Zooming out: How understanding context can help GOV.UK better understand its audience
Government services don’t operate in a vacuum. Interacting with government is part of a much larger user story, and at the Greenhouse team, we are looking to understand how we can help GOV.UK better reflect the mental models people have of government.
Over the last year, the Greenhouse team have been trialling a range of methods that are not typical of those used by government researchers. These methods have the potential to deepen our understanding of GOV.UK's current and potential users, and were the starting point for speculative design explorations that reimagine what the GOV.UK of the future could look like.
Chris and Marina will showcase the work of the Greenhouse team, and make a case for why context-driven research and design can help the programme to better understand the needs of user groups that we know are not well served by GOV.UK today, and find opportunities to reach better and support them.
About Marina
Marina is a Senior Service Designer at GDS, working as part of GOV.UK’s Future Thinking team, also known as ‘the Greenhouse’. A strong advocate of speculative design, she combines innovative user-centred methods with futures explorations, to envision a more equitable future for online government.
Marina previously worked as an architect and brings extensive experience in context-driven design to her work.