Session type:

Talk

Presented by:

Kola Wale

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

Session time:

23 Sep 12:15 — 13:00

Session duration:

45 minutes

About the session

Theme: Testing assumptions

Public services are often designed around assumptions about how people behave, interpret information or engage with systems. When these assumptions go unchallenged, services can unintentionally exclude the very people they are meant to support.

In this talk, Kola shares several real examples of how everyday design decisions created unexpected barriers for users interacting with services. Using these stories as a starting point, he introduces a practical approach for working with assumptions responsibly through hypothesis-driven, iterative service improvement.

The session explores how teams can surface assumptions, test them through small service changes and learn from real user behaviour to design services that better reflect the realities of the people they serve.

Participant takeaways:

  • an approach for multidisciplinary teams to move away from designing around imagined behaviour, instead allowing services to evolve based on what people actually do
  • how to reflect on assumptions you regularly encounter in your own work and consider how these could be reframed and tested within the constraints of public sector delivery

About the speaker(s)