This small government organisation needed a new online service for their licensing application. All wildlife in Scotland is protected by law. Members of the public can apply for licences to control wildlife (for example, by controlling numbers or moving bird’s nests).
We were brought in to help NatureScot on a part-time freelance basis by Calba, the IT outsourcing agency.
Task
NatureScot had a small development team and a User Research but didn’t have in-house User-Centred design staff.
We began in autumn. They needed a new online service for Gulls licences by Spring. The online service had to be accessible and useable. They expected to go through a government service assessment after the launch.
Action
We began by mapping out the online journey using Mural. Our clients often find this useful as we can capture their business needs for the project in a format that’s easy to understand. We’ll often do this before we start writing and designing screens.
Government website content can be a challenge as it’s often written with the government policy and legislation in mind. We worked hard to remove any jargon and put it in plain English, as well as following writing for the web best practice guidelines.
After developing the content we used the GDS prototyping kit to make runs of screens and review them with the design team. We worked out a research plan with the in-house User Researcher.
After testing the design on real service users we handed over the screens to the developers.
We attended team retros to resolve any conflicts over how we were working. We were also present at daily stand-ups to answer any questions about the design.
We attended daily stand-ups to resolve any questions from the dev teams. We ran an accessibility audit to find any errors in the real build and raised JIRA tickets for these to be fixed.
Result
NatureScot launched their new service in early 2022. We helped them improve their in-house research and development capability. They can build future service on a more usable and accessible set of design patterns. Their future services will be based around research with real people.