DEPARTMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL TRADE

Project: KEEP BUSINESSES TRADING POST-BREXIT

Role: I was the Service Designer, working in a full delivery team. I also lead on the User Research and Interaction Design up to beta.

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 used: Sketch - Miro - Photoshop - InDesign - InVision - JIRA - Trello

The Department for International Trade (DIT) sought clarity on the pain points of international trade in order to assist and support British business through the multitude of processes that need to be improved, and show which trade related data may influence any decision. The DIT also wanted to understand business perception of the Government’s role in the facilitation of their trade journey, with

Approach: We used the Government’s standard 3-stage approach: Discover, Alpha and Beta.

Discovery stage:

We conducted comprehensive interviews with many stakeholders, ranging from Government employees, UK businesses with varying exporting experience and third party services who also play a vital role in helping UK businesses export. We combined this qualitative research with quantitative surveys and thorough desk research to build a clear picture of the current export journey.

Our primary challenge at this stage was purely the complexity of the journeys we were mapping. There was a huge variety of user types, in terms of businesses and maturity of exporting credentials, each with their own specific journey/ set of needs tailored to a multitude of export destination and method of transport.

Outputs

Personas: From our research we built 4 personas to represent the different types of businesses who export.

Customer journey: A typical journey for each of these personas was created, highlighting key pain points for each.

Service blueprint: There were combined into one over-arching service blue-print to highlight the areas we believe act as the biggest pain points for exporters.

Problem statements: From this blueprint key problem statements were identified, used as sprint boards to ideate solutions from.

User needs and challenge statements: 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 (duties, trade agreements etc.). Whilst they could previously have used the European Market Access Database, in a post-Brexit world, this information would potentially no-longer apply to UK exporters.

Proposed solution: Design and build a Government service that provided all this information in a clear and simple way, in time for the 31st of October.

Alpha & Beta phases

We had 5 months to build a service that displayed key export information for users, in one place, and show how that information changes after Brexit.

Data analysis: The 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 was available, user flows were created. Discovery showed how overwhelming certain personas found the information. Serving it more dynamically than other providers was key. This was 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. Testing little and often with internal and external users enabled the solution to be truly centred.

Content: A major challenge with this project was ensuring all the information we provided was correct and future-proof (with each days’ politics impacting on what we could or could

not write). This involved daily meetings with policy stakeholders and lawyers to ensure our service showed the most comprehensive, Government approved information.

Development: To ensure the service was built in time, we rapidly built an MVP and then improved in an agile way. 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 several 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.

Results: The service is currently live at https://www.gov.uk/check-duties-customs-exporting

Feedback from users:

“it’s really clear advice, you’ve managed to make a really complicated process feel much more manageable.”

“it’s scary as a business not knowing what’s going to happen. This makes me feel a bit more comfortable.”

“yes, this is what I need to carry on doing business with confidence.”