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01. Understand users and their needs

Develop a deep understanding of users and the problem you’re trying to solve for them.

Doing user research to understand what users need and, where relevant, secondary research and analysis

  • We have done significant quantities of user research throughout Discovery, Alpha, and both Private and Public Beta
    • Discovery: our initial user research in 2020 included semi-structured interviews and understanding current process flows with approximately 60% of UK-licensed satellite operators, orbital analysts, critical national infrastructure groups, space weather forecasters, and diplomats. We then undertook a second round of user research in an Additional Needs Discovery in 2023 with 41 participants across the UK government, academia and international partners to understand their needs for Space Domain Awareness alerts and data, and how they may differ from the needs of oeprators.
    • Alpha: we spoke with 75% of UK-licensed operators to understand their user needs for our conjunction service, alongside 15 users across the UK government to understand their needs for both conjunction and re-entry services. We tested a prototype of the service to assess usability and functionality. Most users were interviewed twice to ensure that iterations of the user interface were appropriate and suitable. All user needs were recorded in the user needs database and interview notes saved to SharePoint for future reference. We continued to work with orbital analysts to test the technical feasibility of the emerging service and expanded our research to academics at Cranfield University.
    • Private beta: we have continued to do extensive research. Before the service was released to private beta in January, we tested with Cranfield University students to avoid testing fatigue from our users. In private beta we have onboarded 3 UK licensed operators, and have followed up with 1 on 1 sessions, drop in sessions, and data analysis.
    • Public beta: we have implemented a beta feedback banner onto the Monitor Space Hazards site to allow users to give their feedback, informing how we improve the service. We also send 1 month check-in emails to new onboarded users to get their feedback and identify any needs we are not meeting. We also explore user needs with prospective operator users through our introductory webinars with them, adding their needs to our user needs database and creating new tickets with actions for improvement on Jira if necessary.

Building quick, throwaway prototypes to test their hypotheses

  • We have used the GDS prototype kit throughout including to test new functionality within private beta before building.
  • We have also used lower fidelity artefacts where appropriate: for instance we mocked up tables in a Googledoc in order to experiment with different ways of displaying data, and created prototype maps using publicly available base maps and shapes in Microsoft Powerpoint.
  • Prototypes have been used throughout the project to test user interface design ideas quickly

Using web analytics and other data that’s available (for example from government call centres or third party services) to enhance their understanding of the problem

  • Web analytics are used to better understand how users interact with the service at public beta
  • Piwik Pro is used to track front-end analytics. It tracks and reports website traffic and user activity. Piwik Pro is a free web analytics programme similar to Google Analytics but without sharing users data wider than Monitor Space Hazards. Features include:
    • Tracking page views, bounce rates and average time per page
    • Tracking mouse-clicking, scrolling and hovering behaviours
    • Heatmaps that show you visually where your visitors try to click, move the mouse and how far down they scroll on each page.
    • Session recordings to see firsthand the user-experience of visitors on your website
  • Users in the private and public beta have been able to provide feedback on the service via an online form (linked in the beta header) and through attending our drop-in sessions/interviews.
  • We are always looking for new endpoints we can create to gather rich data on user analytics
This page was last reviewed on 7 December 2022. It needs to be reviewed again on 7 June 2023 .
This page was set to be reviewed before 7 June 2023. This might mean the content is out of date.