User research

User research helps you to learn about users and create services that meet their needs.

Digital Service Standard

• 1. Understand user needs
• 2. Have a multidisciplinary team
• 9. Make it accessible
• 10. Test the service
• 12. Don’t forget the non-digital experience
• 13. Encourage everyone to use the digital service

The Digital Service Standard guides teams to build services that are simpler, clearer and faster.

Why should you do user research?

The better you understand your users, the more likely you are to design and build a service that works well for them.

User research delivers many benefits for your agency, because you:

• reduce the risk of expensive failures by making fewer assumptions about your users
• reduce delivery time by having more certainty about what to build
• release increments of the service based on the new knowledge you gain about your users

When do you do user research?

Do user research in every iteration of every development stage. Start in Discovery and continue throughout Live.

This allows you to:

• expand your understanding of users and their needs
• test new design ideas, content and features
• understand users’ problems and how they might be resolved
• save time by building only the things that you know your users need
• respond to changing user behaviour and feedback by continuously improving the service

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