Why is user research in government important?

In this video, user researchers talk about why user research in government is important. They also explain some of the differences between user research in government and in the private sector.

User research in government is important because government services are essential to the daily lives of many people in this country. People rely on government services to do important things.

What are government services?

People in the UK interact with the government for a range of services, which can be accessed through GOV.UK.

If someone is using a government service, it’s often because they have to use it. Users who need to renew their passport or apply for benefits and credits do not have a choice of better designed, easier to use or cheaper competitors – there are no alternatives.

If users cannot do the things they need to, it can cause significant problems for them. In turn, these problems can increase government costs and stop policies achieving their intent. If the public servants and third parties who provide or support the service cannot do what they need to do effectively and efficiently, members of the public and businesses will experience problems and delays.

Government services need to work independently and they need to complement other services. Services that do not work well with other related services make it hard for users to do what they need to. Teams who build government services need to work with other teams and organisations when necessary to solve a whole problem for users.

Bringing related content and services together and creating a journey that makes sense to users and is easy to follow is the goal. Users should not have to totally understand how the government works internally in order to use public services.

Services need to be streamlined, efficient and intuitive to the user. This means that services should be scoped according to how users think and what they need to do – not too narrow or too broad.

Building big, complicated services that try to do too many different things are more difficult for the user to use, and services that are too narrow in focus might not actually solve the problem and meet a user need.

Services should start simply and be improved through frequent incremental changes that benefit users. This process of incremental improvement is called iterating – we will learn more about this in the next step.

Where does user research come into it?

When building services, we start with understanding our users.

In government, this is crucial – people need to use government services to live their lives and frequently government services are used to help navigate difficult times, such as bereavement or illness. User research is vital to government services because it allows us to understand the contexts in which people live so that we can design services that are suitable for them to use.

To create an effective service, you must research your users so that you can fully understand their needs, their end-to-end journey, and find out all the ways they could interact with a service. For government services, this can include over the phone, by post and in face-to-face interactions, as well as digital.

Good user research should:

• prioritise inclusivity, making sure to include all the different kinds of people who need your service
• focus on how your service can help them get the right outcome
• not ask people what they like or prefer, or aim to find out what’s most popular
• be a continual process, not just a one off
• involve the team and be open and transparent, with findings always shared

User research is not about pitching ideas or solutions and we cannot design a service with opinions – we need to know what actually works for people, not whether they like or want something.

User researchers present insights from their research to our teams, and then work with the teams to develop and test appropriate solutions. We test the design, system, or service – not our users. We are trying to solve a problem for users, not challenge them.