The Welsh Government asked us to understand and validate the requirements for replacing their legacy data publishing platform. We identified their user and business needs, and developed a roadmap for delivering the new service.
The Welsh Government’s Knowledge and Analytical Services (KAS) is the unit which provides expert advice and insight on a range of policy areas. KAS works closely with Welsh Government departments and external partners to produce evidence-based research and analysis to inform decision-making. As a part of this work, they manage StatsWales, the official data publishing service for the Welsh Government. The service is used for collecting, processing and publishing statistical data about Wales. It provides a wide range of statistical information, covering topics such as population, health, education, the economy, and the environment, which is used by policy-makers, researchers, businesses, and the public to understand trends, identify challenges, and inform decisions.
Together, KAS and StatsWales play a vital role in supporting evidence-based policy-making in Wales. They work collaboratively to produce high-quality research and statistical information that helps the Welsh Government to understand the needs of its citizens, monitor progress towards policy goals, and make informed decisions about the allocation of resources.
It has been almost a decade since the second incarnation of the StatsWales digital service went live. While it was cutting-edge at the time, the service hasn’t been improved or updated over the subsequent years. This meant that while both its users' needs and technology has continued to evolve, the original service has struggled to remain relevant in both areas – leading users to experience a wide range of issues from not being able to find or manipulate the data easily or working around outdated publishing workflows.
KAS created an initial list of the high-level requirements for what a new Welsh data publishing service would need to deliver. They asked us to undertake a Discovery phase to rigorously explore and understand how the current service is being used, how well it is meeting the needs of its users and to refine the requirements for creating a better service. Based on our discovery findings, we then recommended an approach for how to go about designing, developing and building a new service following the Welsh Government’s best practice approach.
Over a total of 8 weeks we reviewed multiple sources of information to gain a deep understanding of existing processes, the teams involved, the existing StatsWales service and explore similar products in the market. We mapped and visualised our findings to help communicate them clearly and succinctly with the team and stakeholders.
We conducted 1200 minutes of research over 20 remote sessions with 31 users of StatsWales. These were internal users who publish data and maintain the service and external users who consume the data. Sessions were in the format of semi-structured interviews and user-driven walkthroughs of the Stats Wales admin user interface and public website.
In addition, we launched a bilingual satisfaction survey to help benchmark the performance of the service across both English- and Welsh-first speakers.
We encountered a number of challenges while delivering the discovery into Stats Wales. While the KAS team were experts in their areas of statistics and analysis, they were new to the agile approach of digital service delivery fora Discovery phase according to the digital service standard framework.
As we always work in the open, we welcomed KAS colleagues to observe and participate in our processes and meetings throughout the project, being careful to explain all of the techniques that we used and their values. We provided agile coaching to familiarise colleagues with our processes and methods. Additionally, we invited an apprentice to shadow our user research lead, so they could learn about user research methods and best practices for gathering and analysing research data . We also invited the broader KAS team to an in-person design ideation workshop at their offices in Cardiff. They immediately saw the benefits of our in-person collaborative approach – it was the first time several colleagues had met face to face following the pandemic.
“[This was a] valued opportunity to reflect on what we deliver” Stakeholder feedback from a collaborative workshop, Welsh Government
A new challenge for Marvell was to ensure that all the research that we did could be done in either English or Welsh. We made sure that we had access to Welsh interpreters, for conducting user research in Welsh. We also liaised with translators to make sure that a user survey published on the site was available in both Welsh and English, as well as user recruitment materials and other artefacts.
Our work together highlighted that the majority of the initial business requirements were validated by genuine user needs and provided insight as to why they were required and the expected outcomes. We also found that some business requirements weren’t actually needed by users, and could be de-prioritised. We even identified some new user needs that hadn’t been captured before.
Our analysis also found that data consumers needed the new StatsWales service to make data and metadata easy to access and find. They needed to be able to manipulate and personalise the data set of their choice; to be able to understand the approach for collecting the data and the narrative behind it.
Other key finding were that internal users wanted to
We provided KAS with a new direction of what needs to be done to replace the existing StatsWales service. We produced clear evidence to support this and have used the outcomes of our research to validate, inform and prioritise the requirements for the new service. Based on this, we created a high-level delivery strategy in several phases, according to the government digital service development framework and provided an estimate of the cost and duration of the required work.
KAS adopted all of our recommendations, commissioning a new replacement service to be delivered. We’re continuing to work with them to deliver that service, and having passed the project’s Alpha assessment, the team are working to deliver a private beta of the new service later this year. You can read about the Alpha phase here.
The new service will make Welsh statistical data more easily available and accessible to its users. We’re excited to have the opportunity of developing, together with KAS and their users, a new service that publishes timely data to help make decisions for improving life in Wales.
Whether you’re ready to start your project now or you just want to talk things through, we’d love to hear from you.
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