Desk research is a way of finding information out about your users without talking to them
Desk research can take the form of:
There is no way of knowing for certain that the data you’re looking at is about your users. You will be making a lot of assumptions at this stage. But the data you find will function as a good starting point for further research. It will also help you create a focus for hypothesis and questions to ask during user research.
Content designers collaborate closely with user researchers to understand and design for user needs.
As a content designer, doing desk research has helped me to:
An advantage of doing desk research on a new project, is that it helps to embed content design into the team. Approaching content in this way aids teams who are new to content design. And how it includes much more than writing.
Desk research provides the perfect opportunity to get a better understanding of the subject matter. One way to do this is through identifying and engaging subject matter experts and stakeholders. Furthermore, you can ask your team members questions and share statistics and trends, allowing you to show the potential scope of a project.
Working collaboratively across professions in DfE means we have access to the fantastic work of other teams.
The About users of DfE services for schools insights library is full of research from previous projects. The #user_research Slack channel is a welcoming and friendly place to ask questions and get help from user researchers.
Here are some ways to find out about potential users whether your service exists yet or not.
Download the desk research cheat sheet (.pdf) or save this page for the future.
If you have any other ideas for desk research, share them below!
There are lots of ways we work in collaboration with our users and professionals in DfE (Department for Education). Our products and services cross over with those offered by local councils and different user groups.
That’s why we have several types of communities of practice including:
cross government
DfE-wide
office or region based
portfolio or business area
specialist interest area, such as ethics club for researchers and designers
Through working openly across government and with our local partners. Our work is more likely to be up-to-date with the latest government design and policy thinking.
We have communities of practice for professions, including:
Design
User research
Business analysis
Product management
Technical architecture
The main purpose is to drive the learning and development of the professions through the sharing of ideas, skills, and experience. This is supported by our Head of Profession team, who look across all DfE's portfolios.
We also use regular profession meet-ups within the vulnerable children and families’ portfolio. These differ from the larger DfE-wide community sessions because we're all working in the same context. This can be an excellent way to get support and advice from those working in the same space.
I set up and manage the ‘user-centred design crew’ within the vulnerable children and families’ portfolio.
We meet weekly and a typical agenda is:
quick updates, any successes or lessons learnt
review something (known as a crit)
discuss a specific problem
We’re a team spread out across the country, so we do these calls on Teams. The purpose of the calls is to improve the standards of our services and ensure we are meeting user needs through our user-centred design (UCD) work. The meetings allow us to support each other with UCD conundrums, whilst offering a safe space to get feedback and review work.
The group have fed into the DfE community of practice and central government guidance, along with contributing to components and patterns.
The UCD crew has helped people to work with others in their profession to solve common problems for the whole portfolio. This has reduced duplication of effort to create more streamlined and sustainable services.
And it also helps to make the portfolio a wonderful place to work!
Within DfE, different communities and groups take different approaches. The key with all approaches is to establish:
a regular time and place
a clear understanding of purpose
an agreed and recorded way of doing things
You should keep a record of insights and developments that arise from the group and share them. You will need someone, or a few people, to take the lead to organise and help the group to move forward. It should not be too difficult or time consuming to set up - keep them casual and reactive to the needs of those who take part as they arise.
‘For me, the UCD crew is one of the most valuable meet-ups of the week. It's an opportunity to get constructive feedback on something I'm working on in a friendly and open environment. It's helpful to hear what other design professionals are doing, as the challenges we come across are often similar.’
Claire Jones, Senior Content Designer
‘One of the best things about UCD crew and our user research huddles is how timely they are. We arrange agendas a couple of days before the meeting which means people suggest topics they’re working on in the moment. This means we’re discussing issues we’re facing now and solving them together quickly.’
Ella Beaumont, Lead User Researcher
You need to understand the needs of the group, and this may vary or change depending on who is involved. For example, a small group of civil servants may have diverse needs to a larger group that includes both civil servants and contractors. You also need to consider things like behaviours and confidentiality to create a safe space.
You can conduct regular retros to help make sure your group or community continues to meet the needs of those who attend and attracts new members.
For communities of practice, you should aim to have a consistent and automated process to onboard new starters into their profession. This includes an introduction with their Head of Profession. Ensuring, new starters know about your community through induction packs and the ways you communicate.
When setting up a group consider broad involvement of different people with different skills and experience.
Having an agreed purpose will help everyone to contribute constructively. Setting up some ground rules around ways you will communicate and offer feedback is essential.
