Buckinghamshire Council Website: weeknotes July 2021
Apologies, we’ve not been very good at publishing weeknotes this year. Unbelievably, this is our first update of the year (and my first weeknotes ever). This is an attempt to bring a bit more regularity to our updates. I’m not guaranteeing weekly, but think we can do better than half-yearly.
A brief recap of the last 6 months:
Phew, where to start?
Earlier in the year we tendered the contract for the next phase of buckinghamshire.gov.uk via the Digital Outcomes framework. We had some great bids and it was a close competition, but eventually we let the contract to the incumbent supplier, Unboxed Consulting and their subcontractors Torchbox and Scroll. Whilst not a shoe-in by any means, it did at least mean continuity.
With the main components of the site now built, the new contract places greater emphasis on content migration. Our priority is closing our legacy sites before the gov.uk domains are withdrawn by MHCLG in April 2023. However, following the principles of user-centred design, we’re not just ‘lifting and shifting’ but designing new content based on research and clear user needs. It’s a rare opportunity to start with a blank sheet and create the content that users need, following the GOV.UK template.
Building a team
Content design is still a relatively new discipline for Buckinghamshire Council and we are heavily dependent on the expertise of our partners Unboxed and Scroll for UX and content design. However, much as we love working with them we know the money will run out at some point, so we’ve recruited 3 content designers to reduce our dependence on contractors in the future.
We’ve also changed management reporting lines in the last couple of months, with the digital and web teams coming back together under our Head of Digital, Peter Parfitt. This makes a lot of operational sense because there’s often no clear water between development and BAU and it helps if they’re managed within the same team.
Boiling the ocean
A content audit of the legacy site showed there are somewhere around 4500 pages of content on the old sites, plus thousands of PDFs and hundreds of forms built from a multitude of technologies. Where to start?
Pete often says we can’t boil the ocean; we needed to start with a defined set of user needs and fix them first, working agile, creating a minimum viable product (MVP) and iterating. We developed a prioritisation approach using a variety of metrics (web analytics, complaints data, customer service calls, pages that immediately precede someone going to ‘contact us’ etc) and used it to develop a roadmap for the next 18 months. It’ll come as no surprise that the biggest priorities are planning and building control, school transport, school admissions, highways and parking, and waste.
We’ve already published some big sections, such as the Family Information Service, Care Advice Bucks (adult social care) and libraries but we’re on the cusp of publishing our first redesigned content under my watch, which will be the parking pages, followed by the first tranches of planning, council tax, housing benefits and business rates.
It’s impossible to estimate the work needed to design new content until the discovery has been completed. We initially anticipated we’d polish off planning in about 8–10 weeks but in reality, even with 2 experienced content designers and a UX designer, it’ll take at least double that — even though our planning team really ‘get’ digital and are fully engaged with the MVP approach. We’re currently about 12 weeks in and have defined user needs, acceptance criteria, audited the old content, created a content plan for new journeys, and prepared prototypes of the first 5 user journeys, which we’re about to test with users. The headline figures suggest for MVP we’ll reduce 743 legacy pages to just 25! Whilst I’m sure it’ll grow from that (the totals exclude stuff currently hidden in PDFs), I’m really excited by how things are shaping up.
Coming bang up to date, this week we’ve held our first show and tell on school transport content, another really gnarly service with high political capital, and kicked off discovery with school admissions. Both of these need to reach MVP before the September school term.
Technical development
A development that’s been a while coming, but is a potential game-changer, is our new content prep server. Different to Staging, which is about testing software development before it’s live, the content server is somewhere we can prototype new content in a web environment. It means we can do UX research with users on a real website before launch. Then, once signed off, we can import the pages to the live site and publish in a few mouse clicks. It’ll save lots of UX time in preparing high fidelity prototypes.
One recurring challenge is that services previously delivered by the district councils work through a variety of different back office systems. Whilst plans are afoot to consolidate them into county-wide systems, these are major IT projects, meaning some services must continue to operate on the ex-district geographies for the foreseeable future. One of our key design challenges is to give users a consistent experience wherever in the county they live, meaning we need to make access to the different legacy systems as seamless as we can. We’re currently developing a new location widget based on GIS data that will redirect service users to the appropriate back office and hopefully make the user journey consistent for everyone.
The elephant in the room…
…is PDFs. Like most councils, we’ve thousands of the blighters. Some of our Conservation Areas are documented in PDFs that were created in the 70’s, whilst our Local Plans are up to 300 pages long.
We’ve developed a hierarchy of what we need to do with what, but it’s still a daunting task. The challenge is even bigger for policies and strategies, many of which have been subject of consultation. More on this in the future.
