Cultural change in a government agency

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for welfare, pensions and child maintenance in the UK. It’s the country’s biggest public service department, employing around 90,000 people altogether. They were putting together an in-house UX lab to make their internal processes more user-friendly and advocate for more user-centric approaches.

The team needed to build up entirely new processes and ways of working in order to inject a more user-centred mindset into the fairly rigid day-to-day of the department. So we used this project as a catalyst to create cultural change and better ways of working.

The core team was a hybrid team of two designers from Idean (including myself as the Lead) and the new UX team of 8 people in Blackpool and 2 in Sheffield – none of whom had direct UX design experience. We were onsite in Blackpool for the project, working alongside the team and visiting the Sheffield office with them as well as welcoming the Sheffield team in Blackpool when they visited.

We needed to not only set up a new approach and toolkit, but also leave the team with the skills to run smooth UX projects in the future.

Changing behaviours

We started with a deep dive into their ecosystem, culture, processes and ways of working to understand the unique setting and the needs of the team as well as the wider organisation.

As we started to have a good foundation to spring from, we ran workshops with the new team to define their vision and strategy. This allowed everyone to form a clear and shared idea of what they were working towards and what kind of methods and processes we would need to be looking at. We needed to play to their strengths and build up towards the impact they wanted to make within the team, on their users, and in the wider organisation. Crucially, we also needed to help them break out of their business-as-usual, which had been shaped by the often bureaucratic environment of a goverment agency.

Alongside how they work, we also tackled where they work by giving their working space a makeover to make use of their wall space, have more natural light, and allow the team to work together with more flexibility and freedom to try out different approaches.

We started with a deep dive into their ecosystem, culture, processes and ways of working to understand the unique setting and the needs of the team as well as the wider organisation.

Setting new ways of working

We ran a live project with frequent touchpoints, tasks, and co-creation sessions to make space for a new process parallel to the previously developer-led cycles, and to encourage creativity and independent thinking, like team building and storytelling workshops.

An integral part of my approach is to use analogies and stories and bring lightness and fun into the work. This isn’t because the work is not serious – but because it helps people relax and open up to new possibilities. It’s part of the idea that sometimes people need “permission” to fail, and when the task feels less serious, they’re less likely to hold back in fear of getting it wrong. This was supported by constant easy access to paper and pens for doodling and writing down ideas, small building blocks to play with and let the mind wander to new areas, and snacks to keep us all going in co-creation sessions.

By going step-by-step through the project, we were able to walk them through ways to prototype a feature or design, manage time efficiently, get visibility across projects, and visualise a process, leaving the team with a clear understanding of what best practice looks like for design sprints and what kind of approaches are possible.

Measuring the results

Before, the team had no way to measure the success of their projects or collect data on user experiences. We needed to start from scratch and find out what to measure, when, and how. So we created a custom framework based on the HEART model, with these core principles:

Happy: Do people like interacting with the thing? Is it simple and personalised

Efficient: Does it cut costs and save our users’ time and effort

Accessible: Is it easy to use in any context the user may be in?

Relatable: Is the messaging clear and consistent?

Task success: Is it easy to do what the users need to do?

To anchor these into concrete actions, we defined a clear process and tools for finding your baseline, setting your goals, and identifying the signals to measure and the metrics to use for them, and the framework was applied to live projects from its inception.

Happy: Do people like interacting with the thing? Is it simple and personalised

Efficient: Does it cut costs and save our users’ time and effort

Accessible: Is it easy to use in any context the user may be in?

Relatable: Is the messaging clear and consistent?

Task success: Is it easy to do what the users need to do?

IMPACT

Skills, tools and a license to experiment

When we left DWP, we had co-created and documented their team’s vision, mission and manifesto; a new, flexible process for UX projects; a toolkit of methods and tools we’d introduced them to; their new custom UX measurement framework and tools, and a clear roadmap of tasks and priorities for the year ahead.

With a new work stream for user research and low fidelity prototyping, the team was able to massively cut down on the development time needed for implementing new features – where previously, a coded prototype was the first chance to validate with users, they were now able to go through several iterations with users before development.

Above all, the team had shifted their mindset from previously bureaucratic and slow to a human-centric, experimenting approach with lean and agile methods and greater transparency across the department and organisation. They were inspired and empowered to take their learnings beyond their UX projects and become ambassadors for a wider cultural shift.

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IMPACT

Skills, tools and a license to experiment

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Cultural change in a government agency