A little under two years ago, I joined Government at the Department for Work and Pensions and began work on the Get your State Pension service.

The team had just finished their discovery work. Anna had done some excellent user research and clearly presented the user needs for the service.

Based on the user needs we could see that people needed to be prompted or nudged, they needed to be authenticated to make sure they were getting ‘their’ pension, they needed to give us the right details (change in marital status matters) and then they need to do something like submit their application/request.

It sounds quite simple, but not everything is simple in Government. That’s our problem, not our users. For them we want to make it easy and seamless and most importantly fulfil their need.

Our Goals

At the time and as a multi-disciplinary team we created service goals to make sure we always had focus. These were;

• It works – it doesn’t crash and the end result happens as expected
• It’s simple – users can navigate through with ease
• It’s trusted – users believe the data they see
• It’s not a long process – when we need to confirm details we don’t make the user feel it’s a massive thing

How has it worked out?

Over the last six months as I began to manage and lead the interaction design team at DWP, I stepped further away from the service team but still keeping an eye on the outcomes.

I’m proud to say that the goals have been realised. The service is in private beta and whilst a lot has changed, overall the service is still simple to use and the analytics show that it’s not a very long process at all.

Catherine Hope has started a series of articles talking about using analytics on the Get your State Pension service.