How might we improve a local authority website in just six weeks?

Hi I’m Alastair from Pilot Works. We’re a digital product and service design consultancy. We’ve been working with Bath and North East Somerset Council recently. They have a large website, with thousands of pages, that has grown organically over time, with each service area (e.g. Waste and recycling) looking after their own section of the site.

The result is a site that’s a bit like a poorly maintained garden. It has lots useful information, but it’s often buried under less useful stuff, or stuff that’s out of date. And as a result people are finding the site hard to use and often resort to other means (like calling the call centre) to get the help they need.

This can’t continue. The council has been hit by cuts and need to deliver services and information more cost-effectively. Meanwhile citizens increasingly expect to be able to get what they need from the council online, from the convenience of their smartphone.

So the council have begun a process of digital service transformation (i.e making services better and more cost effective though better utilisation of technology), but there is much to do and resources are limited. Meanwhile the website content is becoming increasingly overgrown.

How can they tidy things up and improve the experience for the majority of users now, whilst they work through the digital transformation agenda? This is the question we have been working on.

We started in the Autumn of 2017 when BANES asked us to create a toolkit to mirror the GOV.UK Front End Toolkit — a library of building blocks that can be used to create user journeys that are usable and accessible on a variety of devices quickly.

The toolkit includes individual elements like search boxes and form labels, patterns like page headers or ‘related links’ boxes, and full page templates that deal with situations that keep cropping up, like like the ’start page’ you land on before you apply for something like a parking permit.

So far so good, and the toolkit has been used internally, but nothing has changed for users yet :(

Then in May 2018 we were asked help kick-start the process of making improvements to the site, whilst also helping the BANES team adopt more agile and user centred approaches to digital design.

We had just 6 weeks for a small team to make an impact.

Want to know what we have been up to? Over the next few weeks James and Tim from the digital team at B&NES will explain in a series of posts.