User research and the power of flapjacks…
Hi. I’m Tim from Bath & North East Somerset Council. Last time I was telling you about some of the user research we had been conducting to better understand how our customers interact with our website. This time I’ll be talking about prototyping, the challenges of how getting people to take part in user research and how, if all else fails, the offer of flapjacks can be a powerful persuader.
Once we had begun to build a picture of how users engaged with the journeys we had chosen to look at (view/comment on planning applications, finding library information, finding car parking information, and finding Park & ride information), we start to more clearly see the pain points for users and can begin to design web content that helps remove those pain points and simplifies the journey so that it provides a better user journey. During Sprint 2, we worked very closely with Will from Pilot Works to build three prototypes — one for finding Park & Ride information, one for finding library information, and one for viewing/commenting on a planning application. For those of you that aren’t sure what a prototype is, it is basically an early version of what we think the web pages and user journey through them should look like. This lets us then test the concept and make changes based on feedback from users. It’s a quick way of testing ideas before we commit to a design and helps us articulate our thinking. For those who want to know more about this there is some good reading on gov.uk.
When redesigning the chosen journeys, we considered a number of principles which will be underpinning all of our content redesign — does it meet an evidenced user need, is the need already met on the site, is the need already met somewhere else. This led us to build some very different prototypes to meet the user needs for the key journeys we had chosen.
For finding Park & Ride information we quickly realised, through a workshop with the Public Transport team, that this need was already being met by TravelWest — which is a travel information and journey planning site funded by Bristol, South Gloucestershire, Bath & North East Somerset and North Somerset. B&NES provide data to TravelLine (which powers TravelWest)and are responsible for maintaining the website content — effectively duplicating the content we have on our own website. This is a really good example of a user need being met elsewhere — why duplicate information on our website when TravelWest does it so much better? Take a look at the current website pages and compare them to our prototype and see whether you think this is a better user journey.
The prototype for finding library information followed a different route. Information on individual libraries (such as opening times, facilities, what’s on etc) was spread across multiple pages on the current site. We wanted to simplify that journey, giving users all the information relating to a particular library on a single page. Take a look at our prototype and see what you think
To test our prototypes we set up in Bath Central Library and invited library users to come and help us test. Pop up user testing like this can often be frustrating, with lots of waiting around, but it can deliver some good results. Sometimes, however, we need to resort to other, more extreme measures to get users involved — flapjacks. Through the power of promising flapjacks we were able to get a good spread of users, from multiple demographics and with differing levels of digital skills. We record any users who test the prototype, capturing their comments and motivations as well as the way they interact with the prototype, as context can be all important in explaining peoples behaviour.
For more on what we did and the results, please see our Sprint 2 Show and Tell.
Next up we will be talking about redesigning and testing journeys for finding car parking information and applying for planning permission, as well as how you can remove the second most visited landing page on your website and still make the user journey better.
