Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
They probably will launch two new products,
the first one was 24+, advanced learning loans.
Further education students can come onto our systems
and apply for funding to cover their tuition fees.
It’s a new product for us, for SLC,
we’ve never done anything in that particular space before.
The second one was to improve our login and registration process
across all the services that we offer.
Last year, we handled about 450,000 calls
from people who were trying to access their online account
and we reckon about 30% of these were avoidable,
had the online experience been better.
We used to have a really horrible set of password secret questions
where we forced them to say
what the surname was of their childhood hero was.
And a number of other things were very time sensitive
that didn’t you know, five years later, make sense to them.
We tried to really base the new design on as many existing metaphors
that we thought people would appreciate or understand
and not try and reinvent the wheel.
The whole department took on the challenge that our CIO put to us
which was “deliver this service online rather than on paper first.”
We did a lot of user testing to validate
that the same mental models would apply,
that we wouldn’t be fitting a screw peg into a round whole,
just because we thought the same questions needed to be asked.
We were iterating and improving on the product,
so that when we did eventually launch,
we felt confident that we had a […] product.
Deliver the projects in an agile way.
This does give you the flexibility to not only build in an incremental way,
which ultimately delivers a product that better meets your users’ needs,
but it also allows you to prioritise and recognise which features
will give you the most value, and release them first.
Make sure that your business and your IT teams are collaborating
so that they are not, so there is no […] between departments,
it’s very important that ideas are shared
amongst business and IT people at the same time.
Don’t try and fix everything at once,
you maybe start small and work up the way.
If we had jumped straight in, too quick and too early,
we wouldn’t have had all the learning behind us that we’ve got now.