Background, Vision, Research, & Personas - 18F/10X-Users-First GitHub Wiki

Welcome to the 10X-Users-First wiki!

Background

The original pitch of this project aimed to solve for the following problem: Federal government websites still stink and federal agencies still don’t (for a variety of reasons) conduct enough usability testing.

This pitch aimed to bring back a free usability testing service called First Fridays, previously managed by the General Services Administration to support agencies with their usability testing needs.

During phase 1 of this engagement, it became clear that agencies need more than usability testing support in order to successfully implement user centered design principles when building digital products. While 18F, USDS, and the Lab at OPM offer services for federal agencies that seek hands-on training, we heard from users during phase 1 that time, money, and resources can serve as a significant barrier for implementing user centered design in addition to PRA limitations, user recruitment, and a lack of stakeholder buy-in. We want to ensure all agencies have access to valuable user centered design resources so that even agencies that aren't able to work with us can develop their ability to gather feedback from the American public that will help them improve their digital products.

In phase 2, we clarified both the problem we were evaluating as well as the scope of this project, identified key hypotheses, and conducted research to learn more from federal agencies about their implementation of user centered design principles (including benefits gained and pain points they had to overcome). As a part of our research, we studied the resource landscape surrounding user centered design implementation in government, completed an analysis of two surveys conducted amongst the federal user experience community, developed four personas, and completed an analysis of solutions informed by our personas. What follows is an outline of our thinking that we shared with TTS leadership upon pitching for phase 3 funding.

This work is funded by 10x.

Vision

We aim to support federal agencies as they adopt user centered design principles, empowering them to advocate for user centered design while delivering easy-to-use digital products that meet the needs of their users and save taxpayer dollars.

Resources

Problem we are trying to solve

Federal agencies face various challenges when attempting to implement user centered design. A lack of clear understanding and exposure to user centered design principles has led the government to build and buy digital products that don't suit the needs of the user, causing a waste of time, money, and resources along with a high potential for rework.

Hypotheses

Based on our research during phase 1, we identified three key hypotheses to drive our work forward:

Users

We hypothesized that users fit into one of three buckets — implementation team, middle management, and agency leaders. Users also interact with a fourth bucket — contractors.

We initially focused on just the implementation team and leaders, but learned quite quickly before starting research interviews that the middle management layer was quite important to our work. We also learned during our interviews that users also may interact with folks who fall into a fourth bucket: contractors. Thus, we tweaked this hypothesis from it’s original 2 user types to 4.

Resources

We hypothesized that agencies need a single source of truth for how to do user centered design. This single source of truth could include training, use cases, examples of usability testing and user centered design, and documentation or one pagers (similar to the 18F method cards) that provide a bite-sized piece of easily digestible quick information.

UCD Experience

We hypothesized that users fall into one of five experience categories — unaware, aware, interested, engaged, and evangelist.

  • Unaware: People in agencies who have never done user centered design and don’t know what it is or how they benefit
  • Aware: People in agencies who have done user centered design because they’ve been told to
  • Interested: People in agencies who have never done user centered design but are interested
  • Engaged: People in agencies who have done user centered design and appreciate the value
  • Evangelist: People in agencies who have done user centered design, understand the value, and advocate for its use.

Resource Landscape

In the first few weeks of phase 2, we took a look around to identify what resources already exist to help federal employees implement UCD, specifically focused on solving for the problems identified above. We found countless resources and continued to add to our last as we learned more during our research. These resources fall into the following categories:

  • Documentation
  • Training, mentorship, & community
  • Contracting
  • Recruitment, testing, & feedback
  • Policy

A full list of these resources can be found in our pitch deck. Should we obtain phase 3 funding, one portion of phase 3 would involve adding this full list of resources to a number of already existing tools and resources for cross reference and pollination.

Survey study

We studied two surveys, one conducted amongst TTS and one conducted with the UX Community of Practice. We found clear patterns of overlap around the problems individuals faced when implementing user centered design that validated our earlier research. Those key areas of overlap included problems with limited resources, stakeholder buy-in, PRA, minimal bandwidth, recruitment, and a general lack of awareness of user centered design.

Our personas & the solution analysis

To help us make sense of all of our research and get us thinking about our users needs in a more holistic sense, we developed four personas. Personas are fictional characters based on research that represent the different user types that might interact with a service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. By creating personas, we were able to move away from our user groups (implementation teams, middle managers, leaders, and contractors) and instead think about how our users goals might align or how users are limited in similar ways. Our personas included:

  • Embarrassed Edward
  • Overwhelmed Olivia
  • Toe-dipping Thomas
  • Innovating Ingrid

We relied on these personas to conduct a solution analysis. During this analysis, we considered each persona’s willingness, bandwidth, interest, and ability to learn new information and adopt new techniques in order to ensure any solution is sustainable. Without considering our personas and how they might interact with each solution, we'd effectively be setting a solution up to fail.