Gloucestershire County Council

Outcome of Expression of Interest: Not shortlisted

Baseline understanding of user needs and production of a persona library

Councils often enter projects with little or no knowledge of how a system should be built to meet the differing needs of different users. Few councils have the resources to carry out dedicated user research for every digital project they undertake. It would increase the ability to provide an excellent user experience if there was an easily digested library of research to draw on that gave us a picture of the spectrum of local users.

As a user story this can be expressed as:

As a provider of local services we require a picture of resident’s digital needs so that we can be confident that we are working to meet those needs from the outset.

The output of the project would be a library of researched personas that we could work from when developing anything new.

In practical terms we want to:

  • Identify representative users of our online services (from a variety of demographics and representative of the accessibility needs of our users)
  • Interview a selection of users (either remotely or in person)
  • Analyse findings for similarities and differences between different groups
  • Produce a library of personas to take into account when considering user experience and accessibility for any future projects with a digital element and for colleagues across council services to use (ie ask providers how they can meet the needs of) when procuring digital solutions.

We are in discussion with the University of Gloucestershire to scope how we might work together in delivering this project.

  • Digital leadership training (for council leaders, service managers or senior executives)
  • Digital and agile awareness
  • Introduction to user research
  • Agile for teams

Other training requests

Training in best practice in designing personas wold be useful.