User research is currently focusing on the Digital Services Store and some of the ideas we have for how to improve it.
Right now, only buyers have access to the Digital Service Store and this round of research focused on them.
What we found out
- As with Digital Marketplace the ‘OR’ option doesn’t meet the needs of buyers who expect to be choosing groups of people.
- The filters are confusing. In particular, capability and role filters are confusing people who do not understand the relationship between the two. They appear to be independent on the page, but are in fact related to each other.
- We need to provide a redesigned homepage that gives people an overview of what the site actually provides.
As a buyer using the website you can look forward to seeing some changes in the next few weeks - we look forward to your feedback.
Opening visibility to suppliers
We want to make the Digital Services Store as open as Digital Marketplace but in a piece of research we conducted a couple of months ago a very small number of suppliers objected to the prices being visible in public. Get in touch on dsf-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk if you would like to participate in a further piece of research on making the Digital Services Store open. The current approach of hiding the site behind a login in order to keep pricing private doesn’t meet the user need to be able to understand the digital services store and what suppliers offer within it.
Quantitative analytics data balanced with qualitative user research
The problems of openness are reflected in the site usage data that we’ve already started tracking. Analytics confirm that people aren't getting past the Digital Services Store login page. There's significant demand for the service - the login page (which acts as the gateway to buyers finding services) got about 2.2K unique pageviews in the last 30 days (Oct 26 - Nov 24). But only about 200 people reached the actual service in the same period.
The login page is the biggest barrier to people using the service. In order to improve this, and help suppliers get more work, we're working to remove this.
Simpler, clearer, faster buying
Before we move the contents of the Digital Services framework to the Digital Marketplace we need to understand what buyers need from the tool to help them buy. Making changes to the current live services will give us an opportunity to fully test improvements, measuring them to gauge impact on usability. We will be using analytics and user research that will help us to see how any changes are affecting the service and if we’re making the right decisions.