Designing a savings service people could trust

The challenge

A new savings service for people on low incomes was expected to miss its Government Digital Service assessment. HMRC, NS&I and Atos had different constraints, each team brought its own design and research view, and the available patterns had not been made for this kind of transaction.

What I did

• Started by listening in meetings and mapping the people, constraints and decision-making relationships around the service before proposing changes.
• Sequenced difficult decisions carefully: shared research first with the stakeholder best placed to unblock the work, used short usability clips to show the problem and offered an ideal option plus a workable fallback.
• Brought three teams with competing priorities around one service journey, using their needs and constraints to replace confrontation with practical collaboration.
• Researched the most common user tasks, reviewed banking services heuristically and combined familiar patterns into a prototype suited to the transaction.
• Tested with five users every fortnight while developers built the service, documenting how each finding changed the design and delivering the prototype on time for a successful GDS assessment.

What I took from it

I learnt to listen first, work out who could unblock a decision and show short clips of users struggling instead of relying on a report. That gave each team room to move without losing the user need.

“A strong collaborative approach across departments that enabled a successful public launch and very positive customer feedback.”

Dax Harkins, B2B Director, NS&I GPS