Project examples

Studio Solo has been involved in a range of user-centred design and research projects for public sector clients including GDS, Dept for Work & Pensions (DWP), Her Majesty’s Revenue & Income (HMRC), and BBC. Their portfolio also includes private sector work for Moo.com and Marks & Spencer.

Central UK Government

At the Dept for Work & Pensions, James was a user researcher embedded as part of the Digital Transformation of Pension Credit, Winter Fuel Payment and Bereavement Support Payment. Within these projects, James has provided his services across Discovery, Alpha, Private Beta, Public Beta and Live.

Pension Credit has proven to be one of the most complex and challenging projects worked on thus far. The complex policy rules of this means-tested benefit, alongside the elderly and often vulnerable citizens who need this financial support, meant it became very clear right from the beginning that we would encounter many other supporting users that step in to help people apply and maintain this benefit. We were soon able to quantify who our users were through measurements put in place. Within the helper role - we encountered a mixture of official legal bodies such as Lasting Power of Attorney, Appointee and Welfare Rights Officers. But also, since Pension Credit is now online, this opened up the opportunity to allow informal friends and family to help people submit their claim in a more convenient way.

User Research has played an integral part of this transformation piece - to bring rich insight about the users of the service and their entire user journey - from how they find out about Pension Credit, right through to the decision they receive. All research output is regularly presented back to the team to prioritise and drive continuous service improvements.

Winter Fuel Payment was a similar demographic of users to Pension Credit, but the main difference being it is for all UK citizens over State Pension age, who automatically qualify for this annual heating bill payment. The challenges therefore mostly took place behind the scenes, but there was still plenty of research undertaken to understand the pain points of the existing ways of working. And even though the payment is automatic to the end user - there was still opportunities to improve communication and enquiry channels. As part of an agile delivery team, James has helped to pass the Alpha - Private Beta service assessment. A quote from the final report:

“The panel were impressed by the continued standard of user research carried out. This has carried over from previous assessments where this was flagged as a particularly strong point with several user groups being engaged with, using a wide range of methodologies”.

James has also worked on Bereavement Support Payment - a working age benefit for a qualifying UK citizen who was married or in a civil partnership to claim a fixed amount of money - often the payment is used in the immediate aftermath of a partner’s death, and because it is for a working age person, this is often an unexpected death. The user research involved in this project helped guide it through a successful Private Beta phase - at that point it was a digital service for staff to use when citizens called up. It has since gone onto Discovery - into Alpha for a new online channel for citizens to use - as research concluded a strong need for this extra channel.

At Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs Dept (HMRC), James provided interaction design services. Projects included Apply for Marriage Allowance and Check your Income Tax within the Personal Tax Account. This includes service design, user experience and research - always with the greatest respect to the Gov.uk Service Design Manual.

Starting with the Marriage Allowance development team in their private beta phase, we helped bring it through public beta to the final live phase where it now exists in the full public domain.

Here's a quote from a user who has since applied online: 

"We followed the easy procedure explained and applied to HMRC online - very simple and efficient , with instant confirmation! I'll be £220 better off this tax year with similar expectations in future tax years, plus a rebate cheque for tax year 2015-2016 that I think will be £212. Brilliant! Our heartfelt thanks." (Richard & Nancy)

BBC

Whilst working with the BBC, James was on-site in an agile 2-week sprint environment on the BBC iD product - the signed in more personalised side of BBC.co.uk. Hands-on user research practice including planning, running & analysis of user interviews & testing sessions in onsite labs as well as more guerrilla-testing sessions. Also practiced interaction design, created new & adapting existing patterns, sketching, prototyping, responsive layouts and UI & visual design. Guided by BBC GEL Design guidelines & principles. Project work mostly covered BBC iD itself, but with implications that reached across multiple products of BBC.co.uk including BBC iPlayer.

Moo.com

Our work at MOO began with Flavors.me – working closely with the customer call centre staff and development team to help fix, improve and add new features to this website creation product. Flavors was unique at the time for it's ability to pull in content from the user's connected social media channels.

Studio Solo also designed the foundations for the first ever MOO responsive website. This included some rapid research, sketches, prototypes of various ideas and seeing it through to hand-over for visual design stage and then planning & liaising with developers.

Also developed mobile-friendly business card building tools as paper prototypes in co-design sessions with staff members from different depts and roles. This was a fun but highly collaborative team exercise across a broad range of different digital disciplines.

Marks & Spencer

Acting as a UX Manager working with Marks & Spencer, this was a project management role, due to the impending launch date of the new M&S flagship website. Key responsibilities included smooth transition of all 3rd party online software & tools from the old website into the new platform - including all UI and interaction updates were correctly implemented. It also covered MVP launch of size guides into the core clothing sections of the website. We also helped with UAT testing, and helped to identify and record many bugs, with suggested many improvements prior to launch.

Additionally, we oversaw the launch of the in-store Browse & Order touch-screen kiosks (second generation). This agile project team included sprint-planning, task assignment, direction & feedback to UX & UI designers, then delivery of those completed tasks back over to the development team.