Accenture

Central Government Internal Software

Whilst working at Accenture I was contracted out to a Central Government department to co-ordinate and implement a product design project across four different departments in an effort to modernise and centralise a legacy console based system used by the live service support teams. The system needed to be made accessible to WCAG 2.0 AA standard, and it needed to closely follow GDS design patterns and guidelines. The system was to create a centralised source of information which could be used to retrieve the legacy system information in an easy to understand format, and provide accessibility support which was not present in the current system.

Research and Requirements

Initial focus groups with call center staff to understand current pain points and frustrations with the current system were performed. Data was also captured to map out at a high level the kinds of tasks live service agents typically perform on a daily basis. A community of practice was established across all four departments to ensure design and accessibility consistency was communicated with weekly meetings. I also worked with the Technical Architecture team to understand any technical limtations with the technology solution, and to promote the art of the possible.

Design

I worked across the four government departments within each of their agile product development teams, creating alignment across their requirements and leading the UX vision for this product. I used sketches to facilitate functionality discussions amongst the engineering team and BAs during the agile scrum meetings.I mapped out the 'as is' and 'to be' system flows to understand the typical paths we needed to design for in the system. To meet the requirement of a centralised source of information adhering to GDS guidelines and accessibility best practices I created style guides with accesibility guidance, component states and colour palette requirements to ensure the look and feel was consistent across departments. I also introduced an Axure component library based upon GDS. An interactive Axure prototype was created as a deliverable within the development team to illustrate interaction behaviour and expected navigation flows.

Accessibility

I ensured that consistent simplistic langauge and labels were used across department screens and any acronymns were well defined within the constraints of the system. I worked with the Technical Architecture and Engineering teams to promote accessibility best practices at a code level and how to recover from audit failures to ensure AA WCAG 2.0 standard was met.

Outcomes

The interactive prototype version of a selection of key user journeys was showcased to a number of live support agent focus groups to gather their initial feedback and any suggestions for improvement. I was able to create a system which was easy to navigate once a user became familiar with the new interface. Feedback from the four departments was that their individual teams were able to successfully navigate other deparment pages to seek out further information to help speed up their call times when supporting citizens. The live service support team reported an improved citizen experience as lower wait times while on call with agents were possible as they were able to find and locate information quicker on the centralised system interface.