Overview
When I joined this part of the programme, there were no other content or UX designers on the team. The discovery was already underway, and I had to move fast.
A content designer working in the discovery phase needs to think about final outputs they’ll be handing over to the delivery team; the ones who will be designing and building the product. What’s going to allow them to do their best work? And what can I do to set the foundation, that’ll create the best thing for users?
This discovery was all about data fields, working with legacy systems, while ensuring we’re giving users the opportunity to advocate for themselves and their needs.
What I need to deliver
My job is to set up the delivery team to do their best work, with a clear picture of what already existed, what the risks were, and what users actually needed.
I scoped my discovery contribution around four outputs.
- A content audit of existing services in this space.
- A log of content risks, assumptions, and decisions from the discovery phase.
- Language and vocabulary recommendations based on user mental models.
- A foundation for the end-to-end journey, mapping what information users need and when.
Aim of this work
This piece of work was about meeting user needs while adhering to legacy systems. We had to make sure the data points we’re collecting will be used by the workforce, so that the public can have their answers recorded. The data points had to be received by a legacy system. At this point, we weren’t sure what system we were feeding information to.
The aim was to stop people from repeating themselves when giving the same information to support services.
Plan of action
My first few days were spent:
- trying to understand what problem we’re solving
- figuring out who our users are
- reviewing what research had already been done
Initially, my plan was to audit what already exists in this landscape, to review language, tone of voice and information patterns. We required a foundation of what already was being captured across similar services.
After speaking with my colleagues, I realised we were in desperate need of understanding what common data points were being collected in this space. So, I focused my energy in auditing data points across 40+ similar services and forms.
This took a long time. In the future, it would be good to incorporate AI tooling to shorten this process significantly.
I worked with my business analyst colleagues to synthesise these data points into a visual representation of most to least common.
We’ll then map these into a generic user journey, to understand when each data point would be collected, by who, and why it’s needed.
Next steps
Once mapping is completed, I want to focus on language and style. This space is a little different to the rest of the programme, as our user group may require more support or have additional needs. Therefore, I want to ensure the language and style of content I’m using meets their requirements.
I will be auditing the same services and forms, to look for common phrasing and naming conventions. I would like to complete some user testing on this to create a list of recommendations for the designers developing this piece of work post-discovery.
Impact
“Your work and working with you is a dream” – Service design lead
“So grateful for the work you’re doing already and the value added in such a short space of time” – Senior service designer
June Caldwell - senior UX writer and content designer 