Today I had a meeting with the Team lead of my Department at WCG (Western Cape government). This meeting was aimed at uncovering a suitable methodology for research, where I could incorporate WCG.

Dr Marco Pretorius is Team lead of Usability for E-4CG (Department of premier and e-innovation) for the Western Cape Government. He has completed his PhD focused on institutionalising User Experience (UX), usability and user-centred design for government systems. We met to chat about how I can incorporate my job into my research and he was incredibly helpful.

We started looking at what path I was going on at the moment. He knows that I am passionate about data information, info graphics and diagrammatic thinking. My current occupation here at the Western Cape Government was a Usability Architect and designer, this would include jobs such as creating wireframes which are usable and useful for our users, then finding the right users and testing the system with them in the Western Cape Government testing lab.

I have always been fascinated with people, and their backgrounds on a personal level. I think that is why I enjoy design so much, because of it’s respect for human values and for creating systems or products for a particular mindset. So, we brainstormed about possibilities in this area. Our main areas which we looked at were;

User centred design process

User journey maps

Personas

Scenarios

User interviews

Information visualisation

Task flow

Systems observation

e-Government

Government Services

Users needs

We started mapping out my what we as a Usability team need to achieve and what I was interested in. We found that there was a great need to find out what services our users need to achieve to live better lives. We needed to conduct in depth research regarding ethnography of our users, then we needed to record this research and display it in a way where we can analyse them and find out how to supply these electronic services.We came up with a methodology to create personas, user journey maps, task flows, prototypes and User testing for South African e-government  automated services.

This would include all of the topics mentioned above.