Identify user needs and business goals early

Not all design thinking work goes to plan. That’s okay, you can learn from the work you did and make use of the research completed to guide you in your future work.

We experienced this when completing some work with the Public Sector Commission (PSC) Communications an Engagement team. We did not progress past the discovery stage.

Key insights

• It’s okay to end research early.
• Identifying business goals and user needs early helps surface challenges.
• Users are not always easily defined or readily accessible.
• Outputs can be meaningful, reusable and informative, even if the work ends early.

What we did

The PSC Communications and Engagement team engaged us to review a section of their content on For government. We used this opportunity to test our new design services  approach.

We held a workshop using our new statement of intent canvas to understand subject matter expert (SME) goals, their knowledge of users and how their content supports user needs.

We also analysed the performance of their current content and compared it to what the SMEs had told us during the canvas activity.

What’s our statement of intent canvas?

It’s an online whiteboard exercise where SMEs tell us about their:

• users and their tasks
• business goals
• content
• content findability (pathways in)
• content development process
• user takeaways (pathways out)
• success measures.

What’s our content analysis approach?

We create a report about content traffic and user interactions, outlining:

• how users find their content
• interactions with key content, data and visualisations
• page performance indicators
• the overall user journey.

What we discovered

The statement of intent exercise worked. It proved why we had to publish the content—it’s a government commitment. It demonstrated some mismatches between what our SMEs were trying to achieve and how the content was presented. It also uncovered some key challenges we could expect to encounter if we continued with further research and usability testing.

The main concern was that the primary users of the content under review were not easily defined. There were multiple user groups with different objectives all equally needing access to this content. We also discovered that the most prominent user group was not Queensland Government employees.

Continuing with our research would have meant moving beyond our audience scope of government employees.  We would also struggle to access the main user group if we did continue to test any improvements. We were faced with the prospect that the content might be better placed elsewhere (if we considered only the user need).

It was better to walk away at this point than to continue.

What we can use

Research learnings

The statement of intent saved us and our SMEs time. We identified challenges early and made an informed decision not to proceed.

Content learnings

Our statement of intent and content analysis gave us key insights into what was performing and what was not performing in the content, which can be used for this content and other content on For government.

Shorter pages are best

Shorter pages perform better than longer pages (a longer page being one where users must scroll one or more screens length to view all content).

• 55% of users did not view the lower half of a longer section (landing) page compared to 30% of users not viewing the lower half of a shorter section page.
• 70% users did not view the lower half of a longer standard content page compared to 39% of users not viewing the lower half of a shorter content page.

Videos and images

User do not engage well with videos or multiple visualisations on a page. It is best to use these sparingly and strategically.

• Pages with more than one visualisation had very little signs of engagement after the first visualisation.
• The supporting video in this content was only viewed by 1% of users.

PDF versus HTML

Users prefer HTML content over PDFs. Only 23% of visitors downloaded the PDF version of this content. Always take an HTML-first approach to publishing.

Data

Data needs to be meaningful. You need to talk about what the data is saying and make it clear why you included it. Pages designed in this way showed high levels of mouse movement and clicks over this information.

Conclusion

Research is never wasted, even if it’s not completed. There’s plenty we learned in the process that helps us improve our craft.

This work reminded us that engaging early with stakeholders to identify users, user needs and business goals, helps to identify scope and challenges.

This work also generated insights that can improve our content now and in the future.