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The 'north star' mission statement for the new NHS Jobs service kept the team focused on the fundamental reasons for the existence of the project:
Our research found primary and secondary user needs for each persona, for example:
We used these user needs to create various personas in order to keep the focus within the team
(and stakeholders) on the users of the service. These were visible around the project area rather than filed away and forgotten.
We iterated the different personas as we added layers of feedback from Private Beta users and analytics data.
During Alpha, I combined research findings with input from Product Owners and subject matter expects to visualise high level processes and digital user flows.
This also helps teams understand service interdependencies such as status triggers and updates between employers and applicants within a recruitment journey.
I rapidly prototyped using the NHS Digital design system, iterating through designs as guided by evidence from User Research interviews and testing sessions.
Please read my blog post about adapting this design system to find out more about how we used it on NHS Jobs.
I also collaborated with our development team to understand any technical constraints and considerations applicable to a design in order to maintain rapid delivery within project timescales.
I created a hypothesis board using Trello for the Design and Research team. This enabled more objective and measurable testing of design hypotheses within the Alpha stage.
This allowed us to understand whether we were solving problem statements for each user story within a sprint.
There were almost 3,000 NHS employers and 30,000 applicants using the NHS Jobs Beta service by July 2020. We had also seen 32,000 job applications.
We worked with NHSBSA Researchers and Designers to understand feedback from employers and applicants around pain-points within user journeys.
This involved cross-squad collaboration to iterate screens or components in order to improve key KPI's such
as successful applications and time taken to fill a vacant role.