You should also agree how and with whom you will share the outcomes of your work as a group.
Share the details of the group and the purpose in a way that others can view and understand. You can do this through pinned items on Slack channels or through your product and service information.
Explain who is involved and why, and where appropriate, share how others can get involved. Also share the outcomes at community meet-ups and show and tells. Through your communications with internal and external stakeholders.
Are there ways in which you develop your expertise? Leave a comment below and let us know!
Hello, my name is Freya Smith. I am a year 13 student studying A-level History, Sociology, and Philosophy and Ethics. Growing up, I always had an interest in writing and reading - I wanted to develop my creativity and innovation as much as possible. So, when my sixth-form college announced work experience week, it was the perfect opportunity to gain a real insight into the life of work. and to interpret my skills into different activities. The Department for Education (DfE) was offered to students, and eventually four of us took it and we became a small but determined team.
After meeting important people on the DfE team, we were set a task - ‘How could we design a service for young people 14-24, to find local support’. To do this, we developed a variety of skills such as:
We were then able to translate these into our designs for the Find and Connect website. Having the trust and dedication to create our own prototypes, attending the 9.30am stand up calls, and connecting with the team, increased my confidence to present my ideas in front of unfamiliar faces. With such a nice and welcoming team, we all managed to present!
Laura also introduced us to different careers within the Department for Education. There is such a wide range of jobs within the industry, and from talking to so many different people, everyone had a different journey too. It was reassuring to know there are positions that will suit my personal skills and preferences.
On the last day of our work experience, we got to pitch our designs to Ben, who set the task, and others who attended the call. We let people comment on our drafts so we could make improvements. For example, making it more accessible with certain colours or text positioning. This was interesting as I would never have previously considered factors such as accessibility, or paid attention to this on other websites.
I really enjoyed the independent thinking tasks we worked on, and any idea we wanted to develop, the team would have our support to make it work. Everything was thoroughly explained to us, and the feedback we received also made us feel like we were a part of the team. If DfE offers this experience again, I would suggest giving students more physical tasks to complete. We spent a lot of time face to face talking which can be quite overwhelming for some people.
I was surprised by how well this experience tied in with one of my subjects, sociology, which I thoroughly enjoy. Many sessions we had, including user research, related to a lot of the content I already knew, helping to develop my skills even further. Overall, it has increased my knowledge of careers around, and, after researching, government social research and human resources is something that really interests me.
I would recommend work experience in this department to any student who doesn't know what they want to do, or for valuable experience in a new field. Either way, this is a broad and favourable experience for anyone. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity - I have gained so much from this, and it has motivated me to pursue a creative career and to be successful.
]]>This is a longer-term project building on existing good work. As part of it, this week we have launched a new website called Skills for Careers. The website is the culmination of great multi-disciplinary working. Together we're paving the way for future collaboration and innovation. The website gives a simple, clear overview of government’s skills and careers offer to adults and young people.
Please take a look and leave your feedback using the link at the top of the page to help us improve and grow the site.
The 2021 Skills for Jobs White Paper made a commitment to making sure people had clear information about their career and skills options. Since then, teams have been making it easier for learners and employers to find the information they need and the right training options for them.
We have done this in many ways. One great example is our new Skills for Life campaign, which is due to launch in January 2024. For the first time, we've united our audiences (adults, young people, employers) into one single, unified umbrella campaign. The new strategy will motivate and inspire all three audience groups. It will make adverts featuring skills products more recognisable and impactful. It will simplify the customer journey with a single call to action and digital destination.
The Department also launched a new ‘front door’ website for employers in January 2022 as a first step for business users. The website allows them to compare between the different training and employment schemes on offer. Initial user research from the Customer Experience & Design team highlighted that there was still more to do. We will continue to join up our digital domain to better meet the needs of young people and adults seeking information online.
The Customer Experience & Design team ran an ideation session in February. This brought together digital, policy and delivery experts to understand the big picture based on the extensive user research carried out by the team. Further work helped the team to identify 8 top-level user needs relevant to the whole digital skills portfolio.
This allowed the collaborative magic to truly begin. Digital experts from different areas of the department came together with careers advisers, communications specialists and policy leads to find creative, innovative solutions that could help meet the 8 user needs. One example is the recently launched design system for the National Careers Service. This has started to bring better visual join up to the system, particularly through its recognisable bold pink colour.
