The Metropolitan Police
82% approval rating from new recruits
The client
The Metropolitan Police approached us to help them to help design and validate a new responsive website service for new potential recruits. They wanted to design and validate the proposition and key user journeys before launch.
The challenge
The Metropolitan Police wanted to use our experience of user research to inform them of the most appropriate next steps.
The main objectives of the project were to:
• Validate the proposition with some of the sectors that are more difficult to recruit from such as females and people from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
• Identify the main user journeys and functionality required to complete the recruitment process.
• Identify any information gaps such as inappropriate terminology or imagery through moderated usability testing.
• Provide an action list of next steps to implement before the final service iteration went live.
Our approach
We initially identified the elements of the proposition that the Police team wanted to validate through a short workshop with the client. Understanding the key tasks users will need to complete enabled us to start to understand the type of functional requirements that would aid successful completion of the user journeys.
We were then able to use the output information to begin constructing a discussion guide for the moderated usability research. This was then used as a framework for the research sessions. We also referenced the Metropolitan Police persona groups to add further context to the elements to be reviewed. We were able to deliver on a challenging recruitment brief to find users in 15 different representative ethnically diverse user groupings.
The user research sessions were run by Channel Dynamics moderators in our in-house testing facilities over a three day period. During the interviews, users were encouraged to discuss their actions to give a better idea of their motivations and thought process for using the new recruitment facility.
“Channel Dynamics helped us research and validate our new recruitment service platform on mobile tablet and web before we launched to make sure that the functionality and details were correct before we sent the service live. We were impressed with their professionalism and the sessions were well managed by the team and our post implementation research showed a very high approval rating with new users.”Digital Development Manager at The Metropolitan Police
The results
The research and consequent user journey development workshops were a great success. The quick win check list from the research made it simple for the Metropolitan Police team to modify the proposition in some areas while retaining others. They received a 82% approval rating from new recruits using the new digital service as a result of the work.
