Ministry of Defence [norsk version]
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The brief
Understanding the 'Ask' and 'Offer'
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is the UK’s government department responsible for setting and implementing the defence policy, headquartered at Whitehall London.
All three Armed Forces within the MoD were struggling to retain their people. As part of a strategy to combat this, the MoD wanted to make it easy for serving personnel to calculate the value of their total employee package and compare it to what they might be worth in civilian life.
Great State was asked to review and improve the existing ‘Tri-Service Benefits Calculator’ and create a new retention tool that was informative, easier to use, and that could be accessed from remote locations, including under the sea. Anything we built had to adhere to Government Digital Service (GDS) standards and be highly secure.
What we did
Uncovering areas of interest and unspoken needs
Following GDS standards and principles, my colleague and I undertook a five-week Discovery and eight-week Alpha working to Government Digital Standards and coordinating directly with MoD stakeholders. Our discovery consisted of five stakeholder workshops and thirty-six interviews with serving personnel across all four services, including the Royal Marines. Moderated interviews involved semi-structured interviews, card sort exercises and prioritisation matrices with serving personnel of all levels.
We used Affinity Mapping to download our qualitative data, uncover themes and synthesise our findings. Mapping out our insights enabled us to identify target users, develop personas, map user journeys and explore concepts. Weekly we tested with real users across all four services, qualifying early concepts using functional prototypes.
We looped feedback into prototyping to inform the following sprint and testing approach. Using daily stand-ups, we shared our findings with the MoD and wider team to ensure that the build was iterating according to the insight from the user testing.
At the end of our discovery process, our research uncovered the following insights:
- Serving personnel lacked awareness regarding their entitlements.
- Service personnel are a diverse audience.
- A linear calculator approach doesn't work for everyone.
- There's a lack of trust in top-down messaging.
- A 'Civvy Street' comparison is not interesting
- Timely and fleeting interest.
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What we did
Beta concept development
During Beta we conducted further testing and iterations using high fidelity prototypes built with Sketch, Invision and Axure RP.
From the insight gathered, we were able to develop the feature complexity model as follows:
- Disseminate - to present policy information in a compelling, transparent and informative way
- Assess - to help users understand the impact of policies on their situation
- Retrieve - to give users a secure repository for managing information about their benefits
- Personalise - to provide users with specific and up-to-date information based on live data feeds
To help support fundamental policy changes planned for 2019, towards the end of Beta, we mapped the user requirements to phase 1 feature and developed some phase 2 features.
The outcome
Discover My Benefits: Helping service personnel discover what they’re worth, wherever they are.
Launched in May 2019, Discover My Benefits is a free, easy-to-use tool for Service people, their families, and anyone interested in joining the armed forces.
The tool provides clear and unbiased information on the extensive range of benefits, allowances and support that service personnel are entitled to because of the unique demands of military life and operations. Discover My Benefits can be used by all Regular and Reserve service personnel, Ministry of Defence civilians and their families.
The project successfully passed a thorough GDS assessment for each phase, meeting 18 fundamental principles, with the following quote:
"The team were able to articulate high-level pain points identified in user research. For example, they found that users needed a single source of information about the benefits they were entitled to depending on circumstances and who they needed to contact."
Reflections
Not having meetings without an agenda, if there isn't a reason for the session and meeting - don't do it.
During this phase, particularly as we moved into Beta, meeting user needs without compromise was very challenging.
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