Gambling Commission Website Project
Project update #13
29th June to 7th August
This is a catchup for the last 2 sprints (6 weeks), so theres a lot to update.
In summary
- Worked through improvements to the design of our new online Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice (currently a 90 page PDF of conditions)
- Designed a new hub for Safer Gambling content which will help parents/guardians/carers and people looking for help, get authoritative, useful information, advice and tools to control gambling
- Worked on new content aimed at the general public for our fundraising and lotteries section
- Completed the latest round of research with members of the public
- Identified insights and themes from the latest round of user research and discussed these as a team in terms of what we need to do about them next
Design
One of the most important things the Gambling Commission publishes is the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice. This outlines what licensees must do while holding a licence, whether thats a personal licence or a licence to run a gambling business.
We’ve talked in previous weeknotes about the LCCP so I won’t labour the point here, however, I spent part of this sprint working through an updated design following research and incorporated search.
We’re also looking at ways to help people understand the changes to the LCCP over time as currently these aren’t published. We’re also making use of the updated Gov Design System colored tags to identify the different changes in each update.
Additionally to the LCCP content, I have also been working on a ‘friendler’ hub page design for our Safer Gambling content.
This is a very emotive subject but one thats really important to get right. The delivery of the content and enabling people to get the information they need quickly, or find tools or support is really important.
Taking a different approach to this page means it is slightly different in looks to the rest of the website, but also, the audience of this content is somewhat different too.
We’ll be running this through user research with members of the public in the next sprint.
Content
I’ve been really looking forward to this sprint. All the money, rights and complaints content we’ve been working on as a team is now going through user research. Seeing real people using our site (on mobile, accompanied by pets, with the window cleaner in the background), during lockdown has been really insightful.
It’s helped to reinforce how important it is to make things simple for our users.
Changed search terms = changed content
This was a really great point which was covered in the GOV.UK and FutureLearn Introduction to Content Design course. We’ve really tried to look at how and what are users are searching for, either to update or replace our content.
A good example of this is our fundraising content which we’ve been working on recently. Particularly for lotteries.
What’s changed?
We found that our users:
- wanted to know if they could run an online lottery (including Facebook and other social lotteries)
- wanted to know if they can run things like raffles and lotteries for charity without a licence
- were mainly using mobile.
As a result, we’ve created new content. We’ve worked the search terms into headers and copy. We’ve also used links in the inline copy to help users on mobile.
We also found that users were searching for things like ‘how to report an illegal Facebook lottery’. So we’re working with colleagues to produce some new content specifically around this. There’s lots more to do, but to use a pun, hopefully we’re on the right track.
User Research
We have continued with our cycle of running our moderated remote research sessions and then analysing the insights/ themes we have identified and deciding what we need to do about them as a team.
The latest round of research involved general members of the public who consume gambling products, so could find themselves on our website at some point. We tested the following areas:
- Who we are
- Your money and rights
- Complaints
- Reporting illegal or suspicious activity
We are learning about our users
These moderated sessions are so rich in terms of providing feedback that we are learning not only about our website and how our users would use it, more in this below, but also about our users and their behaviours before coming to the website.
At the beginning of the research session, before we get the user completing tasks on our website, we always ask some questions of the user to get them relaxed and in the mood for providing us with constructive feedback.
These questions also enable us to build up a picture of the user and how they consume gambling, which is important to us because this gives us an understanding of their experiences before they come to our website.
To frame these we have used a great piece of work completed by our Insights team, who produced a number of Gambling Topologies. We are linking these topologies to our users so the team can understand the experiences and knowledge such users have when coming to our website.
One of the most common gambling topologies we identified within the last round of research was Typology 7 — For the thrill of it. The win is important to this group of users, so they generally feedback that they would probably find themselves n our website if they thought something had gone awry around the wining aspect of their gambling transaction. Getting to the content around making a complaint was important to them.
We are learning about our website
As we perform usability testing with users we get feedback around the website as they complete tasks and read related content.
We have taken the approach to test design patterns and types of content with our users to see how they work for them and if they have any further needs around them. For example, as a team we were really interested to see how the design pattern around displaying related information, the guide pattern, worked for our users.
In short, the guide design pattern worked well for our users in this round of research. We observed users initially using the ‘Next page’ and ‘Previous page’ links to cautiously move through the guide to absorb the information. Once the user gained some confidence around the content being displayed within the guide, they then used the ‘left-hand navigation’ to moving into specific sections as we asked related questions around the content.
What was really pleasing for us as a team, was that we observed the guide pattern assisting users in their leaning. Once they felt confident with the content, they then adjusted how they accessed the information within the guide accordingly.
We found a research nugget!
One of the things that I love about running usability testing is finding a research nugget — a ‘oh yeah that’s interesting, we need to do something about that’ moment.
We had a few in the latest round of user research, but the standout one for us was around a user reporting something illegal or suspicious to us in terms of gambling.
When we asked users to think of a specific scenario around something illegal or suspicious and then work this through on our website, the first decision they made (independent of our website) was that they associated this with making a complaint about the gambling business. The term ‘complaint’ is key here, as the user then went down the complaints route, which has a very different outcome compared to reporting something illegal or suspicious to us.
The research nugget that we identified is that if users instantly associate something illegal or suspicious as making a complaint about a gambling business, we need to take this into account and then at some point during their journey to find the relevant content, get them on the path to reporting this to us.
Once we led (to move the session on) the users to the ‘Report something illegal or suspicious to us’ content, they fully understood what they needed to do and how this differed from making a complaint about a gambling business — we just need to get them to this content from where they start within their journey.
Next sprint
- We have some holidays in this sprint so there won’t be much on the sign front.
- Working with our safer gambling and anti-money laundering teams to start work in these areas
- Iterating design and content from the feedback we have had from the latest round of user research
- Preparing for the next round of user research with general members of the public
