Thanet Council

Supporting channel shift through UX design research

INDUSTRY: LOCAL GOV - COUNCIL

The challenge

Thanet District Council’s call centre was inundated. Users were visiting the website, but getting lost and quickly exiting. The council wanted to encourage more online transactions to increase efficiency.

The site had grown organically over years through devolved publishing across hundreds of varied departments. The council needed to meet the needs of a very diverse range of audiences across: business, visitors, residents and internal stakeholders.

The tools

Google analytics
Focus groups
Surveys
Card sorting
User interviews
Personas
Sitemap
Supporting UX design
Content roadmap

The research journey

I ran an analytical study to understand the lie of the land and gather some initial benchmarks. A key stat was that 67% of visitors spent 0 - 10 seconds on the site. Also, most users were circling through content, navigating in and our of the services landing page without accessing a specific service page. Approximately 90% of site traffic was concentrated in just a handful of service pages. The extent of users' focus within such a narrow band of content challenged the internal perspectives about priority content. I created word clouds to support the needs/focus highlighted by analytics.

I ran a series of staff surveys and focus groups, which revealed the internal challenge of maintaining content. These focus groups gained early buy-in from staff about the new site. The discussions unearthed the potential and motivation to increase efficiency: 70% of staff shared that they receive calls that the website should resolve. The focus groups also explored the needs for a flexible solution amongst such diverse teams in terms of: scale, funding, access, functionality and complexity.

“The main queries customers have is that they can't find anything! The navigation on the site is complicated. The search fields don't necessarily direct them to where they need to go and doesn't use terms that they themselves would be searching.”

Armed with knowledge from data and internal research, I began my discovery work with end users. My user research included surveys, moderated card sorts and interviews. I recruited a selection businesses, visitors and residents for the quantitative research.

Within the user card sorts, the popular content and groupings were fairly consistent across all users. The discussions also helped to provide rationale to support user-led tone of voice and taxonomies going forward - avoiding jargon. Users each created a ‘common tasks’ grouping, which supported the creation of homepage signposting to top tasks.

As my research built momentum, I created a working set of personas, which were then finalised as the research concluded. These lead the creation of a new sitemap based around user needs, whilst improving the UX for online transactions.

The research was threaded through a set of new key mobile-first wireframes and a content guide to ensure consistency for future web publishing groups. I shared the rationale and outputs as a presentation to the council chamber.

The outcomes

My discovery work supported Thanet District Council to confidently go to tender for the development of their new site. The rationale and research gave strong direction and hugely streamlined their process.