Client

Federal government (DTA)

Timeline

Aug 2016 - May 2019

Role

Service designer

Background

The Digital Marketplace was announced to help startups and small and medium businesses compete for the $9 billion government spends on ICT services each year.

My role was to:

• Lead design in a multi-disciplinary delivery team on a live government service

• Conduct user research, build team empathy and ensure the backlog reflected prioritised user needs

• Create user journeys, accessible UI designs and prototypes.

• Run usability sessions to validate design hypotheses

• Lead workshops, mentor teams and share our learnings and methodology at meet ups and conferences

Approach

We followed the service design and delivery process embracing the UK government’s design principles. The team was formally assessed against the Digital Service Standard to make sure we built the right thing in the right way.

Alpha

Start with user needs. In discovery we learned that businesses only had a brief window every few years to offer services through a ‘panel’. This involved months of paperwork and lengthy assessments.

Build digital services, not websites. We needed to test our riskiest assumption first - could we simplify this model and make it faster? I worked with legal experts, procurement SMEs and developers to create user journeys and prototypes that made it possible for businesses to join the Digital Marketplace panel online anytime.

Beta

Make things open: it makes things better. We used open source code to release a transacting Beta service in just five weeks - five months ahead of schedule. People started using the service straight away - dramatically reducing time to prove value. We made source code open, published monthly service KPIs and spending insights for everyone to see.

Design with data. Real usage gave us very short feedback loops. We were co-located with the support team; I could hear every phone call and read support tickets in Zendesk. Our understanding of actual users, task models and pain points matured through ongoing ticket analysis and follow up interviews. I framed work as deliberate scope (priorities that were put upon us) and emerging scope (priorities that mattered to most users).

The team was spread across Sydney, Canberra and the Blue Mountains, using Slack to communicate. The developers added other services via APIs for real time event monitoring and ops feedback. It was a powerful way to keep users at the front of the team’s mind.

This is for everyone. We implemented the DTA’s Design System along with inclusive usability testing to make accessibility business as usual. The delivery team regularly watched users in context to maintain empathy and understand existing mental models.

Live

Do the hard work to make it simple. In August 2018, the service passed its live assessment. I concentrated on larger government customers that frequently used the service and led design on ask the market, a procurement approach that was cited as ‘shaping our thinking’ in the government’s Independent review of the APS.

Iterate. Then iterate again. By May 2019, more than 2000 buyers from 40 government agencies used the voluntary service each month. The team had shipped 556 releases to help more than 1300 businesses compete for 1670 opportunities.

1666

Opportunities posted by all levels of government

$436m

Awarded in contracts, 72% to SME businesses

556

Releases to improve the service over 34 months