BOBBY KING
Case study: user research at the Scottish Government
Between 2018 and 2024 I ran Discovery projects for ILF Scotland, Social Security Scotland, the Scottish National Investment Bank, NatureScot and the Scottish Treasury.
The brief
Government bodies hire me to research a new service or to help them transform an existing one. I run research with service users and internal staff. I'll usually produce a service map and a set of quotes arranged by theme.
The challenges I usually have are:
- Teaching people about user-centred design and helping them get over their initial discomfort
- Working with complicated legislation that can be difficult to implement
- Running ethical research within time and budget constraings
What I did
Capture research questions and a write a problem statement
I spend the first few weeks of every project getting to know people and finding if the organisation has any existing research.
After I've met as many people as possible I run a kick off meeting and propose a research plan such as a round of interviews. At one organisation, they were so worried about revealing their secrets it took a solid month of persuasion before they let me talk to any citizens. I gradually got the go-ahead by agreeing that a civil sercant would be present in every research session to introduce the session.
Ran an information gathering visit
While I worked for Social Security Scotland we arranged a visit to a DWP office in Belfast. About a dozen colleagues visited the office.
I decided to run the visit as a research session to capture as many useful habits, attitudes and mental models as possible. I coached my colleagues in observing people doing their daily work, asking questions and taking notes. At the end of each day we did a quick sense-making meeting to compare what we've learned.
As a result we built up an extensive document describing how our new service would work in practice, based on observing social security advisers in their workplace.
Ran sensemaking workshops
In Scotland, I think the practice of sensemaking originated at Disclosure Scotland. I wasn't part of that team but I've used the sensemaking technique to check my research outputs are as objective as possible. It's a chance for colleagues to be part of the research rather than passively consuming the outputs.
At the Scottish National Investment Bank I invited the observers back to run an affinity sort on the quotes from our research. I involved a service designer to map the quotes against their service blueprint. We also handed over content recommendations for the new bank's online service.
The outcome
Although pure research is challenging its one of the most rewarding parts of UX design. In the case of these organisations I gave them research outputs that shape their new service. That includes documented research themes with verbatim quotes, content recommendations (including a site map) and service blueprints.