DWP: Making a real difference to the lives of people, every day

The Challenge

The Department for Work and Pensions is the UK's biggest public service department, and DWP Digital transforms the digital services used by millions of people every day. Fay Cooper, Lead Product Manager for DWP Digital, supports product strategy across all lines of business, including setting customer insight strategies and enabling the development of common software capabilities.

As the voice of the customer, Fay brings together insights from across all channels and from user research to test hypotheses and guide product strategy with the end goal of transforming the way people work and live.

But there's a fundamental challenge: "Understanding the voice of the user is our nirvana. It's a real challenge—our products need to work for users of every age and every demographic."

In government, product development starts with user needs. Understanding those needs is both time-intensive and costly, relying upon regular surveys or dedicated user researchers who scour the country engaging as many users as possible. For products serving millions across every demographic, scaling that research was proving nearly impossible.

The Solution

When DWP Digital met Wordnerds, they saw the potential to scale their research and user insights. The partnership would prove game-changing.

"Wordnerds helps us design products users want to use," Fay explains.

The partnership helps keep the team agile and allows them to deliver at pace. Rather than relying solely on costly, time-intensive traditional research methods, DWP Digital could now analyse user sentiment and needs at scale across all channels.

The Impact

The results were immediate and powerful. Their new Apply for Child Maintenance service achieved over 93% take-up in its first month of release and 97% satisfaction rates—evidence that understanding users at scale translates directly to better products.

But perhaps more importantly, Wordnerds' insights had a powerful impact on policymakers, helping to show what users need from services and what causes them friction.

The analysis of their Child Maintenance Service revealed something shocking: "Our initial analysis shocked our stakeholders: amongst the 300,000 tweets, the overwhelming sentiment was one of stress and anxiety. This made our policy team pay attention, we've got a real problem to solve."

This wasn't just noise in the data—it was a real problem that demanded action. The team was able to identify key areas to focus on through intensive user research, using both AI and real people.

They're now looking for answers as to why people don't have a child maintenance arrangement in place, why fathers feel anxious and stressed by the service, and what they can do to improve the speed at which money is paid to children.

From time-intensive manual research to scaling insights that shock policymakers into action—and designing products that achieve 93% take-up in month one.