Case study:
How we helped the team at the Welsh Assembly understand the needs of users of their Record of Proceedings and map out solutions in double-quick time.
The challenge
The National Assembly for Wales were planning to rethink the way they make available the Record of Proceedings - a record of what is discussed and agreed in the Welsh Assembly.
They had done a lot of work to gather requirements, but wanted to take a step back and be sure that they were addressing the needs of different kinds of users, from internal staff, to media to interested members of the public.
Our approach
Over the course of two weeks, we worked intensively with the commission team to interview a range of users to understand their motivations, goals, behaviours and attitudes in relation to the Record.
We presented back our findings in short report that captured the main tasks involved - finding, viewing, using and sharing, monitoring, discovering, engaging, contributing - and how each user-group approached these tasks and what pain-points they suffered from.
In the second week we ran two workshops with the assembly commission staff who would be developing the new online solution.
In the first workshop we provided teams with realistic user scenarios and asked them to create a User Story Map reflecting a new and improved journey.
Then in a second workshop we picked novel, complex, or risky moments in the journey and sketched different ideas for how to support them. This process quickly got ideas out of people’s heads and into a concrete form that could be evaluated by the group.
outcomes
By the end of the fortnight the Commission team had a shared understanding of what their solution needed to deliver in order to meet the needs of their different user groups. And the senior team were confident to proceed into the design and build phase.
The new system is now live at here.
“Pilot Works mobilised at short notice to help us understand and prioritise user needs for two of our high profile services. Not only did they provide clarity on the needs, they also worked collaboratively with our team demonstrating their user-centred approach in action. We would be happy to work with them again.”