Iterate, iterate, iterate…
Hi. I’m Tim from Bath & North East Somerset Council. In our previous blogs I have spoken about how we tested prototypes with our users to get their feedback and to understand how they engaged with our site. In this blog I’ll be discussing how we iterated finding car parking information based on the feedback from users and produced a product that is ‘good enough’.
Our current website has a confusing user journey for finding car parking information, as we have alluded to in previous blogs. Information is spread across multiple pages and there are multiple tables of charges. You also need to know the name of the car park you want to park in, which if visiting Bath can be an issue as you may only know where you want to go, not the names of the car parks near to it. We do have some nice features which tell you whether there is space at some of our car parks, but this too causes confusion as it works backwards, with the green showing when it is full rather than empty!
In order to make things better for our users we built a prototype of what we thought a better journey for finding car parking information looked like, and then went out and tested it with them.
Whilst the feedback we got was overwhelmingly positive, there were some things that users said that had not occurred to us. Users sometimes missed the indicator for an expanding menu, and wanted to differentiate between short stay and long stay parking. They also chose by location first, with charging a secondary consideration.
On the location based pages users told us they would like to see charging information displayed more prominently. Including links to other nearby parking, including on-street parking options, was found to be useful and not always something people had been aware of.
And so we made changes to our prototype based on the feedback they were giving us, and tested it again. This time we uncovered some unforeseen issues with the way we advised people about our cashless payment system, with it not being clear that they could only pay for parking and NOT reserve a parking space. We also explored using a third party site, Parkopedia, to display our on street parking and associated charges — although our initial experiment brought to light some issues with the way their maps display on mobile devices which meant we won’t be taking this idea forward.
We are now working on a third iteration to address those issues, but once those changes are made we will then have an approach to finding a place to park in B&NES then can then be built in our new Drupal 8 environment and made live when we have finished redesigning the rest of the Parking & Travel section.
In our next blog we will be discussing how we redesigned content for Community Transport and why we are creating a content style writing guide for B&NES.
