One of my priority areas is the “Dorset Local Offer”. This term doesn’t mean a lot to most people but, those who know the phrase know it well. Dorset’s Local Offer is what we offer, in Dorset, for the families of children and young people with Special Educational Need and/or Disabilities (SEND).
To give you a bit of background information, our old Local Offer content was on a third party system called the Family Information Directory. Whilst the system is a fantastic directory, it left us a little underwhelmed when it came to adding the advice and guidance content that you needed to go with each service’s page.
It’s great if you know you need a “speech and language therapist” or help with “continuing care” but what if you don’t know what service you need, let alone the council jargon used to describe it!
What to do with all that information?
There was clear room for improvement here as the content wasn’t easy to find and was often written, as many council pages are, in a jargon-filled way, which isn’t customer friendly or accessible.
My biggest challenge with this particular area was sifting through the sheer wealth of information available! There is so much useful stuff but unlike previous projects I’ve been involved in I’m not trying to get people signed up or to buy anything.
Everything I’ve worked on previously has had measurable goals like “get the user to complete the form” or “get more users signed up to the service”. To have a goal of “leave the user able to decide what they can do to help themselves or what service they need ” is much more of a mountain to climb, especially when remembering our adopted mantra of “do less” – we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we do need to leave people informed.
Dorset Parent Carer Council
To start with, we wanted to speak with the real users – parents of children with SEND. To do this we worked closely with the Dorset Parent Carer Council (DPCC) whose members are parents and carers of children and young people with SEND. We got the parents to outline what they wanted to know, how best we could provide this and give examples of Local Offers that they think work well.
Building the new structure
From this work and talking with the services, we decided on the following categories:
- Concerns
- Support:
- Education and learning
- Childcare
- Money and transport
- Teenager to adult
- Activities
- Health
- Feedback/contact us
Once we had this list, we built content by pulling together what was in the old system and applying our new design principles, then added this to bits that were already on our main site and examples of good practice that parents had highlighted. Once the basics were in place for our first few areas we sent the parents an e-form and asked them for their feedback.
The feedback was really useful but we found it hard to get the specific issues from users in this way. We often had to call or email them to get more information about where they experienced an issue when it was something more complex.
Once we’d made changes and spoken to parents for more feedback several hundred times (apologies to our poor guinea pigs!) we put the first parts live to replace the old local offer. We chose to launch in stages rather than having a complete new section to launch.
This let us focus on getting the bare minimum “must have” content up with the aim to come back and improve it based on real user feedback.
Testing the live version
Once we were live, I ran some user testing labs. I set myself up in a room for two days and invited more DPCC members along for hour-long slots. I set a variety of tasks for them to try and complete and interviewed them as they made their choices.
I found these sessions absolutely invaluable! I came out of the first day with 16 pages of notes and lost count of how many pages I had after the second!
User testing has proved so valuable in everything I’ve done with this redesign. It’s made me question every word I’ve chosen, every icon I’ve used and I think we’ve come out with something vastly better than what we had before.
Next steps
We’ve completed most of the “must have” phase, but I’m still polishing this up and making sure that we’ve got everything that we need (and there is a lot of it!) and have started some of the “should haves” and “could haves”, including putting some lovely video inserts in place to embellish the pages. We’re always looking for feedback so let me know what you think!
An example of one of the first video inserts from our “could have” list:
