<aside> ✉️ Let’s chat. Drop us an email [email protected] ****
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Home | Discovery | Alpha | Beta | Weeknotes | Show and tells | Digital Service Standards for Wales
<aside> 🏴 Darllenwch y Gymraeg
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<aside> 🔶 Discovery is about understanding a problem before trying to solve it. It involves learning about your users and what they want to do, what constraints you might be facing and the opportunities to improve how things are working.
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During October, we created a foundation paper, which contained our problem statement, a high-level scope, users, and areas to investigate, and an agreed project team. You can read the highlights here.
A decision was made that we would work with a technical supplier, to help with any technical work, and to also provide some resource to help with user research.
We worked through our procurement process to ensure the supplier selected is a good fit for CDPS…
We also started to validate our problem statement (our users find the CDPS website hard to use, and improvements could be made to it). To do this, we created a Microsoft Forms survey. Our early results show our users get frustrated we have no search function and our lack of tags on our pages and blog posts. Some results are below. We also started to research the needs of our internal users.
A screen grab showing our quick survey we created via Microsoft Forms which we used to rapidly validate our problem statement
A screen grab showing some results from our survey
We also built our Trello board to allow us to store our research in one place (and flex our artistic skills):
An image showing our Trello board
In late October, we had our first “acclimatise” session with Hoffi. This was an interactive workshop held on Miro where we identified what sort of content CDPS produce, what our strengths and weaknesses are, what we feel the current site does well vs what it could improve on, and who we think our users are. It helped us as a team realise who we need to talk to more (our external users), and how we could reach them.
An image showing a screengrab covering what could be improved on current website
An image showing a screengrab covering what CDPS do
An image showing a screen grab covering who are users are
An image showing our project team in a Microsoft Teams video call
An image showing a screen grab covering different boards we looked at
We started November by thinking how best to plan the activities we needed to complete during our discovery period.
In Agile, the standard delivery phases (discovery, alpha, beta) are usually broken down into smaller chunks (or sprints). There is no hard rule as such about how long a sprint should be, although most teams will set a length longer than 2 weeks, but shorter than 4 weeks.