User research and cool tools — understanding how people interact with our website.

Hi, I’m Tim from Bath and North East Somerset Council. We’ve been working with Pilot Works to redesign our public facing website based on the needs of our users and using the toolkit we developed with Pilot Works. This is the journey that we have been on.

We commissioned Pilot Works for six weeks to help us kick start the project. To ensure we got the best value for the taxpayer out of the time with them, we began with an inception workshop to establish the scope of the work and to agree some deliverables. 4 priorities were agreed, all underpinned by the need to transfer user experience, user research and UX design skills into the small digital team we have. We agreed on: 4 key user journeys, a content governance structure to ensure that we can maintain the quality of the website after the project, a new information architecture for the site (how things are categorised), and a prototype of a home page for user testing.

We looked at Analytics to find journeys we might work on. This led us to choose: finding information on a library, finding car parking information, finding park and ride information, and viewing/commenting a planning application. We then implemented some cool tools on the website to understand how the pages were performing. The next blog will tell you more about the prototypes we built and tested with users; however I want to to discuss the tools we have been using to help make data driven design decisions and to gather information on how users behave when they are on our website. I’ll also talk a little about some of the less technological methods of user research we’ve put into practice.

So that we can design content that meets user need, we first had to understand what people came to our website for as well as how they use the current site. Alongside Google Analytics we use Hot Jar to analyse the behaviour of users when visiting our site. We activated the tracking on the pages for the journeys we had chosen to look at, and began to see how users interacted with our content. Through the use of heat maps, mouse tracking, scroll tracking, screen recording, and an online survey we began to build a picture of what users did when they hit the pages for planning, parking, Park and Ride, and libraries.

We also wanted to know how real users of our site would categorise the services that we offer. Local government has a habit of projecting its internal structures outwards, and this has been reflected in the design of the current site. The way our services are categorised (or information architecture) is a key element of the website as it helps improve search engine results, as well as helping users navigate their way through a complex website. This leads to users jumping around between sections and pages to find information about services which in their mind are linked in a way which our current structure doesn’t reflect. We had been testing a new information architecture on the site through a survey asking users to complete tasks and suggest where they think they would find those tasks in our IA, gathering comments from users and staff about their experience. We were now starting to build a picture of how users engaged with our current site and what they thought about the way we grouped content.

If you want to know more about what we did and the results, take a look at our Sprint 1 Show and Tell.

Next up we will be talking about user testing, prototypes and the power of flapjacks.