Gambling Commission Website Project

Weeknotes #4 with Show and Tell #2.

16 February to 28 February

Progress updates from the team delivering a new Gambling Commission website.

What we’ve done:

• Second show and tell done (slides and video) with an update on the progress so far.
• Iterated the design of the ABSG website following feedback to make it more visually appealing and make some content more visible on the homepage. We’ve also got it out as a beta https://beta.absg.org.uk – this is a beta, there’s a few rough edges so we want to see how it performs in the real world while we work on the production quality version.
• Using Sketch, designed some variants for our corporate pages on the Gambling Commission website (careers, governance – the kind of stuff all public sector orgs have to do) we are going to run a design crit on these in the next sprint.
• Started to look at examples of how complex, structured documents and guides are done elsewhere across the web. Lots of ideas and concepts to consider to see if they’ll work for our content structures. I especially like how the Fundraising Regulator does their Fundraising Conditions page as their content is almost identical.
• Decided to move something we’ve been working on into its own sprint. We’ve identified lots of constraints and potential problems so it’s the right thing to do to put this work into a dedicated sprint.
• Planning our user research and participant recruitment so that we can speak to a wide range of users as possible, ensuring we get as good understanding of their needs, pain points etc.

We have learned:

• Our complex documents like our licence conditions (multiple conditions with a child through to grandparent relationship on each) are hard to design. Being safe to say, “this is too big to do alongside other things in this sprint” and have business support to stop and pick it up in a later sprint is really important.

I’ll be writing up a stand-alone case study/reflection on this specific price of work and talk about how we’ve approached it

• Planning user research is difficult and time consuming. However, this is very much the case of doing the hard work up front so that when we get to speak to our users, the essence of user research, it’s a positive experience for all. This should then ensure we gain as much insight as we can from our users given the sometimes limited time we have with them during these research sessions.
• We found users in an unmoderated setting, tended to concentrate their feedback around the looks and aesthetics of a website as opposed to content. Of course all feedback is valid, but we need to consider how we get users to also feedback on content so we can ensure it meets their needs.
• We need to work on our internal comms to get more people interested in the show and tells and to start to get involved more in what we’re doing.

One of the design options for the careers page, without any branding colour. We’re looking at brand guidelines so colour options will need to be worked into these designs in future.

Next sprint we will be:

• Running an express design sprint. We’ve done one before and our focus is set to be the homepage. We will do the design and prototype over 2 days getting people involved in ideas for what we might do with it. We’re going to be brave and really see what is possible to change the focus onto players and the public.
• Continue with planning user research and recruiting people for research activities. All this hard work should ensure that when we get to speak to users, it’s a positive experience for them enabling great research and conversations to happen.