User experience and research

Engagement with all impacted users is essential to the project’s user centred design approach, and to delivering a reliable, fit-for-purpose and valuable platform.

What is user research?

User research is the process of generating insights about system users including their behaviour, motivations, and needs. These insights can be broadly categorised into the following types:

• behavioural – what people do 
• quantitative – how much / how many 
• qualitative – why / how 
• attitudinal – what people say.

The better an organisation understands its users, the more likely the design and build of the new system will function well, while meeting user needs. User research aims to:

• learn about user behaviour and attitudes 
• identify key pain points and challenges in a user interface 
• define user needs and drive solutions 
• test user interface and screen designs to see what works and what doesn’t 
• identify user challenges and turn them into opportunities to improve the user experience.

Understanding the way users want to interact with the new platform and integrating this into the EFS design, will not only provide an improved user experience, but also, ideally, the best possible user experience.  

User research is pivotal to the EFS Project

The EFS Project has been undertaking a comprehensive program of user experience research activities, focused on scenarios and tasks related to payments, funding, and data collection. Through a range of activities and methods, the project team observes and tests desk patterns, pathways, familiarity of language and terminology, and how users interact with the experiential layer of the new system.

Many providers have opted in for their staff to participate in user experience research, and a selection of users from this opt-in list have already been invited to participate in research sessions.

What we are hearing

Identified insights so far have included:

• External users are concerned about information overload, and want information to be organised using visualisations, according to relevance and provider obligations. 
• External users want the ability to have greater linkage between systems to reduce multiple logins or manually going through multiple platforms to complete key tasks. 
• Visibility of compliance indicators, statuses and key milestones, located with guidance information as part of submitting collections that users can click into, where needed. 
• External users want to be able to access "find funding" and "link organisation", alongside other action and status specific cards e.g. "current compliance activities" on the new platform's homepage.
• Most external users wanted funding and grants related tasks or shortcuts on the homepage e.g. "find funding" and "available/open grants".
• More secure and efficient alternatives to manual inputs and the use of excel. 
• Providers are burdened by the manual upload of data and system errors. 
• Users experience significant issues with SchoolsHUB’s upload functionality, manual data submission, and data error correction, which are all time-consuming. 
• Users desire greater visibility into how their data is used, and improved access to history, service request logs, and year-by-year comparison reports. 

2025 EFS user research opportunities

Over the coming months we will be scheduling usability testing sessions to explore the experiential layer for payments, data collection, funding, organisation management and other important functionalities.

What is usability testing?

Participants perform a set of tasks in a controlled setting using a prototype of a user interface. The aim of these sessions is to test and simulate realistic activities users perform in the day-to-day of their roles, and evaluate the user interface experience.