Life Events Service Design: Project Closure Blog

At the beginning of January we took stock of the project and what activities we had planned for the next few months.

Through contacts we had established through the project and the Steering Group we set up in September, we now have three distinct areas of work to focus on. All of these are related to work councils were doing in supporting citizens with the Cost of Living crisis and these fitted into the theme of helping citizens access services when entering a state of poverty that the project was exploring.

We are taking forward and have started the following areas of work:

• Helping Pembrokeshire Council design a new Cost of Living landing page for their website.
• Helping Carmarthenshire design an infographic product to promote their existing Claim What’s Yours web site.
• Undertake a content critique on the Vale of Glamorgan Cost of Living web pages and provide additional help with design and accessibility.

Given these areas of work will take a reasonable amount of effort and time from the Team, we felt it best to run these activities separately and not as Alphas within the Life Events Service Design project. Therefore we have decided to close the project as we feel the original aims cannot be further progressed and the activities we are taking forward are better suited to the role of the Team.

The project has generated a lot of very useful user research and we will continue to learn from this and apply its findings in the work we will be taking forward with the three councils.

The project unearthed a lot of activity taking place generally within the Cost of Living area, amongst councils, but also in other public bodies, notably CDPS.  The Cost of Living Design workshop we co-run with CDPS back in November was a highlight and we will be looking to work with them further.

Some other important lessons were learnt too by the Team, in terms of stakeholder involvement, understanding technical and supplier constraints councils have and the effort involved in trying to design new services.  Again, these experiences were useful and have helped the Team better understand the work they can do and how best to work with local authorities.

We will look to hold Show and Tell events covering the work we are doing and in conjunction with the councils we are working with, details of these will come out at a later date and when there is appropriate content to show and tell about. The final report can be found here.

In the meantime should there be any questions on the work the project has done, or any queries to the Team around applying user centred design to build better digital services, then do please get in touch with us  digitalteam@wlga.gov.uk