Client story

Debt service design for Digital Delivery for Shared Platforms (DDSP)

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

Situation (The Challenge)

Digital Delivery for Shared Platforms (DDSP) evolves and transforms some of the most critical systems in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Scrumconnect were brought onboard to support an existing team with the design and delivery of a new customer-facing service for people who have fallen into debt that will empower them to take ownership and manage their debts.

Our Activities

Applying our user-centered design techniques we understood and mapped out the end-to-end service. The elements of this involved:

  • Defining the needs of the users
  • Understanding the technical landscape
  • Identifying service breakdowns
  • Learning about pain-points and any potential opportunities

By undertaking the above scoping and broadening our understanding of the challenge the Scrumconnect team challenged the current thinking around the service and proposed a different design strategy that we believed would better meet the needs of the organisation and its customers.

Based on extensive research the team created an alternative minimum viable product (MVP) prototype based on a set of well considered and thought through design hypotheses. This included an optimised user journey that uses Government Digital Services (GDS) design patterns. User friendly content provided a simple, seamless and intuitive user experience that maximises engagement and reduces operational costs and inefficiencies.

The MVP was designed to allow customers with one Universal Credit (UC) new claims advance who had since moved away from benefits to take ownership and manage their debt in a flexible and sustainable way. We believed that this would make customers feel more in control and therefore more likely to work with the team to make the repayments needed.

Outcomes

The MVP performed very strongly in lab based user testing sessions. The next step is to build a private BETA service based on the MVP so customers can engage with the system and perform real-world transactions with the service. This will allow the team to learn and understand further their customers needs and in turn further optimise operations.