Putting the worms into a smaller can

This week we have (cue fanfare…) officially delivered the minimum viable product (MVP) for our planning and building control service.

Planning is a fiendishly complex service

Reaching this milestone has been a huge effort over the last 8 months and I’m so relieved to get to this point. At the start of the year the very thought of consolidating and rewriting the planning content of four former district councils was giving me sleepless nights.

We knew it was big, but just how big and complex the planning service is wasn’t truly apparent until we took the lid off and let the worms out.

In this post I’ll summarise the journey and things we’ve learned along the way, but before I do I’ll caveat it to say this is only MVP — there’s still more work to do, but that can wait until later.

The fundamental principles we’re following are:

• we only publish content that meets a clear user need
• we don’t recreate content that’s published by other credible sources, such as GOV.UK and the Planning Portal
• we’ve adopted the GDS writing style, using plain English and simple language

That’s a 180 degree shift from how we worked a decade ago, where the norm was to publish everything for transparency. It’s a big cultural change for many in the council, not just planning and building control.

Pete’s previously blogged about the value of a good product owner and the fortunately we had one in Alastair, without whom we couldn’t have reached this point.

Prising the lid off

We spent a long time doing discovery. It took effort to understand what we had, what the service objectives were, what the user needs were, and how to make the user experience as good as we could. This was the role of Lil, a content strategist we brought in under contract. It’s a specialist skill we don’t have internally and it was incredibly insightful to work with an expert. We partnered Lil with Eva, a senior content designer we also contracted in, and between them they:

• identified the main user needs and user journeys for the planning and building control services using analytics and stakeholder interviews
• captured the service’s objectives (for example, reducing invalid planning applications, reducing telephone enquiries, increasing fee income)
• identified pain points by reviewing call centre enquiries and customer complaints
• interviewed service users to get more insight into the issues identified
• developed an Information Architecture (IA), shorthand for the content structure, terminology and navigation

Only then could we develop a content plan and start to create something more tangible.

Content plan

It’s worth spending a few words on this, because it’s been the backbone of the last 6 months’ work.

Firstly, the IA divided the content into 4 themes:

1. Building or improving your property
2. Having a say and reporting issues
3. Planning policy
4. Other planning content. This includes discretionary services that are important for generating fee income

We created a content plan for each theme, consisting of a series of ‘user journeys’ which are a sequence of pages that lead users through the service. Each page was part of a user journey, and each user journey was related to a defined user need. Every user need had acceptance criteria and every page was tested against the acceptance criteria as part of user acceptance testing (UAT).

For example, the building or improving your property theme comprises 11 user needs. In our original plan these were covered by 9 user journeys, but during testing we expanded this to 15. A typical one is summarised below:

Journey: Check if you need permission or approval for home improvements

User need: As a local resident or business owner I need to check if I need permission or approval to build or improve my property so I can decide whether to go ahead

Acceptance criteria: After following the journey the user:

• knows what types of projects normally need building regulations approval
• knows what types of projects normally need planning permission
• knows they don’t normally need planning permission for ‘permitted developments’, but they can get a certificate of lawfulness instead
• can check what work is permitted
• can find out how to apply for a certificate of lawfulness
• knows they’ll need planning permission for permitted work if there’s a heritage listing on their property, it’s in a conservation area or permitted rights were withdrawn
• can check heritage listings, conservation areas or if permitted rights were withdrawn
• knows they might need planning permission to change historical planning conditions on their property
• knows how to check historical planning conditions on their property
• knows they can pay the council for advice specific to their project
• knows what happens if they don’t get permission or approval when they need it

Writing, testing, iterating

Writing about technical subjects is complicated and our content designers are highly dependent on subject matter experts (SMEs) to co-write pages. It’s a collaborative process and works best when there’s a shared understanding of the objectives. Occasionally our desire for simple language and minimal content led to disagreement with SMEs about what users need to know vs. what the service feels they should know. A few things we learned here:

• this is an area where a good Product Owner really earns their corn
• it’s important to have a delivery manager from the digital team to provide balance and support the content designers
• pick your fights! Compromise is not a dirty word

Prototyping

We found prototyping pages and getting feedback was challenging, and not just with the planning service. People are busy, things look different in a Google doc than they do on a web page, PDF screenshots are difficult to comment on, and so on.

One of the most useful technical developments we’ve implemented this year is a content prep server, which is a live copy of the main site where we can prototype content in a safe environment. This has reduced a lot of friction by allowing us to share working prototypes with stakeholders early on, and enables us to test with users on a real website. We can make small changes in real time during review meetings, which dramatically shortens the sign-off process.

We’ve regularly tested new content with our web user panel, using a mix of in-depth 1:1 interview and automated self administered tests. The results enabled us to tweak the IA to make things as easy as we can. Whilst we don’t envisage testing on an ongoing basis, we still monitor feedback and tweak pages accordingly.

We work in 2 week sprints and once we got into battle rhythm we had a regular content release schedule, every other tuesday. This discipline accelerated delivery and is a model we’ll use again. We ran show-and-tells every other wednesday and these were well attended by the service team and other stakeholders.

A smaller can

The headline figures for the initial IA is that 28 new user journeys, each comprising 4–6 pages, replace 744 old pages. Although we’ve added more journeys as we’ve gone along, and haven’t quite managed to unpublish all the old pages yet, that’s still an impressive reduction.

Those last few worms

So, we’ve delivered MVP and have started gathering up some of the services that are more specialist, like archaeology and energy & climate change.

We still have the challenge around PDFs and accessibility that I mentioned in a previous blog, and some technical challenges around things like forms and embedded functionality such as GIS maps. However, these are all solvable and we’ll say more about them another day.

We also became aware of a user need we hadn’t initially identified, for officers in the service who used the old websites as an informal document management system. As a short term fix we’ve moved the unpublished files to a MS Teams folder so at least they’re findable, but there is likely to be more work needed in this area.

Finally, I want to say au revoir and thank you to our content designer, Eva, who leaves us today. She joined us for 8 weeks and stayed for 8 months and has been instrumental in delivering everything above. Fortunately, we’ve also recruited an excellent content designer in Louise and she’s been working side-by-side with Eva for several months, so we know we’re in good shape to keep up the good work.