own team in order to get their views and ideas, so that the vision is not just the leader’s vision but the vision of the whole team. And at the end of a successful project a good leader will ensure that the whole team receives the full credit for the work rather than allowing the focus to remain on themself. 

Vision 

Often, the concept of user-centred design is seen as being in opposition to what council staff and departments want. I do not believe this to be inherently the case – good user-centred design which makes it easier for citizens to interact with us in the way we’d prefer them to interact with us ultimately makes it easier for us to serve our citizens, and where there is a conflict between our needs and the citizen’s needs, good user-centred design can mitigate that conflict. 

Often our sector underestimates the capability and motivation of our citizens to grasp and be interested in complex areas of policy and strategy. It is true, most of our citizens do just want to report flytipping and potholes without having to wade through text to do that, however good user-centred design will not only separate the waste strategy and the sustainable transport policy from the business of reporting issues to us, it will also make the waste strategy and the sustainable transport policy engaging to read in different formats to provoke interest and stimulate civic debate. 

Often our sector focuses on the facts at the expense of the design; good user-centred design will not just present the bare facts to the citizen, it will do so in a manner which is both beautiful and engaging, which if it does not provoke joy and delight, at the very least does not compound the injury of a failed service delivery with a difficult and ugly experience in complaining about it.