Get help from other roles
We’re a multidisciplinary team made up of people with a diverse mix of skills and expertise. This helps us make better quality decisions that lead to great outcomes for users, as opposed to working in siloes which isolate people from each other based on their role. Great ideas come from combining different perspectives.
We can learn from people in other roles by working directly with them on projects. But when this isn’t possible, we can still ‘knock on their door’ and ask for help. It’s okay to ask for help.
If we ask people for help, it’s okay for them to say no and explain why. For example, they might not have capacity.
A basic template
You can use a few pieces of information to help other people understand, assess and respond to your ask for help.
- Which role (or person) you need help from: it’s easy to glance past general requests for help when busy, so make it clear to the person or people you need help from.
- What you need: describe what you might need someone to do and what their input helps unblock.
- How long it might take: minutes, hours, days or weeks? Let people know how much time they might need to invest (or ask for their opinion).
- Whether it’s time sensitive: if people know you need urgent help, they might be able to shift their priorities around to help.
Product and delivery managers
A product manager is responsible for the quality of their products. They use their knowledge of user needs and business goals to frame problems and set priorities for delivery teams. A delivery manager is accountable for the delivery of products and services. You can read more about product managers’ skills and deliver managers’ skills on the Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework.
You can ask a product manager and delivery manager for help with
- making a decision
- resolving a blocker
- improving pace of delivery
- working out what to do next
- scoping sprint goals
- using GitHub
- planning a workshop or meeting
- clarity of your role in a work stream
- escalating an issue
To get help
- send a direct message on Slack
- use a collaborative tool such as Padlet, Trello, Mural or Google Doc to frame your thoughts
- arrange a call
You can see who is the current product or delivery manager on the ‘Who we are’ page.
Designers
Our designers cover the interaction, service and graphic design disciplines. A graphic designer creates graphic elements that underpin interaction and service design. An interaction designer works out the best way to let users interact with services, in terms of both overall flow and at the level of individual design elements. A service designers design the end-to-end journey of a service. You can read more about user-centred design roles on the Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework.
On this team, we tend not to focus on job titles and we work as a group instead. Though each of us will have particular areas of expertise, we will often work together to draw from each other’s skills and knowledge.
You can ask a designer for help with
- understanding the problem you’re trying to solve
- working with the team to advocate for users
- interpreting user research and data
- proposing potential solutions to your problem
- making a prototype to test assumptions
- making sure the thing you’re working on is inclusive and accessible
- visual design assistance on the thing you’re working on
To get help
- send a message on Slack
- use a collaborative tool such as Padlet, Trello, Mural or Google Doc to frame your thoughts
- arrange a call
Designers on the team
Ciandelle
I have a background in both service and interaction design. I prefer to work on things where I can pay close attention to detail and visualise the work as part of the larger picture. I am really confident with the prototype kit. I struggle with physical drawing and graphic design.
Chris
I’m part of the team’s leadership group, so I’m involved in shaping the team’s priorities and improving how we work. If you’re not sure about how to involve design in something you’re working on, come to me! I also spend plenty of my time doing more hands-on design work, and am comfortable working across service, interaction and graphic design. I have also been at GDS and on the Design System a pretty long time, so get in touch if you’re after historical context on something – if I don’t know, I should know who does know.
Charlotte
I trained as a product designer with a bit of engineering but always preferred service design projects. GDS hired me as a motion graphic designer and illustrator, I mainly did slide decks, animations and social media assets. I’m happy to lend my hand to anything, I like to look at things in detail using grids and maths (engineering side) but I struggle with being super creative. I’m more iterative than innovative.
Mia
I trained as a graphic designer but since then I’ve done a range of things, including motion graphics, product design, interaction design, illustration, publication design and exhibition design. I can draw you a logo and I can help you refine your brand. Coding in HTML and CSS are fun things I like to do when the need arises, but I’m not up on the latest frameworks. I’m generally tool agnostic, and I will always start from first principles: why does this exist, what are we trying to do, what are the words we’re using? My philosophy is: don’t try to solve a content problem with interaction design. Also, if it’s not accessible, it’s not finished.
User researcher
Your user researcher will help your team learn about user’s needs by looking at behaviours and challenges. They will help you frame what you want to know, create questions, design and deliver research, then analyse findings and present insights.
When’s the best time to involve your user researcher?
It depends on where you are in your project and what kind of things you want to find out. In the discovery phase, if you’re looking to find out:
- who your likely users are and what they’re trying to do
- how they do it currently (for example, what services or channels they use)
- the problems or frustrations they experience
- what users need from your service to achieve their goal
You can find out more here in the Service Manual.
Generally speaking, you should involve your user researcher:
- as soon as you think you want to know something about users
- at project kick off
- when you’re knocking ideas around
- when you’ve discovered something mid-project that you need to know more about from a user’s perspective
- you want to find out if research has been done on an subject you’re interested in
- you want to talk about ethics, recruitment or consent
- if you’re stuck and don’t know which direction to go in (ie would knowing more about the users behaviour be helpful?)
Not when:
- you’ve written and sent a survey and want your user researcher to analyse the data
- you’ve decided to book some interviews
- you need a research plan writing
What to do first
Set up a chat or involve your researcher in your kick off discussions and share links to all the relevant documents with enough time for them to read them and come back to you with any questions.
This helps them to understand the context of the project you are working on. They’ll use this to set up a more detailed conversation that’ll help form a research plan (or confirm research isn’t necessary). They’ll use this conversation to find out what you want to know, why you need to know it, the impact the research will have and when it can be acted on.
With you, your user researcher will make a decision about whether and when to do research. Then your user researcher will decide the best way of doing it (methodology) and develop a research plan. You’ll all then agree on the research plan - which is an essential starting point to align the team on research goals.