The Brief
To create a new service that could be based on a current need or around a future need. Identify a new user need and in the form of a mission statement use design principles and guidelines the GDS (Government Digital Service) use to develop and create a new service using thorough user testing.
The outcome of this project is to produce a working prototype using the GOV.UK prototype kit.
The aim of this project was to create a service that when used in the GOV.UK site it will be as viable as possible including all sorts of information that users will need and require for our service.
The Solution
We decided on the service that the project would take place 5 years from now where autonomous trucks are being introduced and large companies will require licences for their trucks.
One major company that we met with is TK Maxx, a retail company that specialises in the selling of clothes, furniture and other home items. Through this testing, we gained a large amount of insight on how these large companies operate their distribution, how they manage their truck drivers and details on how it can be improved.
For the final product, we met with the DWP digital department to present our concept and receive feedback on the general design and functionality of our service. The feedback came back incredibly strong due to our attention to detail and research into what users and companies would want.
Working In A Team
Working together in this aspect really helped us develop as agile as possible like in the past on a project with Sage which has shown our different takes on designing, my personal way of designing is about risk-taking but also using as much planning as possible.
This has been very beneficial to my development as a designer, from my experience working in Hedgehog Lab, Sage and DWP where they work on an extreme scale for the public.
Our Plan
In this project due to the nature of a large amount of the public being potentially interested in the service a sufficient amount of information would be required for people to look into and research.
Through our time working with DWP, we had several meetings to discuss the development of the project as well as the content that would be in the service.
We took inspiration from the current applications and licences for the drivers and other licences. As our application is closed off to large companies in our set scenario we want to still have details and information in where if a user comes across it then they are not confused about it and know certain vital information.
See below: Our licence in comparison against the current driving licence.
Design Development
Feedback on our design development was incredibly insightful, an oversight from the guidelines that we overlooked slightly was that the GOV.UK website has only one question per page and this fix was incredibly simple
Original company application (Left) - Before 1 question per page fix.
Original driver application (Right) - Before 1 question per page fix.
Design Problems
One of the main problems that we had through our development was to make sure that we still kept to our main user needs; keeping it informative, quick to complete and to improve on current usability of the current licence applications. We solved this by keeping our user testing as detailed and kept the end user in thought with every design decision we made, having this mindset gave us an extremely user-focused end result.
When showing our final service and product to users and the DWP digital team it was met with high praise for constantly keeping the user in mind.
See below: Introduction to the service - Required details page (FAQ).
Final Designs
Landing page (Top Left) - required information provided so that users won’t be confused when entering the page.
Company application complete (Top Middle) - information provided around time taken for application to complete.
FAQ (Top Right) - A shortened version of the required details page.
Company application (Bottom Left) - Registration number - information given on how to register their store for the licence and what the information will be used for.
Driver application (Bottom Right) - Driver Licence number - Information on given on how to locate their number and what the information will be used for.
