User-centred design team day
Gwen Henderson and Maddie Broxup - content designers — 2025-02-14
Who we are
As the collective user-centred design team, it’s our job to make it easier for local planning authorities (LPAs) and other organisations to provide planning data. We do this through producing both general and dataset guidance and a service that steers them through the process. We user-centred design (UCD) practitioner types sit across 2 teams, the Data Design team, and the Data Providers team. Each team has a service designer, interaction designer, content designer and user researcher.
Working across teams
While our teams are an important practical division allowing us to deliver our work effectively on a day-to-day basis, our users shouldn’t need to be aware of which team is responsible for which bit of our website, or how each bit works. We want them to be able to complete the tasks they need to do smoothly and efficiently, across the entire site. To do that, sometimes we need to zoom out and work together as one big UCD beast (a non-scary beast, of course, we’re all very nice).
A great way to take a step back to look at this work is simply to get together in person in one room. A UCD team day is a great way to exchange ideas and insights to solve problems for our users. Collaborative time away from meetings allows us to focus as one team, bringing our expertise together from each of the UX disciplines. So we assembled in Manchester for one day in January, covered the walls in paper and post-its, scribbled on whiteboards and sketched out ideas.
What we learned
With there being only 8 of us, it meant we could approach the day in quite a relaxed way. We still had an agenda to steer us, and some loose timekeeping, but we focused less on structure and more on getting to know each other and working together to solve common problems.
We started the day with background from our user researchers on insights learned from watching users navigate our website, as well as some insights from our designers on the navigation and information architecture. With this in mind, we mapped out the current journeys users take to complete some common tasks, and flagged up the pain points.
A content forest
We know from talking to users that things can be hard to find on our website. A lot of that has come from working in small teams in fast-moving experimental ways, so we could learn quickly and iterate. And though that’s been incredibly useful, after a while too much of that way of working can mean content and services can grow a little too wild, and paths that were once clear have become overgrown. Time to get out the forestry tools, and bring some gentle order back to the content forest!
We identified which steps in the journey weren’t working as well as they could. And asked ourselves if these steps were even needed now? Were they relevant? We then looked at how we might make those journeys better, allowing users to complete tasks with less friction - back on clearer paths.
By the end of the day, we came away with some clear next steps which we could write up as tickets to start working on. Once we’ve made our iterations, we’ll work with our user researchers to test any new content and journeys with our users.
What’s next?
Since working from home became the norm for a lot of us in 2020, it’s always a rare and special occasion being able to come together with colleagues in person to collaborate with each other.
In an ideal world (without budget and time constraints!) we’d be able to carve out more time to get together more frequently in person to solve challenges like these.
We’ve definitely seen the value of bringing people together, and we’ll look to hopefully do it again in the future. And we got to go to a really lovely place for lunch all together that deserves another visit!
For now, we’ll continue progressing this work remotely. We’re just starting to work out how we push the work forwards, together, to make sure we’re all aligned and in the loop.
Take part in research
We’re always looking for local planning authorities to take part in research with us. To get involved, join our research pool and we’ll be in touch.
Credits:
- Alex Torrance and Fabia Fowler (Interaction Design)
- Gwen Henderson and Maddie Broxup (Content Design)
- Paris Dharam-Peat and Colm Britton (Service Design)
- Joe Hasker-Sarchet and Adetutu Sadiq (User Research)
- Merlin the dog (Vibes)