How we began to experiment with templates and content on our development site
Hi. I’m Tim from Bath & North East Somerset Council. The last few blogs have been very much focused on user research, the tools and techniques we’ve adopted, and how we’ve used that research to make changes to our current site ahead of redesigning content for our new site. In this blog I want to talk about our development environment and starting to make use of our corporate toolkit to build some new content ready for testing.
One of the first things we identified was that GDS had updated the toolkit we were using. This meant that one of the first things we had to do was update our version of that toolkit so it reflected the most up to date version — the GDS Design System. Whilst this took some time to do, it was essential as it makes it easier to update in future, as well as fixing one or two issues with spacing which weren’t too pleasing on the eye.
Once we had updated the toolkit we imported it into our development environment and began to play around with it to make sure that it was working as we would expect it to.
This gave us the ability to start to use our new toolkit in an environment where we could actually start to build real content and start to make things better for the users of our site. As I mentioned in the previous blog we had recently removed our second most visited landing page (view/comment on a planning application) and our work with the Planning section of the website very quickly led us to realise that in order to tackle planning we were going to have to tackle our approach to policies and strategies — which is what most of the planning section consists of!
We did some initial research by looking around at what other authorities have done to see if there was anything out there that had the ‘wow’ factor. Whilst nothing stood out as exceptional, we did form an approach based on a combination of a few other councils. We wanted to give people the ability to search for policies and strategies, because user research from some of our other projects was telling us that people such as developers, or other professionals who use our policies, strategies and plans for a living, prefer to be able to find them easily without having to trawl through multiple pages to find the right one. So we built an early version of what this could look like in our shiny new dev environment, as much to test out the toolkit as anything else.
Once we had a draft of the policy homepage to play with we realised it would need to have some content hanging off it so that the search concept could be tested with users. So we built a few simple content page with a summary and a PDF of a strategy so we could test this concept further with the people who use our policies everyday. We know we might want an approach that uses HTML as well as or rather than PDF, but for now this lets us start to test whilst we carry on with our auditing of the Planning section ahead of starting to redesign the content and iteratively building our new site.
If you want to know more about what we did then take a look at the slide deck from Sprint 4 Show & Tell
Next up we will be talking about how we have been able to remove content from our site by using external sites that provide information much better than we can, and how we began to revamp our Pay for it page.
