Export Control Organisation
ECO : 2016
Research for Discovery
I was part of the Discovery phase for Export Control and Organisation project at BIS, where I was running the user research and my process was as follows;
- Auditing & competitor research.
- Assumption mapping – hypothesis statements where we focused on testing risk firstly.
- User interviews (face-to-face & phone calls).
- Analysing the interviews & research.
- Show & tell presentations as well as workshops for 60 external users.
- Analysed our research by looking at the roles and responsibilities per user group together with their pain points and needs plus possible solutions moving forward. I identified the commonalities across these groups in compiling the key success factors.
Research findings
Our Inception stage only lasted a day, but having had input from all the stakeholders of whom I should be looking to interview it became pretty clear time would be an issue!
I made the decision to use the first four weeks of Discovery interviewing Exporters, Importers, ECO department teams and Other Government departments. I would end up interviewing 72 people in 18 days.
With my research process in identifying the issues currently faced with the system used for applications of licenses to export goods to and from the UK. Having conducted 72 interviews over a three week period with ECO department users, Other Government department users, HMRC and Border control, we presented out initial findings in two workshops with a select list of external micro, SME’s and macro businesses. We had breakout areas in the conference afterwards where we got to speak with these users and gather further insight in to the potential solutions we had presented earlier.
Once I was back in the office I gathered all the feedback form my initial interviews as well as our workshop feedback by looking for commonalities each user group had experienced with the system.
Below are the photos of my groupings as well as some of my presentation slides I designed for our users workshop as well as our bi-weekly internal show & tell sessions to the ECO department, other government departments as well any interested employees within BIS building.




Presentation infographicsÂ





