by Project details
Date
June 2019
Employer
UC DWP (Universal Credit, Department of Work and Pensions, UK Government)
Key goal
To establish what Landlords need after the frequency of payments to them from DWP was increased, and to implement appropriate solutions for those needs.
My responsibilities
Workshop co-facilitation, ideation, prototyping.
Team members
Me – Interaction Design, Sean Walsh – Content Design, Jane Turner – User Research
How the project started
Landlords, claimants and agents had been frustrated for quite some time around the payment schedule DWP used to pay landlords on behalf of claimants. This created lots of consequences, such as claimant debt, and bookkeeping frustration for landlords. It was decided by DWP that landlords would receive rent payments on the same day that claimants got paid. While this was a welcome change, we needed to find out how this would impact the landlords bookkeeping and accounting processes, and what we would need to implement to aid them.
Key learnings
- Landlords needed a file with all the payment details to upload into their accounting systems
- They also needed a way to check and look into transactions when there was an error or conflict
Changes that were implemented
- Within a portal that only landlords can access, we added the ability to download an excel file containing the transactions for a time period that they would define
- A second function was added which allowed landlords to view, search and filter a list of all payments, and also allowed them to click into the transaction to access further details.
Benefits
- Landlord feedback stated that the new processes that they needed to do were simple and straight forward.
- We were also informed that compared to other data sources, the files UC generated required the least amount of changes before being uploaded into the landlord’s internal systems, and generated only a very small amount of errors.
After
As this is a government service that isn’t public, I can’t show screenshots or finished designs. If you would like to know more information, please get in touch.