The Future Systems Unit was lucky to inherit this collaborative tradition when it was set up in April 2023. We joined a BETA team set up to take forward another one of the identified solutions – the new Skills for Careers website that launches today. This work brings digital leads from a range of different teams together to build a great product at pace.
Sometimes, you hear stories of digital and policy teams not finding common ground. Not here! The new model in DfE is beginning to show how we can all work together to make decisions that work for everyone. Now, we are energised and motivated to work in multidisciplinary teams, putting the user at the heart of what we do. Together we can achieve much more than we could in individual, siloed teams.
There’s lots more to do to keep moving the bigger project forward. We want to find more formal ways to bring this collaborative working together, to keep us focused on user needs and user-centred design. Today though we are taking a step back to appreciate the great things that have already been achieved!
Please do share your feedback on our Skills for Careers website to help shape what comes next.
I’ve wanted to work in content for the Civil Service ever since, so I was delighted to join DfE.
The community learning is what I appreciate the most about working here.
I’ve spent the last 18 months collaborating with and learning from the awesome civil servant and contractor researchers, designers, developers, analysts, product and delivery managers here. I’m a better content designer now than I was when I joined. My skill set has broadened because of the things I have learnt from all those people.
However, I miss helping others develop as somebody who managed a content team, in previous roles.
I feel like I’m ready to take the next step to support and lead others within the civil service now.
Applying for roles in the Civil Service is hard.
I’d tried for senior content designer roles in the civil service in the distant and more recent past but didn’t get interviews. Despite putting days of work into each application, making sure I had examples for each of the criteria, something was not working.
I decided to ask people here at DfE for advice. It was the best thing I did.
When the next role I was interested in came up, I asked friends and colleagues already in senior roles to review and give feedback on my application before I sent it. The advice I received was transformative. I want to share my experience of getting feedback in case it helps others who may struggle when applying for roles in the Civil Service.
There will not always be somebody from your profession on the panel, such as a content designer. Although there should be, and it is something DfE is working towards. Explain what you do in a way that people without the same professional expertise can understand. Ask somebody in an adjacent role to check your application before you send it.
We all face problems in our jobs. I tried to explain difficulties I’d faced in a way that I thought showed that I was taking initiative.
What I learnt was that it came across as complaining. The exact opposite of what I was trying to do!
What I was trying to explain was a good thing, but I was talking about it negatively. Instead of saying “Despite X, I did Y” make a subtle change in the language you use. Say “I identified an opportunity to do X and lead on Y”. Focus on the positive action you took.
This is the bit that always makes my skin crawl. I am a natural deflector and self-deprecator. There’s a reason I left journalism for content design and not marketing or public relations. I would second guess myself in terms of how to write an application for a content design job.
Should I use confident, positive, more verbose language or should I shut up and get to the point using plain English?
Remember, you’re not being scored on brevity. You’re trying to convince somebody that you are the right person for a specific job against a particular set of criteria. Being a good content designer is about understanding the needs and goals of your audience and the context they interact with that content in.
It’s ok to use longer words, buzzwords and workplace jargon here.
After following that advice, I got an interview, got an appointable score, narrowly missed out on a role and made the reserve list.
The whole experience has been a great boost to my confidence and performance. My teammates have told me so:
My head of profession has also mentioned it, saying they have seen a shift in how I talk about myself, my work and in my confidence.
I’ll keep applying for roles, asking for feedback from each panel and learning how I can get better for the next one.
Comment and share your tips on getting feedback, learning and developing in your career.
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As a team we’re always keen to share our approaches to recruitment and to hear about other ways of tackling this challenge. If you and your team have other approaches, we’d love to hear from you.
Teacher Services is one of DfE’s largest digital portfolios. We have long-lived service teams that are empowered to decide how to achieve their objectives. We’ve grown quickly and have been changing how we work together as we scale. We’re moving from building great services as individual teams, to making decisions about the journey for teachers across their careers. We're also changing our role in DfE. You can see our service line here.
We’ve achieved a lot. As I leave the department, I wanted to reflect on 4 things I’ve learnt.
The Teacher Services leadership team knew that as the services matured, we’d need to join-up more. We also knew we shared problems across the service-line. Everyone agreed to “join-up” more, but no-one grabbed the concept and applied it. This was partly because we didn’t initially explain the detail.
As leaders who sat across the entire service line, we agreed to focus on 3 specific problems:
Our Lead Content Designer led on communicating with users. She worked with two service teams to encourage newly qualified teachers to look for jobs immediately after achieving Qualified Teacher Status. The successful campaign led to further experiments around how to increase conversion in this part of the journey.
