Department for Education - Get help buying for schools
The problem
There are a large amount of schools that are not equiped or trained to deal with the complexities of buying goods or services in a compliant manner.
My role in the project
As the sole interaction designer I was responsible for all interactions within the service, whether it's the support request or how the admin team work on a case. I worked closely with the service designers, content designers, researchers and development team. I used a mix of the Gov prototying kit to produce working forms and systems. I have incorporated Figma into my process to allow me to quickly mock up case management screens.
Request for help
Getting schools the support they need should be an easy process with the least resistance. We devleoped a simple form with minimal questions that would allow a school or organisaion to request help. The support request creates a case for the admin team to pick up in which then follows a process where the admin team collect more information and hand hold many schools through the buying process.
Case management
When a school asks for help then a case is created and a member of the admin team will pick it up. The admin team are buying specialists, each with their own key areas so they can give very specific advice. I helped to create the bespoke case management system with another designer and I continued to improve the service as the only designer. The highlight of this project was working very closely with the admin team, gaining their trusts and iterating based on research rapidly.
Responding to changes in the market
When the energy crisis hit we responded by focusing on what we can do to help schools deal with rising costs. With the content designers and an internal energy expert we created guidance that we were able to deploy quickly. We updated the support request form targetting those schools looking for help with energy by asking them to upload their energy bills in an effort to speed up the support time.
Challenges
The biggest challenge of this project is that there are multiple moving parts, all at different GDS phases and this causes issues where we can't promote the full service to the public, but yet we need more support requests to fully test the admin process.
What's next
We're taking the support offering into a GDS assessment