Tips and techniques
At HMRC, we hold an annual learning and development event - ResCon - to discuss trending user research topics and learn new skills. At our last event, experts in body language, persuasion, negotiation and marketing advised us on effective communication, a vital skill for all researchers.
As User Researchers, we champion user-centred approaches, and our work can be internal or external facing. As part of being user-centred, we have a duty to protect our participants’ data, as well as their wellbeing and safety; this applies whether they are members of the public or other civil servants and staff. In this blog, you’ll read about the steps you yourself can take to make sure you’re researching with internal participants in an ethical way.
Good communication with participants is a foundation of user research. But how can you get meaningful insights when communicating isn't straightforward.
GOV.UK Notify is a platform for public servants who need to send emails, text messages and letters. In this blog, Chris Marshall explains how user researchers can benefit from using GOV.UK Notify to send messages about their research.
One of the challenges we face with remote research is making it accessible for our users. We recently ran a remote cross-government user research workshop, and Ariana shares our top 10 lessons learned from this.
Many departments across government are exploring questions of how they capture, organise, and share their research learning, with some departments recruiting digital librarians to build repositories. Here, Salma Patel shares a smaller scale solution she developed to meet the immediate needs in Ofsted.
This blog reports on a GDS user research workshop to build a toolbox of remote working tools we can use while COVID-19 is with us. Please do feel free to let us know any other tools you use.
In this post Crispin explains how to use rainbow spreadsheet method to make usability testing analysis faster and easier with your team.
In this post, Stephanie Marsh, Head of User Research and Analysis at GDS talks about learnings from a workshop that City University ran on designing and research with people with aphasia.
In this post, Jennifer Scott, Senior User Researcher at HMRC, describes how they use A/B testing to learn about users and iterate services.
