BEIS Net-zero strategy
2021-2022
Role: Service designer, User Researcher, product designer
Project: Energy Entrepreneur’s fund
Skills engaged: Qualitative research - Data set reviews - Competitor reviews - Affinity mapping - Empathy mapping - Personas - Task analysis - Blueprinting - A/B Testing - User Stories - Stakeholder engagement - Dev. team engagement - Policy - TOM - Design Thinking - Workshopping
Tools used: Miro - JIRA - Trello - Excel - Powerpoint - Figma
The challenge
In response to the Government’s legally binding commitment to reach Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050, and Industrial Energy’s pre-discovery work with stakeholders, a compelling need was found to make Net Zero funding for businesses easier to find and apply for.
EEF is a competitive grant funding scheme to support the development of technologies, products and processes in energy efficiency, power generation and storage. It aims to decrease the costs of decarbonisation to help reduce the UK's contribution to climate change.
Myself and 3 SPARCK colleagues supported the BEIS team with designing and building this service, from application stage to final assessment.
Approach
Interactive workshops helped draw-out the biggest frustrations users had with funding services.
1. Researching with users
User research was carried out with both internal and external users (or potential users) of the service.
A digital inclusion survey was also sent to all participants, to ensure research as conducted with users with all levels of digital confidence.
Research was conducted through 1-1 interviews as well as hand-on group workshops.
Empathy map for each of the core personas.
2. Synthesising findings
Findings were then synthesised through affinity mapping on Mural to assess common themes and patterns.
Personas and empathy maps were also created to bring the different insights to life and help understand the service as a whole.
This formed the basis for pain points and user needs, which were ranked based on importance to the user.
3. Defining the problem
With an understanding of the as-is, a to-be service blueprint was created. Although only a section of the service was being delivered in this project, the wider end-to-end service was mapped, to show the hand-off points and impacts that related to other parts of the organisation.
To-be service blue-print with detailed user-journey flows below.
Top-line journey map of service to demonstrate hand-off points between this service and wider BEIS.
Rapid prototyping was done with the full team in crazy-8 sessions
4. Ideation on the biggest opportunity areas
The top user needs were then reviewed from a feasibility and viability perspective with the product and tech teams.
The biggest opportunity areas were then flipped into How Might We questions for ideation, which were in turn ideated on in collaborate session with all stakeholders and project teams.
The workshops started on pen and paper ideas. Once these were ranked (using the RICE method), the top ideas were ideated on, going from hand-drawn sketches to clickable prototypes.
5. Testing and learning
These clickable prototypes were tested with all persona groups, creating an iterated set of designs.
6. Designing the detail
With the biggest opportunity areas designed and tested, detailed user flows of each section of the service were made. These were then used by design and tech to build-out the beta service. Each of these flows were again tested with users. A 2-week sprint cadence was used for user research, which enabled for the service to iterate at speed.
7. Designing for accessibility
Different journey maps of how users with low digital skills used our service, to help form the to-be solution.
Accessibility was at the heart of every design and build decision. Throughout the process we tested with users with a wide range (8) of accessibility needs to ensure everyone could use our service.
8. An assisted digital solution
The service also had an assisted digital flow, so that users of all levels could use the service. 5 users low on the Digital Inclusion scale were interviewed to understand which components of the service they would most struggle with. This to-be solution was co-created with the internal users who would be supporting assisted digital users.
9. Measuring success
A custom PowerBI reporting tool was built, alongside Google analytics and Grafana, to ensure that key metrics of success could be closely observed and learnt from.
10. Passing GDS assessment
The final service was heavily praised by GDS assessors for its rigorous approach to user research and user-centred design, in total involving:
