Your persona
Well done on taking the first steps towards developing your understanding of user-centred working. Your responses indicate that this may be an area that’s less familiar to you, but that’s about to change! By getting to know the people who engage with your government’s services (digital or otherwise), you’ll position yourself and your team to meet their needs better. Involving the end user early and often can help you identify if you’re on the right track and allow you to switch lanes and focus if things aren’t resonating with their audience.
User-centred design as a discipline can feel pretty big and complex, but you’ll be able to experiment with smaller aspects of it and gain confidence and skills. The same goes for working on accessibility guidelines — it will soon become ‘business as usual’, and you’ll be instrumental in developing and promoting services and products that can reach and engage the largest audience possible.
Build your skills and knowledge
Spend some time becoming more familiar with the different types of user research. What’s being used by your department? What are the outcomes? If you can identify some ongoing user research in your department (or beyond), perhaps you could ask to sit in and gain hands-on experience. From a leadership perspective, it's also helpful to find out what exactly goes into setting up these sessions and what is done as a follow-up, giving a picture of the entire process.
Familiarise yourself with User-Centred Design, particularly the phases that often go into a piece of user-centred design work (research, ideation, prototyping, testing, and implementation).
Identify some real, tangible case studies where your government has used User-Centred Design. Better still, try to build a picture of the journey or process leading to the final result.
What digital accessibility standards are you working towards? Consider this from both an internal and external perspective.
Create a community of practice
What’s going on in other departments? Who could you connect with and learn from? There may well be a crossover in who your end users are, so perhaps there is an opportunity for you to learn from your peers (and they from you). Alternatively, could you gather together like-minded leaders and consider how to pool resources and maximise time spent talking to users?
Think carefully about your network or who you work with. Can you identify anyone who might be a source of information or inspiration for being User-Centred? An informal chat about their work could help bring the area to life.
Join the conversation by finding an Apolitical Q&A that speaks to you. This one looks like it’s got some interesting insights being shared: If you were in charge of building a digital product to support a government service, how would you keep the focus on user needs throughout the development process?
Keep exploring
If you’re looking for inspiration for structured skill development, take a look at our Learning Plans where we have stitched together disparate educational resources into rich, diverse, cohesive and enlightening learning journeys which can have a transformative impact on both our professional and personal lives.
Do you like learning while watching? Our event recording An introduction to human-centred design for public servants could be right for you. Keep an eye out for other events coming up - maybe there’ll be one you’d like to join live!
Take some time to explore Apolitical articles, and consider engaging with the article creator by using the comment function. Bringing human-centred design to your team? Start here could be a good place to start.
Ready for some more formal learning? Our Digital Transformation in the Public Sector course covers User-Centred working in Section 3.
What's next?
Not sure if this is the right persona for you? This diagnostic and its suggested outcome have been designed for illustrative purposes and may not reflect your level of awareness or competency.
Find a guide to the statements covered plus the scenario questions here: User-Centred Working Self-Assessment and Scenario Summaries.
Explore the other personae using the links below:
Leadership:User-Centred Working Explorer, User-Centred Working Consolidator, User-Centred Working Trailblazer
Non-Leadership:User-Centred Working Explorer, User-Centred Working Consolidator, User-Centred Working Trailblazer
⬅️ Government Skills Impact Tracker | Digital and Data Skills Hub ➡️