Website project update #11
A new website for the Gambling Commission
Fortnight ending 5 June 2020
Sprint update
This sprint we:
- worked on a new section aimed at the general public about their money and their rights.
- completed our latest round of moderated remote usability testing around the ‘Who we are’ and ‘Publications’ sections of the prototype. We then ran an insights and themes session around this research across the team.
- continued to recruit participants from user groups that we need to involve in our next round of user research for the online version of the Licensing Conditions and Codes of Practice (LCCP).
- reworked our contact us page to bring our signposts to different routes in for contact to make it easier for users to get to the right point of contact quickly
- presented the website as a case study at Gov Digital Services’ Service Thursday to other designers across government. If you’re on the Gov/Local Gov slack you can find a link to it in the design channels.
- started planning to work with our lotteries team and also our safer gambling team to help get their content onto the new website in our updated styles and patterns.
- we agreed as a team to not have meetings on Wednesdays to allow us to focus on work without any disruptions.
- we have also agreed to switch to a 3 week sprint to help us and the team work more efficiently around our own personal constraints that Coronavirus is putting on to us.
Design
Making it easy to get answers
We get a lot of questions into our contact centre, many aren’t ours to deal with. For example, we don’t deal with complaints about transactions, so we want to help people get answers to the common questions without having to contact us.
We want to avoid FAQ’s this is more to help people who’ve googled “Contact the Gambling Commission” and come straight to our contact page.
Making guides more user friendly
Iterated our guides to maily help users on mobiles who’ve scrolled to the bottom of a guide, get to the next page or the previous page more easily. However, it works for all users equally as well. This reduces the need to scroll back to the top of a page to do the same action.
An updated homepage
We’ve not tested this design yet. However, we weren’t too happy with the design and layout. So,with what we’ve learnt from other areas of the website, I have redesigned the page to give us something more functional to test.
This is a recent version of the page, we’re probably going to tweak this a bit more and there are some styling matters to resolve, but, as our focus is consumers, we want to make it consumer friendly.
We don’t want a corporate looking homepage or just chock full of a load of cards that people have to read through to get to what they need.
We have designed the page based on what people are looking at on our website, what they search for and what is important for us to push to users too.
Government Digital Service — Service Thursday
I had the opportunity last week to present our website project as a case study across the design community in government.
We’ve had some really good feedback so far and if we can help others with what we’ve learnt and how we’ve done things then thats a bonus.
Content
This sprint we’ve been focusing on content for the players and the public section of the new site.
Unsurprisingly, we know our users visit our website looking for answers to questions about their money and gambling.
Money, money, money
We looked at our Google Analytics data and user feedback from our current site via Mouseflow to identify common questions and problems. We were also able to get insights from our internal teams who manage inbound consumer messages.
We’ve used all this to create a new ‘money and rights’ content hub:
The idea is, this will give us flexibility to iterate and change this content according to what our users want to know most. For example, we know online trends, Coronavirus-related issues and major sporting events can all quickly have a big impact.
We’ve also created a number of new pieces of content in a ‘your money’ content hub:
There’s quite a lot to do to pull all of this together. For some of these areas we already have good existing content. For others, we may need to combine historic content or look to include new information.
It’s a busy sprint for content!
User research
We continue with our cycle of planning for research, completing rounds of research and then learning as a team about our users. This cycle is key to ensure that the website we produce is understandable to our users and meets their needs.
Remote insight and themes workshop
Wrapping up a round of user research is great as we know the next step is to run a workshop across the wider team to continue to learn about our users, identify insights and themes as well as, decide what we want to do about these findings.
We have been using a product called Miro to complete the insights and themes workshop remotely. This product has really helped us complete these sessions remotely. The team were also great in supporting each other to complete this workshop and really got involved as I knew they would.
If I’m honest though, I did struggle a little leading this workshop remotely. I felt it was too formal with me leading it and ensuring everyone was given the opportunity to contribute. For me these sessions work best when we are all in the same room and the conversations can ebb and flow with a sense of informally about them.
These sessions are however, a good opportunity for the team meeting up, collectively learning about our users and understanding the bigger picture in terms of design, content and user research.
Do you know what’s hard — participant recruitment!
This sprint we have also been recruiting participants for our next round of user research with the online version of the LCCP. We needed to include a couple of specific user groups in our research.
Given the current situation, we decided to only send out correspondence about this user research to those individuals that had already signed up to our user research participation programme or had already indicated that they wanted to be involved in future user research when they had participated in the past. Fortunately this did include individuals within our targeted user groups.
This ensured that we were sensitive around the current situation and that such correspondence wouldn’t be unexpected. Of course, there’s no obligation for an individual to take part in the user research once they had received this correspondence.
So far, we have managed participant recruitment ourselves for the website project. This has been hard work in terms of arranging the logistics and ensuring the participant is well informed about the session. But equally rewarding, as we have had a fantastic response to our request and have already started to build up our relationship with these participants before the session.
Preparation, preparation, preparation
As already stated, our next round of user research concerns the online version of the LCCP. The following preparation tasks, which we normally do before each round of research, have been completed:
- identifying our learning objectives for the session
- completing a discussion guide and ensuring the team can feed into this from their perspective
- revising what we currently know about the specific user groups and researching any specific needs the participant may have during the research session
- ensuring that we have received each participant’s informed consent
- running through the session with a colleague to ensure we identify and then correct any obvious issues
Due to the remote nature of all research at the moment, we will be running the research session using a tool called Lookback. Before we do this for real, we had a trail session amongst the team to ensure everyone was comfortable using it.
During the trail session with this tool, the mock-participant made some great notes of things they thought we should let our participants know before and during the session. Essentially, we researched the user research tool amongst the team to ensure it works seamlessly for our participants and ourselves. We’ll let you know how it goes with this tool in future Weeknotes.
Next sprint
- we’re moving to a 3 week sprint and doing 1 show and tell a month
- progressing with the public and player content
- Digital Accessibility Centre (DAC) will be starting the accessibility testing of the beta website
- we will be working with more teams and their content
