Digital Lead/ Senior User Researcher

This was an all one in role where we worked for a year with Bradford Council on developing from inception to end of Alpha/beginning of Beta, a ‘Pro Democracy’ portal which Bradford Council wanted to develop to provide better direct communication with local citizens and greater  transparency of local government.

We held Project Lead role for the project and one of the key contributions we provided early on to the digital portal was clarity and a clear roadmap at a time which significantly aided the shaping of the service and subsequently its development.

For example, at the time, where ‘Web 2.0’ was becoming a common phrase and social sites like ‘Fixmypothole.com’ highlighted how digital services could streamline costs and communications between local authorities and its citizens, Bradford Council wanted to take advantage of the ‘digital revolution’ to reduce its costs, improvement transparency and speed at which enquiries were dealt with but didn’t know how.

With Bradford Council having little to no experience of having teams working in Agile environments underpinned by principles of user centred design we came in and led the service from Discovery to the initial stages of Beta.

From a Digital Lead/ Product Owner perspective, our role included:

1. Embedding a culture of user centric design: across the team/stakeholders so user/ customer needs alongside business needs would be one of the key principles to prioritise to the development of the service.
2. Leading a number of requirement workshops: with key stakeholders, subject matter experts and service managers delivering services that would be delivered through the portal to capture requirements that would help provide a clear direction for the service.
3. Formulation of clear business objectives for the service: was seriously lacking from Bradford Council early on and a clear direction from them in terms of what objectives they wanted to achieve. I worked with stakeholders to develop these objectives and highlight how the digital portal could improve efficiencies, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction by digitising key transactions through the portal.
4. We delivered a clear ‘cascaded’ MVP and Roadmap: after what seemed an unclear scope, We delivered a discovery which produced a vision and roadmap of the service which converted what was initially unclear goals from the client, to clear customer and business orientated objectives and outcomes agreed with the client which meant the portal had clear roadmap underpinned by 4 main features/epics:
   
   1. Report: a service where customers could digitally report, communicate and track reports of fly tipping, pot holes, anti-social behaviour and more completely online. Depending on the report, these would be made public and eventually geographically pinned through an API on google maps on the service.
   2. Complain: make complaints of Council services directly online and track its handling.
   3. Petition: similar to sites today like Change.org, this service would allow local citizens and groups to petition local causes which Councillors would debate on at official Council meetings, when petitions reached a certain threshold.
   4. Survey: one of the key statutory obligations Local Authorities have to deliver is public consultations which is also a costly, time consuming exercise. This feature aimed to help conduct consultations online enabling Bradford Council to reduce time conducting consultations, increasing the number of people who could get involved whilst reducing the overall costs.