Gambling Commission – Website project notes #7

30 March to 9 April

Our fortnightly updates from the team delivering a new Gambling Commission website.

While remote working continues we have been making the most of the collaboration tools we use to still work together as a team. Notably Miro and frequent Skype calls.

Held our 5th show and tell (slides).

We have been progressing with how we can convert our Licensing Conditions and Codes of Practice (LCCP) from being PDF to HTML so they are more accessible usable and manageable.

We quickly learnt in a previous sprint that we needed to dedicate some time to this area of content and we did this last sprint. We have tweaked and refined the design this sprint and we’re going out internally to do some research with teams across the organisation who use it regularly.

We have identified issues while creating the alpha version and will look at these as areas to focus on for the Beta.

Corporate content

This is content we have to publish as a public body, so we started with “Who we are” working through how we represent our people and leadership/governance groups as content types.

This proved to be more complicated that we first thought and wasn’t until we started modelling it and linking up with our Alpha frontend that we realised we needed to change the model.

We’ve also migrated all the people in to the CMS so we have a fully functional “Who we are” section with links.

Publication scheme

We have also spent this sprint working on the content model and front end design for our publication scheme content.

This is all the content we’re need to publish under the ICO requirements. This is where most of our time has been spent this week and it took us some time to work through the model and front end structure. Will all of course need some user testing to see if it works.

Documenting the design with ZeroHeight

I have also started to document the design rationale and examples of specific components in use on the website in ZeroHeight.

Being the only interaction designer in the organisation, creating new components that meet our accessibility requirements through reusable SCSS components, HTML and implementation takes a lot of time and is hard on your own. (I’m happy to talk to others about how they’ve approached this)

To make the most of this, I’m documenting why certain design decisions have been made so that others in the team have some background as to why some things are the way they are and we can have informed discussions within the team about any design changes.

I’m quickly realising just how much there is to do so will be taking some time to focus on the admin side of the design work so it’s not all left to the end of Alpha.

User research

As a group we have decided to ‘keep calm and carry on researching’ with our users. We know that we need to be mindful of the current situation in terms of the feedback we receive during these sessions. However, when speaking to internal users (colleagues), they were still very keen to get involved in our research and ‘do something a little different to help out and breakup the day’, so we were more than happy to assist and continue to collaborate across the Commission.

We ran a session amongst the team to identify our learning objectives for this user research. This is really important for us as team members work through the design, content etc. they will automatically have questions that they would like answers to from our users. Involving different perspectives to drive research sessions ensures everyone feels involved in the process and is able to learn from it and then progress.

We have completed a number of research sessions this week, which has already provided us with some key feedback, and we will continue with this round of user research over the next couple of weeks. It’s certainly been a team effort, with colleagues assisting with note taking and identifying key pieces of insight. All have said its been really beneficial for them to be involved and see users use the online service.

This sprint has really made me proud to be part of the Commission family and I feel very humbled, what with colleagues still being really keen to help us out and get involved in our user research whilst trying to get to grips with different working conditions that they are having to adjust to themselves.

Next sprint

• Looking at how we do guides (groups of related content)
• Improving how we do news
• Continuing the development and creation of corporate content
• Planning and doing user research sessions around the LCCP

Easter weekend

Hope everyone stays home, stays safe and makes the most of Easter at home!