GOVERNMENT
Client
The Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) is a UK government department, focused on benefit payments. It’s currently the UK’s largest government department, with about 20 million customers and 83,000 staff.
Program partners were BT (UK telco) and Accenture (US systems integrator).Program/Project 1
Create Natural Language Call Steering for Universal Credit (UC). UC is a huge program, fundamentally changing the way in which social benefits are handled. It is being rolled out across the UK over many years and is politically sensitive.
My Role
UI Design Lead during Kick-off, Requirements and Design, for first deployment.
UI Consultant to UI delivery team for subsequent phases.My Responsibilities
Presented Natural Language and Speech Design during Kick-off to client/partner senior teams.
Facilitated Requirements and Design workshops with client teams.
Documented multiple Requirements Specifications and High/Low-level Designs, for review/approval by client and partners.Challenges & Opportunities
The client had no prior experience with speech recognition.
The UC concept and much of its terminology was completely new, so a traditional data collection phase for NLU (Natural Language Understanding) was impossible. We used a novel hybrid approach to train the statistical language and semantic models, which worked well.
New concepts were to be rolled out at different times, to different geographies, so the use of real caller utterances as training data for speech models had to be carefully planned.
As UC was completely new, no SMEs existed yet, so we needed to work closely with SMEs for existing benefits.
To support accessibility requirements, we needed to design dialogue to suit a 9-year-old reading age.
To respect style guidelines for web/paper, I worked closely with UC’s Technical Communication Program Lead.