Introduction to user research at the Home Office
User research is a thriving discipline at the Home Office. User researchers work across the department, gaining insight into our users to improve services for the public and civil servants.
When you join us
When you start as a user researcher at the Home Office you must:
- go to the ethics induction and sign up to our policy on data use and protection in research
- follow the Market Research Society’s code of conduct
- get involved in the user research community by going to meet ups, talks and events, to join email userresearchanddesign@homeoffice.digital.gov.uk
- read the GOV.UK Service Manual
How user research works at the Home Office
You should be doing different things at different times, so we’ve structured our guidance around the stages of an agile project:
- discovery is exploring the problem space
- alpha is learning what works best
- beta is building and refining the best option
- live is running and improving
What you must do at every stage
Although you’ll be doing different things at each phase, you must have one person with an access need in each round of research or testing. This helps teams build accessible services. You’ll need to dedicate some rounds of research to access needs.
Everyone in your team has to spend 2 hours every 6 weeks observing user research. This helps build empathy with users.
Related content
Read about how we approach user research at the Home Office in these guides:
You can find out about the training we offer in the user research training section and get more guidance from our user research blogs.