When the Academy moved to Government Digital Service (GDS), it put us in an ideal position to collaborate with digital, data and technology communities from across government to understand their learning and development needs.
We met with specialists from the user-centred design community, including user researchers, interaction designers, content designers, service designers and accessibility leads.
From research that they had undertaken, we discovered that there was a need to provide an awareness level course on why and how we research and design government services.
What the course is and who it is for
The new course covers what user centred design is and why it’s important; how user centred design is done in an agile team; and how the different disciplines in user centred design work together.
The 1-day course is for people interested in design and user research in government. You might be a product manager, delivery manager, analyst or technical architect who wants to work more effectively with designers and researchers. Or you might be a generalist civil servant or policy maker who wants to know about the basics of design and user research.
For some users, this course will be the beginning of a further learning and development journey towards becoming a user-centred design specialist.
How we developed the course
The learning outcomes for the course were developed with a team of user-centred design practitioners. We ran an alpha and some betas, iterating the content and delivery approach based on user feedback.
We will continue to work with the specialist communities across government to understand their learning and development needs as they build capability. And part of this work will be to design learning journeys to support the digital, data and technology job roles and careers.
You can sign up for the new course which is now available from all our Academy locations.
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