Meeting the needs of Assisted Digital users is something that the ‘find an apprenticeship’ exemplar team have worked really hard to address.
Although we have only seen Assisted Digital needs in 5% of our users, we have addressed these needs by incorporating solutions back into the product following user testing sessions (Testing Tuesdays) and have created a helpdesk function that will serve anyone who struggles to use the digital service.
During the public Beta phase the team intend to continue to test this with users and continuously improve the product. So far we have done over 100 hours of end user testing.
Our User Researcher in the exemplar team, Nahella Ashraf, has been out visiting colleges and talking to hard-to-reach users. These potential users only make up a small percentage of our user base but it’s a worthwhile investment of time. Nahella recently visited a charity in Birmingham who work with young people.
The charity work with people coming out of care, those with mental health issues and those who have just come out of prison. As well as working with people that are homeless, they also work with those at risk of becoming homeless by offering basic careers support and benefits advice alongside courses/support groups covering basic life skills.
She says:
I was particularly interested in how they sign post people towards apprenticeships, and I was keen to work with them to access this particular end user group. I worked with the charity to identify a small group of users that I could meet one to one to look at the new candidate journey.
For me as Service Manager this is the really valuable work and it’s what makes the job worthwhile. This is a truly user centric approach.
I want the team to focus on the content provided by our service to understand if it meets their needs and to find out how they would access the service. The charity has warned that although they can help arrange further one to one meetings they cannot guarantee the person will attend. With this in mind, I’m aware that this is going to be challenging but I believe it is a worthwhile approach.
We intend to work on servicing the needs of our Assisted Digital users throughout public Beta and work in partnership with charities and Remploy to ensure our service continually improves.
Keep in touch. Sign up to email updates from this blog or subscribe to the feed.