Department for international trade
ROLE: Service Designer
PROJECT: the International Exporter Environment
Skills engaged: Qualitative research - Data set reviews - Competitor reviews - Affinity mapping - Empathy mapping - Personas - Task analysis - Experience mapping/ user journey - Sketching - Prototyping - A/B Testing - User Stories - Stakeholder engagement - Dev. team engagement - Accessibility reviews - GDS design reviews
Tools: Figma - Sketch - Photoshop - InDesign - InVision - JIRA - Trello
Discovery phase
THE BRIEF
The Department for International Trade (DIT) Digital Team wanted to better understand trading pain points with an aim to understand how this journey could be improved to help and support trade, and provide an understanding of what trade related data may influence their decision.
As well as this, they wanted to understand business perception of the Government's role in the facilitation of their trade journey, with particular focus on how the landscape could change post-Brexit.
Themes explored
Explore and define the information UK traders need when exporting
Understand UK traders perception of the Government’s role in trade and how they navigate the Government landscape
Understand the feasibility of exporting, including perceived barriers
Research
Internal stakeholders: We spoke to a total of 17 different teams across DIT to understand what they have been working on and whether there is any crossover in the work they were doing. This helped us gain a deep understanding of what the Government was providing users currently/ looking to export.
Recruited users: We conducted 37 in-depth interviews with a wide range of businesses currently exporting/ looking to export.
Competitor/ 3rd party service reviews: We conducted reviews of 3rd party services which might also be used by people currently/ looking to export, from information services to freight forwarders.
Output
Personas: From our user research we built 4 personas to represent the different types of businesses who export.
Customer journey: We then built out a typical journey for each of these personas, highlighting key pain points for each.
Service blueprint: We combined these into one over-arching service blue-print to highlight the areas we believe act as the biggest pain points for exporters.
Problem statements: We then pulled out key problem statements from this blueprint, to identify how best to improve the users’ journey.
Types of findings:
How users currently go about researching and executing exports
The barriers they have throughout the export journey, from finding new customers to getting it past customs
How exporting ties into their wider business plan
What they need from the Government; specifically what type of information they need (e.g. tariffs, regulations etc.)
The role they expect the Government to play in their export journey
What tools exporters currently used which would no longer be relevant to them after Brexit
Our Discovery work had shown that to continue trading with the rest of the world, UK exporters needed access to the correct regulations and information in a post-Brexit world.
Proposed solution: Design and build a Government service that provided all this information before the UK leaves the EU.
Alpha and beta phases
Brief- based on discovery findings
Build a service that allows users know how to export their goods in a post-Brexit scenario
This service should be pitched at the pain points outlined in the Discovery
The information should be clear and easy to understand
Process
Designing and building a service to GDS standards, with a huge data set, in 4 months was a daunting prospect.
Print-outs of the multiple design sprints
Data analysis: Our first step was to find out who could supply the data. After reviewing a number of companies through data/ screen scraping and being provided samples of data to review, we signed a contract with a 3rd-party data provider.
User journey: With an understanding of what data we had available, we started to sketch-out the flow of information we would provide users. Based on our Discovery work, we knew that we wanted to serve users only relevant information, which could be achieved by cross referencing the code of the product they are exporting against the destination country they want to export to.
Wireframing: With such a little amount of time, an agile approach was essential to this project. Throughout the entire process we continually tested clickable wire-frames with external users and internal stakeholders, tweaking and updating daily. We had to build and test a series of different versions of the service, based on potential Brexit outcomes.
Content: A major challenge with this project was ensuring all the information we provided was correct. This involved daily meetings with policy stakeholders to ensure our service showed the most comprehensive, Government approved information.
Dev: To ensure we had a service built in time, we rapidly built an MVP and then improved the service through consistent milestones. This was achieved through a combination of Trello and JIRA, with daily stand-ups, weekly notes and Show & Tells to ensure that everyone stayed on-track and we could re-design/ solve any blockers which came up.
Governance/ go-live: Any Government service must go through a number of hurdles to meet accessibility, governance and security standards. Alongside designing and building the service, I managed wider stakeholders to ensure the service met the high standards of a Government service, often iterating at speed to ensure our solution found a balance between the need of the user, the requirements of Government and the tight Brexit deadline.