How to remove your second most visited landing page and still improve the user journey…

Hi. I’m Tim from Bath and North East Somerset Council. Over the past few blogs I’ve been discussing our approach to user research and how this shapes the way we design new web content. This time I’d like to talk about how our user research for the new site helped us identify an opportunity to improve a journey on the current site ahead of redesigning and replatforming for our new site.

One of the key journeys we had selected to look at was viewing/commenting on a planning application, which is our second most viewed landing page after the homepage. The page provides guidance on the type of comments you can submit, links to our privacy notices, and a link through to the system for viewing and commenting on applications.

Through the use of our new favourite cool tool, HotJar, we were able to very quickly establish that visitors to this page found it incredibly confusing, with dense text, no clear link to the system for viewing/commenting on applications, and that the majority of people did not scroll down on the page to read the information contained there. In fact the user research was very clear that this page might not be needed at all – which for a page with 64,747 views in the last 6 months (5.84% of all page views on the site) is a huge call. So we prototyped what the new journey could look like and put it to the test with real users. Could we really just remove a page which has 6% of the traffic to the whole website?

We tested the new journey with people at Bath Central Library and with Keynsham Town Council’s Planning Committee to see whether they would agree with us – and the answer was overwhelmingly yes.

By moving the advice on commenting on applications into the actual system for commenting (iShareMaps), providing it in a way where it is more contextual (when it is needed rather than up front), and linking straight to iShareMaps from both the homepage and the Planning and Building Control section page we could remove one of our most viewed pages and have made things simpler for our website users. Proving this concept sets a precedent for other pages – it’s about getting users the right information at the right time through their journey and not giving them everything up front and hoping they remember or them having to flip backwards and forwards between several pages.

For more on this (and to find out what else we did in Sprint 3) take a look at our Show and Tell.

Next up we’ll be talking about the way in which we set up our Drupal environments so that we can start to redesign content using our corporate style guide, as well as how we found ways to involve users in testing without having to set up a pop up testing station.