Our Principal Technical Architect led on improving how we track people as they interact with our different services. Eventually we built a service that will integrate with GOV.UK One Login and all our services. Once implemented, we will be able to better track people, provide them with a more personalised experience and reduce their administrative burden.
Policy colleagues reduced complexity around routes into teacher training.
'Joining up' was successful where we had well-defined problems, teams that understood the urgency and potential impact across the service line. Where we lacked one or more of these, progress was slow.
We broke our service line down into individual service teams because of the scale.
Once services were built, we needed to move out of our self-created silos and think like a service line. It was no longer enough to just deliver quickly, we also needed to consider competing priorities. This was challenging given people naturally prioritised their own service outcomes.
We made sure everyone understood the objectives of each service, and how they contributed to the overall objective of an excellent teacher for every child. Our Senior Leadership Team built collaboration and trust, and we felt the benefits of working together. We introduced a “transfer window” where people could ask to move teams for a new challenge. When people moved, they brought a new perspective to their new team. They often suggested how their new and old teams might work together whilst minimising dependencies.
We maintained our own DevOps team and used an application programming interface(API)-centric model to reduce technical dependencies.
This combination meant we minimised how much dependencies slowed down delivery.
I needed to make sure my peers, superiors, and teams trusted me, and each other. This wasn’t always easy.
We found that the more teams were protected, the more they disconnected from broader DfE. Communication was harder, and misunderstandings more common.
We built trust by celebrating small, tangible successes, and sharing the credit.
I felt we had a responsibility to help DfE continually improve. We worked with the cyber security team to improve the Authority to Operate (AtO) process. This is an annual process where cyber security colleagues visit delivery teams to review and approve services. Together, we developed a new model that focused on principles that delivery teams could use every day.
Where we lacked trust, we created friction and frustration instead of positive change.
One senior stakeholder had a reputation for not “getting” digital. They were rumoured to have called user researchers elsewhere “charlatans”. Before a high stakes meeting, a colleague challenged me to speak to the stakeholder using their language.
I took the challenge and talked of the importance of “being able to learn from our mistakes and correct them in weeks not years” instead of “being agile”. I talked about “the risk of not knowing how people might react” instead of “user research being important”.
Speaking like them meant we could work together closely, and they trusted me more. This helped me clear the path for successful delivery.
I consistently underestimated the time and energy needed just to maintain delivery.
We faced increased pressures on budgets and headcount, which led to high staff turnover. We also faced commercial, legal and tax challenges. Working through these took time and effort but led to service teams achieving some impressive outcomes.
For example, our Initial Teacher Training Recruitment Services have helped provide more than 1,000 extra initial teacher training candidates. The Teaching Vacancies service is saving schools more money than ever. We’ve enabled over 200,000 people to start either the Early Careers Framework or National Professional Qualifications.
It’s been great to enable this, but it has been at the expense of other changes that would have moved us towards our service line vision faster.
Leading empowered teams at scale is hard! I didn’t always find the role glamourous or fun, but I’m proud to have done it. I am leaving the DfE satisfied with the outcomes our service line is achieving, and the credibility we’re building across the department. There is more Teacher Services can do as a service line, and I look forward to seeing how the teams take things even further!
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For some time, I had been thinking about offering work experience. I just hadn’t quite got around to progressing the idea.
So, when I received a message on my netball team WhatsApp chat, I jumped at the chance. A parent at the club was desperately seeking an opportunity for her daughter.
In this post, I'll explain how I organised a 4-day experience for 4 students, and how my multidisciplinary team helped me.
I was working on a service for the public in a private beta phase. This meant that we didn’t have any concerns over sensitivities.
I was in a well-established, high performing team - who all had time and desire to help. This was important as it was too much work for one person to take on alone. Input and ideas from others would also enrich and improve the week for the students.
I had the basic idea:
I spoke with the work experience lead at the school to make sure that what I was preparing was appropriate.
I asked if there were any other students that might want to join. I felt that if one student came on their own, it might be a bit daunting, and we typically work in teams. One student soon turned into 4.
Each student came with their own laptop and worked from a room I’d booked out for the week.
The idea was for the students to get a taste of what it’s like to work in a service design team, and learn about working in a central government department.
My aim for all students was to:
A group was formed to deliver sessions to cover these aims, and I brought other DDaT people in from outside of our team to share their experiences too.
It was a busy week. I kept the agenda flexible, providing the students with lots of breaks.
