We’ve been quiet for a while but for good reasons. The fully staffed project team is now in place and we are busy beavering away redesigning our online content while keeping in mind our design principles.
One of my assigned priority redesign areas is the waste and recycling website and questions like the above have caused a lot of great debates as I begin my journey to improve the website based on what our customers need and want.
Let me just quickly dive into a little bit of background about the waste and recycling website. In the last year the site has had 1,426,639 visits, this contributes to roughly 6% of our traffic to Dorsetforyou.com as a whole. Now considering we represent seven different councils, for one service that is quite impressive, right? It holds everything you need to know about your waste and recycling service in Dorset, from when is my bin going to be collected? to what exactly happens to my waste?
Staring at my blank sheet of paper (obviously metaphorically speaking!) I needed to know where to start: what works and what doesn’t on our website at the moment? How do people use our website? With these questions in mind I decided to run some quick user testing modules online with members of the public. I asked for both male and female testers across many different age demographics and my results gave me a clear idea of the areas that I needed to concentrate on. I based these modules on five tasks that my data (phone call statistics, Google Analytics, online transactions) told me were the most popular, these were:
- Find out when your bin collection day is
- Download your bin collection calendar
- Report that your bin was missed
- Report that your bin is broken
- Apply for the garden waste collection service
Although this testing was valuable I have learnt a few things along the way. As my five tasks were all about the same topic my testers became rather familiar with the site which made me think, is this an accurate measurement of how our customers are using the website? Would they really complete all of these tasks so quickly if they hadn’t just been on the site? I decided the next time I run these modules I would run them across different areas of the website, for example housing, parking and waste, as this might give me a more accurate view of how our customers behave online.
After weeks of testing, redesigning, more testing…more redesigning!… I decided I would venture out and visit a few libraries and chat to real people! (or even better actual Dorset residents!) and show them my designs. To hear feedback such as “That was so much easier” to “If someone my age can do it then anyone can!” I was happy. I felt confident that the fresh new look I had created was a success and a hit with the public! I have even seen feedback trickle in over the Christmas period commenting on how it easy it was to find their Christmas bin collection dates, which is just brilliant.
Now I need to take a moment to share the love a bit, this was by far not a solo act. I worked closely with the Dorset Waste Partnership team at Dorset County Council for weeks, to be honest I became a part of the furniture! A combination of their knowledge about anything and everything there was to know about waste and recycling (and trust me I have learnt a lot!) and my digital “know how” we made a pretty good pairing and as a result I am pleased to say this was a success.
My last leg of the journey is to redesign the recycling specific pages which includes how you can reduce or reuse your waste – on that note I am now off to do some reducing of my own after seeing how many toys my daughter has received over Christmas! I think a trip to the charity shop for a bit of out with the old and in with the new is in order!
You can find my redesigned pages here – https://www.dorsetforyou.gov.uk/recycling-rubbish-and-waste
Oh and in case you were wondering, we are calling them recycling centres although recycling village does sound like my household rubbish would have a lovely vacation!
Could do without Americanisms – vacation is something you get at university, holiday is more appropriate. And american date format on the e-mail ’01/16/2017′ is a complete abomination
This is simple & we do not have to re invent the wheel.
They should be called – recycling and waste disposal centres. Please just get on with it.
We do not need to share & ask for opinions on everything.
Call it a RECYCLING DEPOT (or Centre) – very simple and appropriate.
Thank you for your suggestion Brian, ‘recycling centre’ is also what was agreed by the team. Great minds!
Never mind the website, what about the actual recycling sites? We live in Gillingham and have to drive to Shaftesbury to a site that appears to be always crowded and very often closed for ‘impacting’ of various containers, which leaves queues of vehicles stretching way back and adds greatly to the time taken to ‘recycle’ anything. When will we see a better and more accessible site, particularly as the housing plan suggests that there should be more accommodations locally.
What about Lyme Regis we need one
Very interesting, Amanda. Maybe you should condense it into Five Tops Tips, or similar, and give it wider circulation? Getting involved in the service so you really know what it needs to convey, for me, is crucial. Also, ensuring your users in the user testing don’t have any additional knowledge – and recognising there will be a range of users, from the digitally very savvy to people who are not used to engaging with our services online. Are you going to promote your new pages to, say, library staff and customer care staff, so they can show residents how easy it is to find information/log missed bins online?
Thank you Penny this is really helpful and I couldn’t agree with you more. Working so closely with the service was essential in making this redesign a success. Promoting the new pages to those who interact with residents frequently is most definitely a part of my plan – absolutely! Thanks again Penny!
Hi Amanda
This has been good – so far it has prompted me to find out about waste and recycling for our Village Hall, ask for a speaker about recycling and food waste for one of our Community lunches, look up about real nappies for our 6month old grand daughter and I liked the box reminding us of collection dates.
Thanks very much
That’s fantastic news and so nice to hear, thank you for taking the time to share your Dorsetforyou experience with us Patricia.
I see that you are not widening the search options available for your current project: waste management. It would never have occurred to me to search for a recycling ‘village’. But why is it not possible to recognise either ‘village’ or ‘centre’ in a search box? Do we really now need to know whether the website recognises ‘tip’ or ‘dump’ in order to find the opening times of the facility?
Hello Judi, you are absolutely right, residents should be able to find the information they need easily without having to know the inner workings of our site. It is not mentioned above but I am also working on improving the search results residents get when using search engines such as ours and Google. So no matter what search term they use (within reason of course) the most appropriate pages that match that topic should be listed. I hope that answers your question Judi – thank you for your comment.
sort out the fly tipping by the no marks should be at the foremost on your list
You can call it a recycling centre to us it will always be the TIP.
Suggest testing the user experience on your webpage links.
Clicking any of the links from the page you referenc in your article from an iPad using Safari brings a pop up box offering me the chance to sign up for emails.
This cannot be closed using the close button.
Similarly the feedback form from the kampyle.com link on the bottom right leads to a web form that doesn’t seem to work with Safari.
Hello Jon, I am sorry to hear that. I will look at getting this tested and resolved – thank you for letting us know.
Please may we be provided with the amount of funding provided for the provision of Digital First – digital services in Dorset?
Hello Geraldine. Our digital team got £25,000 from the Local Government Association to help us carry out research into how our customers use the website and access digital services here in Dorset. This research also helped us decide what our key areas should be in the content redesign part of our project.