Meeting user needs through the use of external sites – how we removed our public transport content by using TravelWest
Hi. I’m Tim from Bath and North East Somerset Council. One of the first questions we ask when auditing content on our website is whether a particular user need is best met by the council. This blog will be talking about how we applied this principle to our Public Transport pages and improved the user experience at the same time.
Our Public Transport pages have historically offer a wealth of information about public transport in the region – despite the council not being responsible for the delivery of the vast majority of them. Within the section we had pages on trains, air travel, and coach travel all of which had to be maintained and simply linked out to the commercial providers of those services. We also had pages about bus travel, timetables and journey planners, and bus routes.
There is a wonderful website called Travel West which is funded by the four local authorities that use it – Bristol, South Gloucestershire, North Somerset, and us. It is designed to be ‘the one-stop travel website for the West of England, however you like to travel’. It allows users to find information and advice on all public transport services across the region, from timetable and ticketing information to how to complain about a service and what do to do if you have lost property. It also has a multi-modal journey planner allowing you to plan your journey across the region and the rest of the UK however you prefer to travel.
The site takes real time data from transport providers, data from all the local authorities involved, and a host of other sources to provide a holistic travel experience. The Public Transport team at B&NES is responsible for maintaining the content on Travel West as well as the content on our public facing site, which duplicates the information on Travel West but in a much less user friendly manner.
We felt there was a strong case for using Travel West to meet the needs of users wanting either travel information or journey planning as it is not necessarily something that you would expect to come to a local authority website for. We tested the concept with users through our prototype and the response was positive. So we faced a dilemma – do we wait until we had redesigned the section and moved it over to our new site before using Travel West more widely or do we make the change now and prevent the Public Transport team from maintaining double the amount of content?
It seemed like a no brainier to us and the Public Transport team agreed. We reviewed the content on Travel West to make sure it was up to date and factually accurate, before looking at our current site and identifying what pages we would redirect to Travel West. We then made the changes. So now when you visit www.bathnes.gov.uk/services/parking-and-travel/park-and-ride you go straight to Travel West where your travel needs are met through a much better user experience.
To find out more about else we did during sprint 5 you can see the slide deck from our Show and Tell. Next up prototyping Community Transport and iterating Find a car park.