In short, 16 professionals delivered 15 sessions over 4 days. Most sessions were delivered in person, with some delivered through teams.
Our sessions included:
The students had a ticket on our Jira board and gave updates on our daily stand-up calls. They worked with our multidisciplinary team to define the problem, understand user needs and come up with some prototype designs for their solution.
We focused on user-centred design, and covered accessibility, research methods, personas, and problem statements. We worked on paper as well as digital tools like Lucid Spark.
I used a Trello board to manage their schedule. The students could access the board and the team also used it to help provide additional resources. I also arranged for 2 of our Deputy Directors and 2 of our Heads of Profession to talk to them about their education and career paths.
At the end of the 4 days, they presented their designs to some of the friendly faces they had met during the week. The students came up with 4 great design ideas. Our policy colleague was so impressed that they asked me to present the ideas to the project board.
We ran a survey at the end of the week to gather feedback. All 4 students said that they would recommend this experience to others.
‘It was great to find out that not everyone went to uni, like some did apprenticeships, and everyone has had lots of different roles and experiences … it’s reassuring that you don’t need to know exactly what you want to do now to be successful in the future.’
- Ruby and Alicia
‘Each session was highly informative and interesting, and provided a clear picture on what it's like to work in this sector of the civil service. The team have been extremely helpful and welcoming to us and it has been a lovely working environment.’
- Kate
We received excellent feedback, but there is always room for improvement.
For example, the students said there was a lot of information to take in on the first day. They said it could have been more interactive, with perhaps a few quizzes. This is great, actionable feedback for us.
There was also the way that the students were able to take up the opportunity. In future I want to think about ways to offer this experience in a more inclusive way. How could we attract various students from different backgrounds, with different interests and skills? Perhaps targeting students from less affluent areas who have fewer opportunities.
There are so many students each year seeking work experience placements. My team and I really enjoyed facilitating ours, so I'd recommend doing it too, if you can.
For government departments - the school will ask you to provide a copy of your public liability and indemnity insurance. As a central government department employer, we do not have this - we are covered by the Crown indemnity. So, I just had to provide the link.
I also needed to complete forms for the school, and make sure I understood any special requirements and have emergency contact details for each student.
Overall, this experience made me understand how these types of placements form such an essential part of a students’ development. It helps to inspire them to explore ideas for future careers.
If you or your team have any other tips on organising work experience, or if this post has inspired you to give it a go, please let us know – we'd love to hear from you.
]]>As a user researcher and a Fast Streamer I’ve moved between different teams to learn and get experience. At first, I was intimidated by how mature most of the DfE service teams were. But I soon learned that developing teams is an ongoing process and everyone has a part to play.
I’m drawn to the idea of building and growing teams, so in this post I’ve shared some tips that have helped me steer my team into being a more collaborative one.
It sounds obvious but having regular check-ins (outside of sprint events) with the people you’re collaborating with, can transform your team's culture.
Even ad hoc ‘huddles’ on Slack can become safe spaces to challenge and address issues and help brainstorm solutions. The brilliance of the hive mind in a high-pressure environment is the secret to solving problems.
In a hybrid workplace, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by channels and group message threads. Bringing together connected disciplines in one chosen channel was a game-changer.
I began by setting up a channel for user researchers, content designers and interaction designers. This channel was largely self-sustaining, with colleagues from different teams asking each other questions. Our professions overlap, so this channel also became the epicentre of team-level changes that had real impact. For example, advocating to adopt Figma for sharing designs with the wider team.
In any government department, alignment can be challenging at the best of times. Having this collaborative channel was helpful to workshop ideas - be it around ways of working or decisions around tools. Once issues were raised, we could act to prioritise them and champion them in conversations with our wider teams, and in sprint events such as retrospectives.
A frequent pain point was feeling overwhelmed by comments on our work. My response was a simple ‘bucketing’ system to filter out noise and streamline actions.
When kicking off a piece of work that involved all 3 professions, we decided to bring 3 different streams of feedback into a single ‘canvas’. Having advocated as a group to move from Lucid to Figma, we put our proposed designs on a digital whiteboard and used themed ‘buckets’ to sort comments, creating a list of actions in order or priority. Figma was better for us due to improved user-friendliness and it being easier for guests and contractors to access for collaboration purposes.
Although there were lots of us trying to capture and respond to over 50 comments, it was still overwhelming.
As user-centred design (UCD) professionals we naturally welcome comments and feedback. But we also need time to digest and experiment without being constantly mindful of non-UCD people’s opinions.
