Our content redesign project is well underway.
We began by establishing 10 priority areas to focus on in our redesign:
- Parking
- Planning
- Highways
- Registrars
- Dorset Waste Partnership
- Housing
- Revenues and Benefits
- Adult Social Care
- Leisure centres
- Children’s Services
Before we started redesigning these areas we undertook some user testing with customers. We set them a range of tasks to baseline both customer satisfaction and website usability.
We asked users to complete a series of actions like applying for garden waste collection, finding out their council tax band, finding out how to apply for housing, or looking for planning advice.
We videoed users doing the tasks to see how easy or difficult it was for them to find the information they needed. From the videos it soon became clear where the weak points are in our customer journeys.
This user-testing was extremely useful. It provided us with sound information about where to start improving the content in the 10 priority areas.
We also used this information to show our colleagues why we need to make changes.
Once the content designers work through the improvements we’ve identified, the userexperience team will get involved again – testing the new pages and forms with users so we can keep on making the small improvements to user journeys that will equal big improvements in customer satisfaction.
So what are we expected to do? No idea from your website – I must be dim.
I have just checked DWP and Parking on to Travel Dorset and found it very easy use with attractive common format – you are doing well.
Thanks David
i hope the new website will be as user friendly as we all hope. One wonders how the creation of the “old”dorsetforyou was managed so as to be so hostile from my experience, and perhaps from an understanding of this some lessons may be learnt.
Sounds like a good idea but how expensive is this to implement? Presumably those taking part are offered some sort of incentive. Hope it’s not a lot as I am sure there are lots of people who would be glad to take part for free especially if it kept council tax from increasing.
Some of the user testing was done completely for free in leisure centres and libraries. We would like to thank all our volunteers who took part in those sessions. There were some costs in the testing we did where we used users with screen recording equipment but we believe the benefits were worth the expense. Thank you for your comments Marmie.