Working with the DTA to discern pivotal consumer needs to shape people's future digital experience.

Mapping both the emotional and behavioural customer journey

In the design of online federal government services the Digital Transformation Agency aims to cut through existing complexity and clutter and create universal and simple digital experiences. As a start point they engage quite deep reaching ethnographic discovery research. 

As one of the DTA’s research teams, our job was to spend time with people who were having a baby. Starting with human needs and feelings, we conducted extended immersions in-home with all kinds of new mums and parents to be, both typical and edge cases. We followed both their journey as a family and their non-digital and digital journey with services.

Our challenge as ethnographers was to avoid getting caught up with participants' specific issues with the legacy digital service. We focussed instead on developing a deep knowledge of the users, their situations, challenges and resulting needs.

We mapped the customer journeys people took and did an exhaustive task analysis detailing the steps, processes, government touch points and channels. We produced an alignment map to look at how well the service design features aligned with real-life customer behaviour and needs.

We identified key pain-points, identifying both the ‘easy wins’ and the bigger medium-term opportunities for the DTA.