Case study - DEFRA

Leaving the EU and Common Agricultural Policy has presented UK farming with the biggest challenge in a generation.

With new legislative powers at the UK's disposal, a new agenda was set for the future of farming as part of the 25 year Environment plan.

To meet non-disclosure agreements, information maybe obfuscated. Views written are my own.

Background

Agricultural Environmental Schemes (AES) have been part of the farming landscape for over 20 years. Their aim is to offset the impact of intensive farming to help preserve our environment.

Accompanying the uncertainty that Brexit created for many UK farms, came an opportunity to bring a new mandate through the 25 year environment plan, including:

Clean air
Clean and plentiful water
Thriving plants and wildlife
Reduction in and protection from environmental hazards
Adaptation to and mitigation of climate change
Beauty, heritage and engagement with the environment

The challenge

Previous schemes had struggled to strike the balance between uptake levels and environmental benefits.

Key objectives included:

Design a new simple service to replace existing AES with improved scheme uptake
Working across the Future Farming programme to create a joined-up experience for farmers
Rebuilding trust with the farming community after years of mixed farming messages

My Role

Service design

Working closely with Defra's Policy team, Forestry Commission, Environment Agency and Natural England to understand goals, scope and constraints.

ELM service — Identifying pain points within current Agri-Environment Schemes (AES)

Listening to the experiences of farmers and foresters to understand the farming context, pain points and opportunities.

Service map — To-be service mapping; end-to-end, front-to-back

Interaction & content design

Understanding the bigger picture then refining the detail:

Sketching preliminary designs and drafting content for interfaces and user guidance
Building responsive HTML / CSS prototypes working to WCAG
Testing and iterating the interface to optimise user experience
Working to GOV.UK design patterns

HTML snippet — Rapid prototyping using the GOV.UK toolkit

Research & analysis

Meeting with a wide range of service users to understand their needs, experiences and identify opportunities.

Call centre workshops — Workshop held with an operational team to understand the types of calls and when they happen.

Formulating and running workshops, conducting analysis and building evidence to drive design decisions.

The Design Sprint

The following case study details a 5 day workshop conducted with the Environmental Land Management (ELM) and Tree Health policy teams as part of our wider Alpha work.

We were keen to explore how we could encourage different workstreams to work together to help deliver positive policy outcomes whilst supporting the needs of our service users.

Bringing together the right people for the amount of time needed was one of our biggest challenges. After some convincing (and diary juggling) we confirmed our invites and set a date.

We based our workshop on Google Venture's process. If you're interested in running your own event, GV provide more detailed information (opens in a new tab).

Goals

Programme level

Investigate how design thinking can be applied to policy design
Create wider awareness of user centred design methods to deliver tangible learning and help de-risk delivery
Build a workshop format which can be reused to enable rapid learning across other workstreams

Service level

Create common understanding of the ELM / Tree Health problem space
Drive policy discussion and expedite decision making
Generate and evaluate ideas, build a narrative and prototype

Scenario

Tree Health, Forestry Commission and ELM identified a candidate problem to focus the design sprint activity:

A land manager receiving ELM payments finds a tree disease in their woodland.

We explored this scenario from a user’s perspective and investigated a simple service design which supported wider tree health resilience.

^{Day 1}

Start at the end

Sprint goal

We discussed and agreed what a successful outcome looked like:

Our services support and incentivise woodland managers toward good behaviours which deliver a resilient woodland landscape.

Setting a goal — Agree what an ideal future looks like and map potential risks to delivering our goal.

Sprint questions

Mapping the problem

Ask the experts

Capturing and grouping ‘How might we’ statements after interviews with specialists.

^{Day 2}

Sketch ideas

Pick a target

Lightning demos

Sketch ideas

Create & review gallery

Create and review gallery — Ideas were pinned up on the wall and presented back to the team.

^{Day 3}

Create a storyboard

Speed critique

Create the steps

Building the storyboard — Building the completed storyboard for prototyping.

^{Day 4}

Create the prototype

Building the prototype

^{Day 5}

Test with woodland managers

Unfortunately the final day of user research was delayed pending agreement from senior stakeholders and we didn't get to test our prototype. However we did take many positive learnings from the design sprint.

Washup

Retrospective — To close, we held a retrospective to discuss what went well and what could be improved in the future.

Despite not being able to test our prototype with users, we felt many of our program and service sprint goals had been achieved:

Program level outcomes

Successful investigation of how design thinking can be applied to policy design
Wider awareness created of user centred design methods
Creation of a reusable workshop format to enable rapid learning across other workstreams

Service level outcomes

Common understanding developed of the problem space
Policy discussion across workstreams with rapid decision making
Team ideation, evaluation and build of a testable idea

Conclusion

On reflection, we felt that the time and effort to organise and facilitate the design sprint paid dividends in terms of the insights and common understanding created.

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