Mars Spiders delivering Private Beta for Defra. World leading at facilitating International trade for Defra customers, enabling a seamless transit through EU Exit into the future. | Mars Spiders | All Inclusive Independent Creative Digital Agency London

The scene

Mars Spiders team was parachuted in a hostile environment where things were done back to front. We have defended the UCD (User Centric Design) in the front lines. The EU Brexit project was completely tech-driven. The user journey was unchartered and unmapped territory. We have started educating and convincing the stakeholders by explaining the benefit of the service which is fundamentally there to fulfil the needs of our customers. Speed, customer satisfaction, fewer support calls = savings. These are the kind of benefits we have uncovered for the DEFRA leadership.

The journey

Our journey started by mapping the territory and creating E2E (End to end) user journey map. Due to technical constraints, we have not had a chance (yet) to remove the double registration. One with the Government Gateway and the second with the Defra account.

Following the successful mapping exercise, we have evaluated the fragmented product created by the developers without any UX input. Already at the internal evaluation stage, we could see several issues. The data collected through mixed data fields, deviation from GDS standards are the kind of examples of what we uncovered.

From the negative emerges the positive. We have started annotating with posties, brainstorm, imagine, inquire and draw low fidelity prototypes.

From low fidelity prototypes, we have moved to the Gov prototyping kit. We have A/B and C/D tested the current "designed by developers" journey and our take on it and iterated based on the user feedback. Here are examples of the improvements we have introduced.

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Mapping E2E journey

Our thinking process

Take time to properly understand the problem first

1: Definition - Define the challenge of a specific group of people.
2: Research - Interview and observe the target audience in its own context and identify its needs, problems and expectations associated with the defined challenge.
3: Interpretation - Detect patterns among research data and use them to generate actionable insights.
4: Idea generation - With inspiration from the insights, generate ideas for creative solutions that may satisfy the needs and expectations and solve the problems of the target audience.
5: Prototyping - Turn selected solution ideas into tangible forms.
6: Evaluation - Test the solution alternatives by using prototypes, and refine them based on target users’ feedback.

Problem statement:

Who is affected? [....................]
What is the problem? [....................]
Where does it happen? [....................]
Why does this pain-point matter? [....................]

Hypotheses:

We believe that[....................]
For[Exporters]
Will achieve[.............]
We’ll know this is true when we see [.............]

What we learned

We have learned that with a positive mental attitude and high degree of professionalism things can be done. We took the service and the stakeholders on a journey and orchestrated a new service which is a real digital transformation not just paper to digital wishful thinking.