The Education Funding System (EFS) is based on a user-centred design approach. Engagement with users across the schools and higher education sectors through user research has been an essential step in designing the EFS.
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What is user research?
User research is the process of generating insights about system users including their behaviour, motivations, and needs. The better we can understand our users, the more likely the design and build of the EFS will function well, while also meeting user needs.
User research is pivotal to the EFS
The Department of Education has undertaken a comprehensive program of user research activities, focused on scenarios and tasks related to payments, funding, and data collection. Through a range of activities and methods, we observed and tested desk patterns, pathways, familiarity of language and terminology, and how users interact with the experiential layer of the EFS.
Many schools and higher education providers have participated in user experience research activities to date.
What we heard
Identified insights so far have included:
- Users want more secure and efficient alternatives to manual inputs and the use of excel.
- Users feel burdened by the existing manual upload of data process and regular SchoolsHUB errors.
- Users are concerned about information overload, and want information to be organised using visualisations, according to relevance and provider obligations.
- Users want the ability to have greater linkage between systems, to reduce multiple logins or manually going through multiple platforms to complete key tasks.
- Users want visibility of compliance indicators, statuses and key milestones.
Users experience significant issues with SchoolsHUB upload functionality, manual data submissions, and data error correction. - Users desire greater visibility into how their data is used, and improved access to history, service request logs, and year-by-year comparison reports.