It’s time to Level Up

Introducing Level Up

Level Up is a cross-disciplinary team focusing on improving various British Red Cross websites. This means that the team is made up of people with the following areas of expertise:

• Data analysis (Johnny and Sami)
• User experience (Adrien and Vicky)
• Content optimisation (Elena and Ben)

The Level Up team

Our aim is to provide anyone in the organisation who has an idea for how to improve something on our websites with a plan, research, evidence to prove (or disprove!) their hypothesis, and a tangible solution.

How do we do this? Well we’re investigating and challenging the entire site, looking at every page and user flow. We’re looking at data from lots of different sources, including analytics, heatmaps and screen recordings as well as running usability testing and user interviews.

As well as this we look at requests from anybody throughout the organisation that flags an issue. We then meet once a week, look at it, and define a scope of work.

A heatmap showing where users click on one our pages being improved.

What have we been up to so far?

So far, we’ve been working on a few different areas, including:

• Running split tests and proving assumptions. We ran a test on the donation button on our main site, and used the data to change where we sent potential donors.
• Rejigging the design of key volunteering and donation pages. We’re looking at the usability and the visibility of these key pages, and how to make them more efficient using the data we collected and the testing we’ve run to optimise them. We’re then showing a plan to stakeholders, which flags the issues, how we’re solving it, and what the proposition and timeline is.
• Providing research and analytics in response to specific questions to help make the best decisions possible for the site
• Looking at user interface components and addressing accessibility issues

How do we work?

We’re following scrum principles so that we can ensure we’re being adaptive, collaborative and flexible. Practically, this means running in fortnightly sprints, prioritising the backlog of investigations and committing to a workload that we can complete within the sprint. We’ll plan the investigation, allocate the right resources and prioritise the effort.

We’ll be sharing more on what we’re working on and what we’ve discovered as we go, so stay tuned.