Live

Live is the fourth phase of the service life cycle. A service going live means that it is ready to be run at scale and, if it is replacing another service, that the older service can be retired.

During live, the team will still be working to iterate and improve how the service works, but live is mostly about supporting the service in a sustainable way. The key difference with public beta is that there will not necessarily be a full team working to continuously support the service during live.

The team will still need to:

• continue to address any constraints identified at beta
• continue to develop the service and work with other organisations providing services that are part of the same journey, iterating towards solving a whole problem for users
• transition or integrate any existing transactions (tasks that a user completes while using a service) that meet a similar need

During beta, the team will determine what level of continuous improvement it makes sense to support and what sort of roles will be needed on the team once the service is live.

One of these will always be a user researcher, since improvements made to the service during live still need to be based on user research and tested for compatibility and accessibility.

What do user researchers do during live?

During live, the service should be running properly and meet user needs, since all of the issues and barriers should have been resolved during one of the previous phases. However, things can always be tweaked and improved – and contexts can change, meaning that user needs can evolve and require something different from the service.

During live, the aim of user research is to: * assess the user experience of the service * understand evolving user needs * test new features, changes or improvements to the service

During live, user researchers will work in similar ways to the public beta phase. You will review web analytics and back-office data, as well as analyse support tickets and direct user feedback.

You will continue to conduct interviews, visits and usability and A/B testing sessions to gain a deep understanding of problems that users are facing and to gather data on new and changed features. Other methods such as surveys can also be used to gather data at scale. You should also continue to work with colleagues such as performance analysts to track KPIs and other metrics.

You should always prioritise accessibility for all users, ensuring that the service continues to meet the needs of disabled users and those with support needs. For example, changes to the design of a webpage or other aspect of the service could have unexpected consequences for users who use assistive technology, as changes can create issues with compatibility.

User research during live will give you:

• a deeper understanding of how different kinds of users experience the service
• insight into usability and accessibility issues and how to fix them
• ideas for ways to improve the service in the future

There is no real time limit on how long a service can be live, so long as it continues to meet a user need that cannot be better met by something else. This means that you could continue to do user research with users of this service for a long time, but you will know that you are doing ‘enough’ research when you can:

• understand and articulate how different kinds of people experience your service
• understand how their needs may be changing

If user needs change significantly and the service stops being fit for purpose, then it may be time to end its life cycle by retiring it.