Look up at the sky! Drones and the CAA.
people are always droning on about air safety
CLIENT: CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY
BRIEF: RESEARCH, DESIGN AND BUILD A NEW DRONES EDUCATION AND REGISTRATION SERVICE
WHEN: NOVEMBER 2018 — AUGUST 2019
SPRINT: ONGOING 2 WEEK SPRINTS
WHO: STEVE, FRANKI (SERVICE), MAX (RESEARCH), THE USUAL CAST OF DEVELOPERS AND ANALYSTS
METHODS: PROBLEM SOLVING; USER FLOWS; USER JOURNEYS; PERSONAS; SCENARIOS; DESIGN STUDIOS; SKETCHING; PAPER PROTOTYPING; RAPID PROTOTYPING; WIRE-FRAMING; USABILITY TESTING; SKETCH; INVISION; PRESENTING; AXURE; VIDEO; STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT; COMPETITOR ANALYSIS; USER INTERVIEWS; marketing & media
FEEDBACK:
“You’re smashing it out of the park!”
Nilesh, Delivery Manager
“Very impressed with Steve’s quality of output, goes above and beyond!”
Ameen, Product Owner
“Working with Steve on the Drones project has been a great experience - his outputs are to a high quality”
Ruth, Business Analyst
The Civil Aviation Authority is the safety regulator for the skies over Britain. Protecter of millions of holiday makers. A world leader in aviation. But can be brought to a standstill by some expensive toy drones.
The government passed a law in the spring of 2018, which would give new powers to the CAA when it came into force in November 2019. These powers were to help regulate the use of drones and model aircraft and gave the CAA the tools to research, design and build a brand new education and registration service. Unfortunately the laws were not written with the user in mind. A problem that would follow the project throughout the Government Design System process.
Background
The brief was to create a new service from scratch, within a hard deadline, while navigating some political and public relations turbulence. Our project would follow GDS processes, even though we would not strictly be part of gov.uk. This meant a Discovery phase to establish a need, an Alpha phase to try things out, and a Beta phase to build and test.
The service would allow people who fly drones or model aircraft to register themselves as someone with a drone, and to pass an online test to demonstrate they know how to fly within the new laws. Think of it as taxing your car, reading the highway code and passing your theory test.
What follows is a whistle stop tour of some key outputs and outcomes.
Discovery
We engaged with a client that had limited Design Thinking or Agile experience. So we spent some time proving the value of our design led approach to customer facing services. This meant involving the client in lots of user workshops. And getting lots of drone flying enthusiasts involved in some activities.
Some lovely drone and model aircraft hobbyists
After speaking to many of these chaps (and they were almost entirely chaps!) we felt we understood our core market pretty well. However it was much harder to understand people who were not enthusiasts, the people who had not even yet thought about flying a drone. So when it came to personas, we had to wing it a bit.
One of these people was in Harry Potter and Rising Damp
With a lot of research behind us, and a few assumptions we would test later, we got to thinking about how people might use the service. Our research meant we had some pretty clear problems, but also some problems that we were totally clueless about. Which made it great way to learn loads about what the service might look like, but more importantly, how the customer might interact with it. So I set about sketching some storyboards to help communicate and broadcast what was going to happen.
It’s not quite a Spiderman comic, but it did the trick
We passed our Discovery ‘assessment’ with flying colours. Time to do some designing.
Alpha
This is when we got to do lots of fun sketching - trying out ideas, knocking up quick wireframes and dirty prototypes and generally playing with post its and crayons. I ran a number of Design Studios involving the client, the researchers and the nerds, the analysts and basically anyone who could get involved.
Lots of Crazy 8s and ideation games meant we quickly designed screens and churned out prototypes. Each iteration a r/evolution of the last.
Government design systems - not pretty, but effective
It looks pretty simple here, right? But it wasn’t. Getting people to register in the right way was tough! Our service needed to feel appropriate whether the customer arrived from gov.uk or caa.co.uk. We had to work hard to understand all the different mental models that people might have when they arrive at the site.
Because of the confines of the government design system, it was a creative challenge to get the most important things on the screen at the right time, in the right way. To make it even more interesting, we had to find a way to build a new design system based on CAA branding that complemented the gov.uk design system. No easy feat!
However, with some collective moments of genius and being bold enough to try new things, we created a tight sign up journey.
The next challenge was education and testing. This was largely a content design effort, which I’ll leave to another day.
After passing our Alpha assessment, we were on the runway and ready to take off!
Beta
This was a period of fewer BIG PROBLEMS, and more tiny tweaks. We needed the prototype in a good position for the dev team to start polishing the code. We also needed to think about how we used images.
Images would be very important in our education and test sections. We had some quite complex rules to communicate, many of which were based on unusual circumstances. This proved to be great fun, but also a source of great existential angst. But we got there.
Rules. Just like being in school again.
Rounding off Beta has all been about fine-tuning, polishing the edges, crossing fingers. A lot of time spent with the tech team has been a lot of time well spent. The coded product being released into the wild is good, very good. The feedback has been resoundingly positive. We’ve landed safely.
What would I do differently?
It’s fair to say that the biggest challenge has been the way the legislation has been written. Basically, we were given a tough brief. We’re sharing our experiences with the rest of the agency, and key to this is having the confidence to challenge the legislation, to make sure it’s written in a way that best serves the punter. Because that way everyone wins.
Also - eat less biscuits, listen to more 1970s funk and get a travel pillow.
[edit - 2020: the service has been live for quite a while, and I’ve heard largely good things about it. See for yourself here. As with any new service, a lot has changed since the original vision but there’s still plenty of our blood, sweat and tears in there!]