At Register Dynamics, we’re data experts: data science, data architecture, data systems, engineering, compliance, processing, collection, strategy, quality… Clients come to us when they need a Data Solution. But as we’ve written before, the real magic happens when that strategic data expertise meets good user-centred design principles.

This can all sound a bit hand-wavey, but it really does boil down to this: We define and solve complex problems by harnessing data, focusing on user needs, and helping clients choose the best technology to get to a solution that works for them.

Meeting clients where they are

It’s not our style to swoop in and impose a one-size-fits-all solution. On each project, we get up to speed quickly with any new domain knowledge.

For example, we didn’t start with healthcare sector expertise. We’ve gained it through working with clients like Genomics England on a genome discovery service and the Department of Health and Social Care on a service built for medical procurement professionals, clinicians, and suppliers.

How did we acquire this domain knowledge quickly and effectively? Well, aside from the fact that we’re a team of intellectually curious nerds, we also ask good questions. We work closely with clients to fully understand the problem they want to solve, and test assumptions about users of the service they want to design.

And why should a team of data specialists care so much about becoming domain experts (beyond the pragmatic and cynical motivation of wanting to win bids)? Domain expertise and a full understanding of a client’s position and the sector landscape around them is essential to meeting them where they are and promoting fruitful collaboration. Data experts are often treated as interchangeable: brought in for “handle-turning” and the nuts and bolts of implementation rather than for creative, bespoke solutions that solve a whole problem. As a people-first data and tech consultancy, we build with data for real clients and real users.

Fully understanding the domain and the problem to be solved allow us to create the bespoke solutions that make us unique. It also reassures clients that we see them and we’re on their team.

Tackling problems with creative ideation

Once we have an understanding of the domain, users, and user needs, along with an idea of what data systems and sources we’re working with, we can ideate! Words like ideation and iteration can sometimes sound a bit daunting to client teams who have less experience with user-centred design and Agile ways of working. We can help bridge these gaps and help client teams build their capability.

Ideation is the part of the user-centred design process when we come up with lots of ideas to creatively solve the problem. Being experts in both data and user-centred design means we can guide a client through this process, applying best practices to identify innovative solutions. These best practices are informed by our past experience and familiarity with research on how people interact with technologies, services, and content.

We don’t shoot down ideas: we test them. User testing helps us validate or iterate on these ideas. Design iteration is what we call cycles of product or service testing (with a product or service being anything from a sketch to a high-fidelity prototype). With each round of testing, we make adjustments to our product or service… and then test again! How our ideas work in the product or service (or don’t) for real users shows us how well they meet user needs and therefore how well they solve the problem. Iteration also promotes good collaboration and communication between clients and consultancies like ours. It gives us the opportunity to check in along the way and make sure that we’re all on the same page.

Clients often know their users best (sometimes, they will be users themselves) and user-centred design helps us create an atmosphere of openness, transparency, and collaboration. Creating the right conditions for giving and receiving user feedback in the context of a specific domain, and deciding how to react to that feedback, is both art and science.

So it’s always rosy, then?

Not always! For example, sometimes stakeholders suggest features that don’t seem to be aligned with accessibility principles or user needs. They may not understand when we explain this, or they may be beholden to pressures outside of their control, and that’s OK! This is why the testing and learning process is so useful. Testing might provide evidence that gives the client confidence in our advice. It might also prove that their idea does fulfil some user needs despite its lack of alignment with best practices, giving us reason to iterate on it. Either way, testing and learning creates space for useful dialogues and enables teams to go on a collaborative journey with us.

Working with us

We love working with our clients to tackle big challenges. Our case studies give a flavour of the different kinds of data-flavoured problems we’ve helped organisations solve, and how we combine data expertise with user-centred design to shape solutions that work for real users. If you have a data-flavoured problem, get in touch.