MHCLG: Delta grants discovery
Understanding a critical national service, and finding quick wins to improve it
Role: Senior Interaction Designer (freelance), Softwire. Client: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
Outputs: User research, four personas, prioritised improvements using the GOV.UK Design System, a quick-wins roadmap and plans for Alpha.
Delta is how MHCLG collects data from, and pays grants to, local government and other organisations. It processes billions of pounds every year and is classed as Critical National Infrastructure. Working alongside Softwire’s Senior User Researcher and the MHCLG client team, I helped run a discovery phase to understand who uses Delta, where it fails them, and how it could be improved.
Listening to the people who use it
We interviewed 20 internal and external Delta users across MHCLG and local government, in 60-minute sessions, to understand:
How they experience setting up, approving and paying grants
Where the key problems and points of service failure are
How Delta could help them manage grants more effectively
From this, we identified the main pain points and created four personas representing Delta’s key users.
Quick wins for a live service
Because Delta is a live, critical service, users couldn’t wait for a long-term redesign. I recommended improvements that could be made within roughly six fortnightly sprints, using proven components from the GOV.UK Design System to tackle many of the pain points quickly and consistently.
Alongside these quick wins, we created a roadmap with medium-term design and research plans for an Alpha phase.
Discovery outputs: personas, prioritised improvements and a quick-wins roadmap.
Two quick-win improvements to the live service using GOV.UK Design System components
From discovery to funded next phase
A few months after discovery, MHCLG secured funding to take the improvements forward.
What people said
“Working with Sam has been an absolute delight, and comes with the highest recommendation from myself, and the whole company.”
Lauren North, Senior Digital Project Manager, Maverick (MHCLG project)