The (space shuttle) Citizen Digital Discovery, launched in the summer, successfully landed last month – destination Alpha!
I consider myself lucky to be captain of this particular voyage. As Service Manager I've been given the task to create a new digital service for citizens seeking information, advice and guidance to use, develop or completely change their skills. This may take the form of career development, further learning or embarking on a new or alternative employment path.
As part of the relatively new Chief Digital Office I'm continuing the trend with this being my first post. I have to admit it has not been the writing itself that has been difficult – there is so much to share about the team and our voyage so far. But choosing what to share first has been the challenge!
So, mindful of the Service Standard, I look to our users as the starting point. What do they want from our service?
Discovery identified that our users choose to engage with us to obtain answers to one of 3 simple questions:
- Where am I now? (what skills do I have and how could I use them)
- Where am I going? (what options are open to me based on my own individual circumstances), and
- How do I get there? (what is the best route to get where I want to be)
Our team vision is to create a service that provides appropriate and individualised responses to those questions – whatever triggered them in the first place. The user stories that emerged from Discovery are consistent in the need for a relationship at the heart of our interaction with users.
However, our existing service has clunky and inefficient ‘sign in and save’ functionality (a glance at our user feedback and customer complaints highlight this) and this is a pre-requisite for the responsive, personalised service we are looking to develop.
The need for this reliable persistence in the relationship with our users is further demonstrated in our analytics. the data suggests a firm link between online registration and content consumption for the existing service; registered repeat visits during the last quarter comprised less than 5% of total visits, but accounted for 26% of page views.
Our Alpha is prototyping a redesign to users arriving at our digital service and registration; focussing on the 3 key user questions above.
Over the coming weeks my delivery team and I will continue to share insights as our Alpha begins to take flight.
So continuing the flight speak ‘Cabin Crew, prepare for Alpha take-off, destination Beta’.
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