Gambling Commission Website Project – Weeknotes #1

6 January and 13 January 2020

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

Going forward we’ll be doing these each week to give an update on the progress of the project and sharing our show and tells. Hopefully this open approach will help other teams, just as much as others being open, has helped us.

Background

We’re doing this work for a number of reasons:

1. Our website isn’t fully accessible so we want to sort that out
2. We have years of content which needs reviewing and making easier for people to find
3. we have a lot of PDF’s which ideally we want to make HTML content so they can be found
4. People, including our own staff, find the website difficult to use

Kick off (week 1)

We held a kick off meeting on 6 January which formed the project team made up of people from the Digital Team and the Communications Team. This kick off set out our vision and goals for this project.

It was also an opportunity to start to identify users, needs establish governance, we wills and ways of working.

Learning from others

We’ve been following what Buckinghamshire Digital Service have been doing for a few months and have been inspired by some of their show and tells and progress of their own website project.

We run show and tells regularly and seeing the work they are doing has helped us think differently about how to approach this project as opposed to designing a transactional service such as Apply for a licence or Manage your licence.

We had a chat with the Head of Digital, Ben Unsworth from BDS on Friday, to find out a bit more about their work and to ask a few questions. It was really useful and helped us realise that we’re on the right lines and going in the right direction.

We’ll be continuing to follow their work and if you’re picking up a website re/design project then they quite a way down their journey already.

Week 2

• look at our website estate and decide which will be straightforward to start with and try out lots of ideas on
• understand governance and who will be responsible for what and escalation routes for decision making
• identify, understand and diagram the existing information architecture of our websites so we have a good understanding of what’s there now and how it’s structured.
• go over the analytics data we have on our websites to get an understanding of the technical nature of our users, (what tech they use, browsers, devices, locations etc) so we can consider this when doing user research on any prototypes
• bring our comms team colleagues up to speed with the Service Standards, we’re familiar with them in the Digital Team but others across the organisation aren’t. So it’s a good opportunity to share and refresh the project team’s understanding

• using the data and knowledge we have, start to look at how we will prototype ideas and test these with our users
• gather content editor user needs to understand what we need a CMS to support.
• following on from the user needs, we already use a headless CMS (Contentful) to manage our service manual content so naturally that’s our first option to consider, but we will be looking at our options.
• use the information architecture work to identify content types and what these may translate into in terms of page designs
• start to plan recruiting people to take part in user research activity. Including recruitment through links on our existing websites and our user research programme
• continuing stakeholder mapping through identifying users of our websites

Next sprint:

Design work on the ABSG website.