Introduction to interaction design in gov

What's it like being an interaction designer in a UK government department?

Interaction designers, sometimes known as user experience (UX) designers, are an essential part of digital service teams that want to meet user needs.

They work closely with the entire team, especially service owners, product owners, delivery managers, user researchers, content designers, service designers, software engineers and quality assurance (QA) testers.

What do interaction designers do?

  • Create design ideas based on user research
  • Design mock-ups
  • Create prototypes in code
  • Decide on high-level user journeys and micro-interactions

Other useful skills

  • Graphic design
  • Content design
  • Accessibility
  • Front-end development
  • User research
  • Information architecture
  • Responsive web design

GDS (Government Digital Service) design resources

Day to day

  • Sitting at the computer
    Much of your time will be spent sitting at the computer, designing things. Don’t forget to walk around and talk to your team. If you're working remotely, tools like Slack are good for keeping in touch, but often Civil Servants are restricted to things like Email and Microsoft Teams.

  • Meetings
    There are lots of meetings. Find a way to attend the important ones, this is where decisions are often made. Although time consuming and energy zapping, one of the strengths of agile working is the shared understanding between the team. The more you hear, the greater the understanding you will have.

  • Workshops
    Workshops are like meetings, but you actually get stuff done. Bring post-its and use whiteboards to analyse research and come up with design ideas. If you're working remotely use collaborative tools like Mural or Microsoft Word. Make sure everyone is included.

  • Daily stand-up
    A brief meeting with your immediate team to share what you're focusing on. Try to answer these questions: What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Is anything blocking you?

  • Show and tell
    Every 2 weeks or so, teams organise a presentation where they share their progress. Sometimes called sprint reviews. Often stakeholders from across the organisation are invited. Be prepared to talk about your work and show a few slides. Over time, these slides become a useful resource showing how the work has progressed.

  • User research
    Observe as much user research as you can. Work with your user researcher to plan objectives, and ensure your designs can help answer the research questions. Take notes during research and help the team to analyse the findings.

Basic process

  1. User need is discovered
    User needs are uncovered by user research, or other sources of evidence. Business requirements will be introduced by the internal team too. Make sure business requirements meet user needs.

  2. Understand the need
    Read any previous user research, talk to the user researchers and subject matter experts. Understand why this thing needs to be added.

  3. Has this been solved before?
    Speak to the design team. Speak to the wider government design community. Check the GDS (Government Digital Service) design resources.

  4. Mock-up some ideas
    Design a few ideas quickly, these could be sketched on paper, created in a design app like Sketch, Figma, Mural or written out as plain text. Often, simple and obvious ideas are the best. Remember that many users are inexperienced with using computers and digital tools.

  5. Prototype
    Sometimes a paper prototype is enough to use during user research. Sometimes an interactive HTML prototype is required.

  6. Usability testing and research
    Meet with the user researchers and discuss the prototype and how it functions. If possible, go along and observe the research session.

  7. Repeat
    Repeat steps 1 to 7.

Prototyping in code

It can be difficult to use the GOV.UK Prototype Kit for the first time (unless you are familiar with installing things via the command line). Get some help to set things up. Once that’s done, you only need basic HTML and CSS knowledge to get started.

Tools

  • Pens, post-its, notebook
  • Macbook
  • A web browser, like Google Chrome
  • GitHub account for version control and sharing code (your organisation may use something like Gitlab or Bitbucket)
  • Visual Studio Code for writing code (other text editors are also available)

Related, my blog post about interaction design tools.

Further reading