This challenge is to prototype and test ways of providing remote support for individuals struggling or failing to make Universal Credit claims online for reasons like a lack of digital or language skills, or mental health issues.
Further User Research – Definition
It was obvious from our initial user interviews some of the main hurdles users were coming up against. As a team we had to prioritise which of these we were going to investigate further. We wrote about how we did this here.
We now had assumptions to test:
- Would users benefit from knowing excatly what was needed and the steps they would have to take before they started their application?
- Would users benefit from being able to share their application remotely with an advisor?
In order to test these assumptions, I wrote a new user research plan and script for a more targetted user interview. I also sent a user survey out on a number of Universal Credit facebook support groups. Here are the survey results:
Confidence before applying 
Confidence if they had known everything they needed beforehand 
Confidence if they had known all the steps beforehand
The results from the survey show a shift in confidence when if users had known the steps and the things they had needed before they began their application. This was backed up with the user interview data.
Through virtual workshops with the project team, we used this additional data and our personas to create ‘How Might We…?’ statements leading to a ‘Crazy 8’s’ workshop to generate ideas to help solve our users’ problems. We collated and prioritized our ideas leading to a collaborative decision over the prototypes we would design and test:
From this workshop we had decisions on the way forward and the prototypes the digital team were to begin creating:
- Visualisation of steps — service map showing overview of application process (including government departments and agencies). Vertical format for interactive navigation on mobile device.
- Checklist — interactive check-box list of documents and other resources required to fill in UC form. Includes examples, and ‘ticks’ persist across browser sessions (on same device).
- Real time support from a real-life professional — document comparing options for screen sharing between claimant and adviser. Criteria to be co-created by project team.
Link to the digital team’s blog posts: https://medium.com/sector-challenge-9-claiming-universal-credit
Hannah Belshaw 