Gambling Commission Website Project update #14
10 August to 28 August 2020
This sprint has focused on lots of areas of the website, including, how we get it live. We’ve had a few infrastructure issues which have caused us some headaches but we’re hoping to get it out to the public in the next sprint.
We’re really now just adding content, ideally, the site would be live and we’d be getting this content out in front of people now and getting feedback.
A couple of us are presenting a summary of the project and seek a nod to go to Public Beta next week. So fingers crossed.
Design
Andy Williams-Jones and Rupi Dosanjh
Anti-money laundering
This sprint is my first project with the team. I thought, great way to get to know more about the different areas of the Gambling Commission — with Anti -Money Laundering (AML) being my first stop.
During show and tell, I presented an overview of what we’ve been doing during Discovery so far. We highlighted the following problems we identified:
- The current content is hard to navigate
- People are struggling to find the information they need
- Pages are too long with content (data shows us people are leaving pages quickly or going back to the page they were previously on)
We ran a workshop with the AML team to help us understand their issues, pain points and used this, alongside other data (a mix of quantitative and qualitative) we pooled together to tackle these problems. Everything we collected so far was valuable to help us to start coming up with ideas for how we can improve the AML section.
During show and tell, I ran through a few examples of what we have been working on. These consisted of:
- Central hub for users to start or refer back to when browsing AML content
- A brand new page for updates and notices
- Optimising the current news pattern that’s already designed and adding a year timeline for users to go through historical news stories
What we learnt:
I’ve been working with Cian, Junior Service Designer who has on boarded me with content systems and ran through the Gambling Commission design system. We spoke about what we’ve learnt so far on this project:
Importance of iteration
We started off with one design of how it could look and developed it over time.
Using the data to drive the design
We used Google Analytics and heat maps to understand what was important to users, rather than what we might assume.
Have a design to start a conversation
We put to these ideas in Miro to start getting feedback from the wider team on how to improve the designs. It’s a good exercise I find to not become too attached to designs — it’s so important to be ready to move onto something that could be more useful to a user rather that get emotionally attached to something that looks good.
Understand your stakeholder
During my second week, I attended an induction that was about AML. This was golden for me! The team went through an overview of AML and other key information. Straight after the induction I requested the slides and often referred to them.
Next steps:
Going into the next sprint, we plan to continue iterating the hub ideas we generate, use the data to influence designs we develop and put together screens for user testing with participants.
Content
In this sprint, we’ve been looking at our content around safer gambling.
Our starting point was a kick off meeting with our subject matter experts in this area. We also looked at how users were using this kind of content in our current site. We shared these insights during the meeting.
The main things we found were:
- several users were accessing this content very late at night or in the early hours of the morning
- several pages had very high bounce rates
- our heat maps show users only focused on the opening paragraphs of longer pages
- there was a significant group of users looking for information to help a family member.
New safer gambling content: simpler is better
Using these insights, we started creating new guides.
We know that our users weren’t scrolling down longer pages (and often exiting the site altogether). So, we’ve split content across multiple pages so as not to overwhelm our users. We’ve also used Plain English and clear, reassuring language.
Here’s an example from our new guide on the ways to stay safe from gambling:
We’ve also done a first iteration of new content aimed at helping parents around young people and gambling. We’re going to be testing this content, and our other safer gambling guides, in a future round of user research.
One of the things we’ll be looking out for is how we can help our users find the tools and support content that’s right for them. We’ll be looking forward to sharing more about this in the coming weeks.
Research
In this sprint we have been busy planning and completing various research related to our users, not only for the website project but also for other projects we are involved in. Seems to be all coming at once at the moment, but we continue to learn about our users and create things that will ultimately meet their needs and eliminate any pain points they have.
Pick a card, any card and now place it into a category
Within the website project we have recently completed a card sort on our fundraising and lotteries content. The team, alongside the organisation, produced the content for a number of guides relevant to this area. They then logically grouped up the guides according to topic and provided some high-level category names.
To test out these guide groupings, we created a closed card sort via Maze, which could be completed unmoderated by our users. The users were selected through our User Research Participation Programme. The team work hard in getting the design and content right for our users, which we specifically test through usability testing, but we also need to ensure our users can get to this excellent content. One method we can achieve this is through a card sort.
Through the closed card sort we got a proposed information architecture from our users, which wasn’t too different from the team’s original groupings. But it did include some key changes of guides moving around into other categories, that users thought they would more logically fit into.
Within the card sort we also provided an open feedback question. This provided some more insights into those users that would be accessing this content, which hadn’t come up in previous research around this area. All research findings were then presented across the team and a number of actions noted, which will be implemented in a future sprint.
Let’s talk about Anti-Money Laundering
We have also been working on bringing the current Anti-Money Laundering (AML) section into our new website. This would be an important section of our website as we are the gambling supervisory body in this area.
We have no previous specific research into those users that access this area of the website. So the Service Designer, leading in this area, and I set about producing a research plan so we could discover more about these specific users.
We quickly got a feedback mechanism implemented within this area of the website. The Service Designer also analysed the analytics we have around the current AML section of the website and produced an excellent discovery slide deck, which was presented across the team.
This desk research provided us with some good insight into this area, which helped us to form the learning points (and subsequently research questions) we wanted to achieve from the user interviews we have been conducting in this area. The participants were identified from previous user research sessions and from the AML team we have been working closely with.
We have been conducting these user interviews via Microsoft Teams for the first time. So far it has been a really useful tool as we can open up the camera which allows us to start building that (albeit remote) face-to-face relationship with the participant. It also allows us to record the session, which obviously the participants consent to, enabling us to go back over them to pull out our insights.
Through the feedback mechanism on the website, the analytics related to this area and our user interviews, we should have a good sense of user needs and pain points related to the AML section of the website that will drive the design in this area.
As always, it’s been vital to work closely with the Service Designer in this discovery as we have complementary skills that enables us to be user-centric in what we do and produce.
Get in touch with us
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