Croydon Borough Council

UX/UI consultancy and Agile coaching within a major London local authority, helping improve digital services while supporting more user-centred ways of working.

Introduction

My work with Croydon Borough Council combined UX/UI consultancy with Agile coaching, bringing together two areas that had become increasingly connected throughout my career: improving the digital experience for users and improving the way teams design and deliver those services.

Working within a large local authority meant dealing with complex services, multiple stakeholders and the needs of a diverse population. My involvement included helping shape user interfaces and digital experiences while also supporting teams in adopting more collaborative and Agile approaches to delivery, ensuring that user needs remained an important part of the development process.

Improving Digital Services Around User Needs

Local authority digital services need to support a particularly broad range of users, often accessing important information or trying to complete essential tasks. This makes clarity, accessibility and ease of use fundamental parts of the user experience.

My work with Croydon Borough Council involved UX/UI consultancy aimed at helping create digital experiences that were easier for users to understand and navigate, while recognising the organisational and technical requirements within which council services operate.

Combining UX/UI with Agile Delivery

An important aspect of the engagement was that my role extended beyond interface design. I also worked with teams as an Agile Coach, helping develop more collaborative and iterative approaches to delivering digital services.

UX and Agile can complement each other particularly well. Both encourage teams to understand the problem, involve users and stakeholders, test assumptions and improve solutions progressively rather than treating requirements and designs as fixed at the beginning of a project.

Supporting Teams as Well as Products

This combination of UX/UI consultancy and Agile coaching reflected the continuing development of my own role. Improving a digital service is not always simply a matter of improving its interface; sometimes the greatest opportunity comes from improving the processes and ways of working used to create it.

Helping teams collaborate more effectively, maintain a focus on users and respond to changing requirements can ultimately have as much influence on the quality of a digital service as the design of an individual screen.

Read the Full Project Story

This article provides a short introduction to my work with Croydon Borough Council. For more information about the project, my role and the wider professional context, read the full Croydon Borough Council project page on Mike-Speight.co.uk.