Buckinghamshire Council Website: Weeknotes #30
We’ve been thinking a lot about search again this week. We will be testing a few ideas soon — to see if we can improve the results for users. We’ve also been looking in detail at some of the seasonal spikes. For example, the number of people looking for information about school uniforms climbed up the chart.
These searches spiked on the 21st July and have tailed off into August. We’ve also been seeing calls about this come into the customer services centre. It’s the responsibility of schools to set their uniform policy and isn’t something the local authority can help parents with — but as lots of people are looking, we think we should get some useful information up there and make sure people know where to go.
The content design team have been working on a card sorting exercise for the Family Information Service content. Card sorting is a great exercise for planning the information architecture of a website or sections of content. We will be using a tool called Optimal Sort and sending some homework out to our panel of user testers.
What we’ve been thinking about
Service reviews
The council’s service improvement team have been kicking off a series of service reviews. They’ll be looking at the user experience, technology and all the parts that make up how a service works. We will need to make sure our planning is lined up with the outputs of that work, so we can help the design of future services.
Improving the ‘contact us’ experience
The council offers web chat as a customer support channel. We have a very simple service in place today that routes everyone to a central team. We will look at triaging people to different customer service agents based on which geographic area they’re in.
Show and tell
It’s the last week of this sprint, which means a show and tell on Thursday. Hopefully we’ll have some interesting results from the card sorting exercise to share.
Next week
- Analysis of card sorting for the family information service
- Deploying emergency alert banners
- Deploying Family Information Service templates
- Making improvements to the complaints and FOI forms
