Ministry of Defence

Creating a self serve portal that allows developers to build and deploy applications at OFFICIAL and SECRET.

Role

User Experience Designer / User Researcher

Company

PA Consulting

Year

2022-2023

What is D2S?

D2S provides Ministry of Defence developers a secure and assured cloud-native application platform to help quickly develop digital services at OFFICIAL and SECRET.

As part of a collaborative team effort, I lead the development and design of a new service for the Ministry of Defence, focused on enabling frontline developers to quickly create and deploy applications. During the discovery phase, I actively participated and organised workshops and user research to identify needs and requirements, ensuring our team’s decisions were data-driven.

I also played a crucial role in the design team, helping to create detailed prototypes that were tested in immersive usability sessions with users.
Throughout the project, I worked closely with stakeholders to validate and refine design decisions and user journey flows.

Purpose

Ability to deploy applications at speed

The goal of creating this new service was to enable developers to build and deploy applications rapidly in the deployed space. With D2S’s new service, applications that previously took years to develop could now be completed in just weeks.

The key selling points of D2S include a self-serve platform for team onboarding, privileged access management, a secure pipeline, and continuous assurance throughout the application development and deployment process.

2022 Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

Allow users to navigate their way through the onboarding process without manual intervention

This MVP approach allowed users to sign-up, view learning and access the D2S platform all in one place. This new addition will provide significant value to our users by reducing onboarding times from 10 days to just 48 hours.

What we learned

D2S’s potential is hindered by lack of cross functionality

Developing applications within the defence sector requires adapting to the diverse needs of frontline commands and their teams. Given the vast scope of the defence organisation, users range from novice developers to seasoned back-end specialists. Our central challenge was: how can we empower all users to build and deploy applications without being constrained by technological limitations?

In the initial discovery phase, I collaborated with a team to conduct workshops with stakeholders across various levels, including internal personnel and 1 Star officers, to gain a deep understanding of the challenges within D2S's current process.

Major Issues

Legacy platform and lack of technology

As a large organisation within the public sector, the defence sector often faces challenges with siloed departments, resulting in limited cross-functional collaboration and communication. This fragmentation makes it difficult to make timely and effective decisions regarding the adoption of new technologies.

Lack of engagement from users and research

Many defence services lack user-centric practices due to poor communication, and in the initial stages of D2S, no research was conducted to address this gap.

After completing the initial interviews, our team began developing a customer journey lifecycle architecture.

The purpose of the customer journey lifecycle architecture is to divide up the end to end journey into phases. Each phases represent a particular touch point and milestones for users and they all have their own needs, and requirements.

MVP was achieved by clearly defining the definition of done from both a design perspective and engineering perspective.

In addition to identifying pain points, we also organised co-creation workshops with multiple stakeholders and users to uncover new perspectives. These sessions allowed our team to collaborate openly with users who had first-hand experience with the service, and they also fostered a sense of community with client-side personnel.

The Phase 1 session, which spanned one month, were instrumental in shaping the MVP for D2S’s new platform. During these sessions, we gathered data that included ideas for the service page structure and key features for the MVP. To finalize the outcomes, participants were invited to dot vote on their preferred ideas.

Following this, our team, in collaboration with the primary stakeholder (the service owner), prioritized which features would be included in the MVP.

Phase 1 workshop metrics

4

Co-creation workshops

8-12

Users per session

2hrs

Length of session

Process

Discovery & Research

Initial Steps

I was involved in assisting the scope of features, objectives for feature designs, planning research to validate assumptions and hypothesis.

Research Analysis

At the end of research phases, we would carry out thematic analysis of our findings, theme our results and create a plan to report back to stakeholders with our findings.

Collaboration

Working alongside the wider UCD team, we would plan our presentations before sharing with stakeholders in an end of sprint demo.

Stakeholder Engagement

After each sprint, we would present research findings to users and internal stakeholders and then making our recommendations for next steps.

Design Phase

Prototyping

Once stakeholders have approved the recommendations, we move into the design phase and begin prototyping new features to be added to the service.

For this project, we were required to use the GOV.UK prototyping kit, as it is a standard for government services.

Validation

Collaborating with the wider UCD team, we hold daily sessions to discuss and validate design choices. Utilising Figma, we are able to collaborate seamlessly and share ideas in real time.

As well as working with UCD team, designs are always presented to the development to validate the functional and non functional requirements.

Testing with users

After finalising our designs, we conducted usability tests with users to validate our approach. Given that this is a government service, we followed a structured recruitment process for testing, which included sending out consent forms for users to agree to participate.

Iterate

Occasionally, issues may arise after usability testing. When this happens, we revisit our designs and make necessary iterations to ensure the journey is intuitive and compliant with accessibility laws.

Handover & QA

Development handover

Handover sessions with the development team take place when a design has been successfully tested.

QA & Testing

During the development stage, the UCD team and I conduct continuous reviews and QA sessions to ensure that our designs meet the required standards.

We accomplish this by utilising sandbox environments, where we can thoroughly test and refine our work.

Sign off and ship

After development is complete, we integrate feedback mechanisms directly into the service to facilitate continuous improvement.

This feedback is collected through forms built within the service and is used to identify potential new features, which are then scoped and planned for future iterations.

To better understand the design process we followed, see the triple diamond diagram below

Final Design

We developed a comprehensive end-to-end journey enabling developers to self serve and onboard to the D2S platform. Developers now have the ability to access a personalised dashboard and create development environments within D2S.

Onboarding Journey

This flow allows a user to request a defence digital email address to access their own dashboard and development space to start building applications.

Dashboard Journey

Below shows a screen of the users dashboard where they can begin to create and deploy applications, as well as getting support and guidance.

Confirmation Journey

Below shows a confirmation screen for when a user successfully creates a development space.