{"id":119,"date":"2015-09-15T14:04:02","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T13:04:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.dorsetforyou.gov.uk\/digital-first\/?p=119"},"modified":"2015-09-15T14:04:02","modified_gmt":"2015-09-15T13:04:02","slug":"our-design-principles-start-with-user-needs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/2015\/09\/15\/our-design-principles-start-with-user-needs\/","title":{"rendered":"Our design principles start with user needs"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are pleased to be able to share our new Design Principles with you. Our team got excited when we first read them through a few weeks ago because we know they’ll help us work smarter with our users and with council services.<\/p>\n

Now they have been signed off by the Project Board you can all take a look:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These eight principles will guide the digital team every time we work with services to add any new content to the website – from a page or an e-form, to a whole section or customer journey.<\/p>\n

These reflect local business and user needs as well as best practice from the Government Digital Service Design Principles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dorsetforyou Design Principles<\/h2>\n

1.Start with needs – user needs not council needs<\/strong><\/p>\n

Use data to inform everything we do. Can we prove users need these webpages? Have we asked them?<\/p>\n

2. Do less<\/strong><\/p>\n

Keep it simple, if the information is out there on another website link users to it – we don’t need a special Dorset version of everything.<\/p>\n

3. Let your content reflect our brand vision<\/strong><\/p>\n

Choose every sentence, every image and every page with care and make it work as hard as possible.<\/p>\n

4. Design with data and iterate<\/strong><\/p>\n

Use all the information at our fingertips to keep improving our digital services. Polishing each one until all the sticking points disappear and every transaction runs smoothly.<\/p>\n

5. Do the hard work to make it simple<\/strong><\/p>\n

To me, this is about not settling for ‘good enough’. Invest the time and resources to write and build excellent online services.<\/p>\n

6. For everyone<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whether they use our website from\u00a0 their phone, a PC or a tablet, we need to get it right first time for all our users. Accessibility<\/a> and usability go hand in hand.<\/p>\n

7. Build digital services, not websites<\/strong><\/p>\n

This goes back to the focus on user needs. Building websites is fun but our citizens need a quick and easy way to buy a parking permit or renew their library books so they can get on with their day.<\/p>\n

8. Content for citizens, not customers<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stick to providing a service to citizens, everything else is a distraction. We recognise that some services, like country parks and leisure centres have different needs, so the Futuregov<\/a> team is drawing up a parallel set of design principles we can use to help ‘trading’ council services have a strong, competitive digital presence.<\/p>\n

What do you think? Are you a citizen? Or a customer?\u00a0 What do you need from your council website? If you work for, or with, one of our partners will you be able to apply these principles in your service? to your digital transactions with citizens? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are pleased to be able to share our new Design Principles with you. Our team got excited when we first read them through a few weeks ago because we know they’ll help us work smarter with our users and with council services. Now they have been signed off by the Project Board you can… Read more Our design principles start with user needs<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[7,6],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}