The best compromise was to establish a ‘window’ for comments with a hard cut off period of 24 hours before testing. This gave UCD colleagues a reasonable amount of time to review and respond instead of being rushed, which would compromise the quality of our data.
As our research continued, I noticed that more and more colleagues from our wider team were coming to the user research presentations (sometimes known as ‘playbacks’). This was positive. But there were still people within the team that didn’t attend any sessions.
This was likely due to their workloads, but a team retrospective revealed some other factors. For example, one developer didn’t feel connected to our project and wanted more visibility.
The next step here would be to establish a culture where everyone feels willing and able to attend at least one research session in a round. Posting a link in a channel to encourage team members to sign-up is not enough.
As a user researcher, I need to try to actively encourage other disciplines to attend sessions. Approaching team members directly is a better method. This can help to build empathy within the team and make work tickets feel more tangible. Hearing feedback directly from users adds context and value to your work – it creates a more nuanced understanding of their needs.
For future playbacks, we could perhaps focus on the 'need to know' points. For example, promoting the playback as ‘the top 3 to 5 ‘need-to-know’ insights from this round’.
In a multidisciplinary team we had a split – half the team were there for most of what was presented, but the other half were not. How does the team navigate this? This is something I am continuing to explore as part of the user research community of practice. Watch this space.
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]]>Thursday 18 May 2023 was Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). GAAD is in its 12th year now. By this point, we’ve had enough of just raising awareness. It's time to take real action.
Here at DfE Digital, Data and Technology, we decided to use the day to build empathy - so that people prioritise making our services accessible.
In this post I explain what an accessibility scavenger hunt is and share some tips on how to run a successful one yourself.
An accessibility scavenger hunt is a challenge to find a series of facts and figures online. But the challenges must be done while using assistive technology. It’s an insight into to the everyday experiences and frustrations of an assistive technology user.
I was introduced to the format by Catrina Imray and Andy McNicoll at Social Security Scotland. Credit goes to Home Office Digital’s Guerman Cope and Jamie Fraser for the idea - they use it as part of their accessibility training.
Anyone could develop a disability at any point, whether it’s temporary or permanent. We’re also more likely to become disabled as we get older. Most people will experience disability at some point in their lives – whether that’s directly, or a close friend or relative becoming disabled. Even if you don’t know it yet, accessibility matters to you. Personally.
A scavenger hunt highlights how badly designed some websites are, and how users with accessibility needs are excluded from using them.
1. Choose what assistive technology to use. Something that everyone can learn quickly is best. For that reason, we chose to do some tasks using keyboard-only navigation, and some tasks using browser zoom at 400%.
2. Set your tasks - choose examples of both good and bad website design. You’ll need to test the websites with the assistive technology you’ll be using in the session to find examples. You need difficult examples that will make everyone frustrated at how badly designed websites are, and some good examples that will show people the impact of good design. We won’t name and shame the bad examples that we used, but we used GOV.UK and the BBC website as good examples.
3. Start the scavenger hunt. Tell people what you’re going to do. Make sure everyone has the instructions and is comfortable with the tasks. Ask your participants to find something that’s listed on the page. For example - go to the GOV.UK homepage and find out how many ministerial departments there are.
4. If it’s a big group like ours was, put people into smaller breakout rooms. Encourage everyone to have a go at the tasks, and to talk as they do them. This means people can build a team spirit of ‘it’s us against the website’ and find solutions to common problems together. It’s a good idea to try your bad examples first and finish with the good ones to make the most impact.
5. Collect feedback. Bring your groups back together and see how people found the tasks. What was easy? What was difficult? Was there anything they found surprising? Talk about what it felt like and check people’s stress levels. Ask everyone what they’d do differently in the future to add accessibility focus to their work.
We created a survey to collect participant feedback to see what they thought of the session. All the participants who responded:
We received some great feedback:
“I read WCAG, I've been on training courses, I've learnt from colleagues. But what I've always wanted is to see real life examples of how people use assistive technology and what it's like for them.”
- Stephen Milnes
“It was a very frustrating experience ... a really helpful reminder for why we put so much time and effort into making sure our services are accessible.”
- Laura Heatherley
“An excellent exercise in creating empathy for the daily experience of people with access needs.”
- Ady Horan
If you or your team have any other tips on how to run an accessibility scavenger hunt, or if this post has inspired you to give it a go, please let us know – we'd love to hear from you.
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