Knowing your user and their needs

🎯 Theme: Knowing your audience and building products for them

This page explains how to apply user-centred design principles to data management by understanding the needs of primary users, secondary users, and beneficiaries to ensure public data creates positive social outcomes for communities.

Managing data in line with data users’ needs, whether they are residents, organisational partners, or municipal officials, will ensure that public data generates a positive policy and social outcomes. Understanding and applying user-centred design practices across the city’s data work will ensure that product teams are able to design data tools and platforms that meet users’ needs. Additionally, understanding how users make use of data, for example by collecting metrics on data usage or conducting user research to understand data stories, can help tell the story of how public data generates positive social impact for communities.

Users are commonly broken down into the following categories:

• Primary User: The general description of a primary user is one who will be directly using the tool or service that we provide. They will often co-create or ‘product own’ the tool and are often also responsible for its content and maintenance. This user is theoretically our specialist in their field or job. We ideally want detailed knowledge of how they carry out their tasks and what barriers they face in doing so. We aim to deliver a product that is a contextual response to the challenges faced by our user with the end beneficiary in mind as the proof of a successful delivery.
• Secondary User: A secondary user in our context is someone who receives outputs from the primary user. IE: we may be working with a data steward from a unit as our primary user and the reports and outputs they create go to decision makers who would be our secondary user. Where possible we want to work with secondary users to better understand what they require of the primary user. This increases the chance of expectations being met in terms of desired outputs. Outputs created by the primary user should be specific to the secondary users ideal situation meeting them at both their technical and focus levels.
• Beneficiaries: Beneficiaries are people like residents and community members. In a successful system they receive the benefits of the work we do. Ideally the engagements should always be as non extractive as possible and should be in a relationship where we are clear about sharing results or progress of the work we carry out. We should endeavour to share results and progress in a non cryptic way that doesn’t require technology or access to paid mobile data etc to access that knowledge.

In summary, user-centred data management can both improve efficiency by ensuring that departmental units use data-driven practices to address challenges that matter to residents, organisational partners, and municipal officials; and can also improve outcomes for communities by ensuring that public data is shared and applied in ways that meet community needs.

User research as a practice

User-centred design involves implementing design practices before the launch of a new data-driven program, tool, or platform based on users’ needs. Design processes focused on users’ needs must start with an exploration of potential challenges that data users face that can be solved with data. These explorations can be categorised as user research, and should be used to inform ideation around the implementation of data-driven solutions. Specific insights that emerge from user research can be attached to specific proposed solutions. Then user researchers can work with data owners to understand which proposed solutions are both feasible and impactful based on the results of the research.

For data users who are municipal officials, user research may involve conducting interviews with government data users as well as doing background research to understand administrative and policy environments. Insights emerging from user interviews can then be compared with or cross-referenced with background research to understand how the challenges that data users face are connected to institutional barriers to data use. For example, background research may reveal certain policies that restrict the sharing of important data across units or disagreements about data-sharing priorities. These insights may then be validated in interviews with municipal officials who are data users and should be taken into account when developing potential solutions and understanding their true feasibility.

For data users who work for organisational partners outside of government or who are municipal residents, user research may involve broader surveys of community needs beyond just what users need from data. All residents have a right to access and use public information, and may benefit from better information about specific policy issues so that they can make more informed decisions in their day-to-day lives. With this in mind, interviews with potential data users can also be supplemented by exploration of social challenges that are widely and deeply felt. Insights emerging from user interviews can be compared with these broader social analyses to identify which potential data-driven solutions will resonate with community needs and therefore meaningfully address hot button issues. This can ensure that public data is perceived by the general public as helpful and useful in addressing current community challenges.