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Unity without uniformity

Back in the GDPR: user researchers won't break the law

User research session with observers sitting round a TV screen

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new EU regulation which strengthens people’s rights to understand and control how information about them is used. The user research team has been busy preparing for it.

Beyond usability testing – picking the right research method

Someone doing usability testing in a research lab

When people think about user research, their image is often of our research lab. Steve Bromley explores the attraction to usability testing in a lab, but also explaind how we decide on the research method used.

Our user engagement team – what do they actually do?

Salim from the user engagement team

The user engagement team is one of the largest in PDS. Despite being so many, there's probably a lot of people who don’t actually know who we are or what we do. That's what this blog post is for.

How many times did that happen? Why we don’t answer that question

Graph showing that an issue happening in testing once may happen up to 60% of time in the real world while an issue in testing happening 5 times might occur between 60% and 100% of the time in the real world

When presenting findings from usability testing, we often get asked ‘how many people had that issue’. In this post, Steve Bromley explains why we don’t answer that question.

Switching off our old search service

A screenshot of the new search service

On the 6 September last year, we turned on a new search service for parliament.uk. On the 19 January we'll switch off the ‘old service’ for all our users and we'll be fully decommissioning the service by the end of January.

Why user researchers work in multidisciplinary teams

Multidisciplinary product team in a meeting

The user research team are a busy bunch so how do they decide where to focus their time? Steve Bromley explains what these teams look like in Parliament and why user researchers support them.