Gambling Commission Website Project
Project update #12
8th to 26th June
This sprint in summary:
- First of our new 3 week sprints has gone really well
- Digital Accessibility Centre started testing our Beta website with very favourable initial feedback
- A new section with information aimed at the general public completed
- First rounds of external user research completed
- Planning for a go-live of our beta and working with our infrastructure team to start configuring our app services and certificates
Design
This sprint has mainly focused on building forms for the new website and setting up templates in GOV Notify to route messages through to teams internally who deal with individual requests. Being able to use Notify to handle messaging makes implementing email functionality so much easier.
I also mapped out all our contact options and the recipients. This is just a starting point, but we will expand it to include information relevant to each route as we need to. This will help people understand when a form is submitted who gets it and who supports the process.
We have had issues with Bots submitting crud to us in the past, we’ve protected our forms with Google reCaptcha to protect against this. Rather than opting for the visual ‘select all the traffic light’ option, we’re using a hidden version which scores the submission so we can choose what to do based on a confidence level, we can tweak this score as we get real submissions coming through.
We’ve also decided to fully integrate our public register into the new website. We did some work on this as a beta last year and it tested really well. Instead of having it as a separate service we are going to integrate it fully and offer the user a seamless experience of our website.
This will also help people who are directly linked to the register from gambling operators’ websites, to find out more about us and how we can help them understand the gambling industry and gamble safely and responsibly.
Implemented a cookie control service to allow users to selectively control cookies when they first visit our website and then change them on subsequent visits. Rather than roll our own we’ve opted to use one that's used on other GOV sites and the ICO’s own website. Done some testing on it and it’s tracking when permission granted and not tracking when revoked.
Content
In this sprint we’ve continued working on content in our money and rights section. We presented it back to our subject matter experts and have iterated the content in some places, based on their feedback. We used a simple word document template to collate feedback which seemed to work well. Just columns for the URLs and any changes requested.
This section will soon be going through user research. It’s mostly completely new content, so (although naturally a tad nervous) I’m looking forward to getting feedback and comments from external users.
I’ve also found the 3 week sprint has worked really well. It’s given more realistic timescales to meet with different stakeholders and still have time to work on content in the CMS.
One of the things I’ve been struggling a bit due to lockdown fatigue is keeping a hawk-like eye over spelling and typos. So, I’ve been trying out the read-aloud feature in the Chromium Edge browser. So far this has been great at counteracting ‘copy blindness!’
I’d be really interested to know if anyone has any other suggestions?
User Research
The 3 week sprint has worked well for user research as it has enabled us to complete a round of research, which we do over two weeks, and then get together with the wider team to understand what the research insights and themes means to us as a team. Essentially, what we need to do about them next.
Fortunately for us before lock down we acquired the tool Lookback to enable us to run remote research sessions with our user groups. We are only a small team so being able to travel to complete any user research face-to-face, although being very rich in terms of feedback, wasn’t really going to be an option for us.
We used Lookback for the first time during the latest round of user research, which was associated with those users that need to use our Licence Conditions and Codes of Practise (LCCP) for their role. We have just taken this online and wanted to test how this would work for those individuals.
We found ourselves testing the online version of the LCCP with Compliance Managers across the industry, one who was based all the way in Australia (nice early session for us to ensure the participant wasn’t completing it in the middle of the night), gambling consultants and Solicitors. We got some really good insight into how the online version of the LCCP would fit into their day-to-day activities and also some additional needs they told us about.
The tool seemed to work well for these participants, we only had one real issue with a participant’s connectivity but managed to complete the session in two parts in the end, which is something that’s really important for us. Thank you to all those that participated in this round of user research.
We did have some difficult sessions, as essentially we are trying to test a complex regulatory framework where we can’t change any of the content without going through a formal consultation. We must though bring it online to ensure it’s accessible and ensure it meets the needs of our users.
Having difficult sessions is all part of the course of being a user researcher, but this tool allowed me for the first time to go through each session to not only learn about our users but also learn from any mistakes I made leading these sessions. Doing this will hopefully mean I become better at leading difficult sessions. As I always say, “God loves a trier”.
I also need to thank the team as they did an amazing job in observing the sessions and making notes, couldn’t of done it without you! They even framed the notes like an empathy map, by putting either [S] Says, [T] Thinks, [F] Feels and [D] Does at the beginning of a relevant observation notes. This has allowed me to seamlessly create two new 2.5D sketch personas, which of course includes my drawing in the top left-hand corner to bring to life the user’s situation.
At the same time of completing our user research we have also been planning our next round of research with general members of the public that may find themselves on our website. Again, we will run the sessions through Lookback and we’re really looking forward to seeing users on our prototype website and feeding back to us.
Next sprint
We’re welcoming a new Service Designer into the organisation and onto the project. They are passionate about design and eager to get started, so that’s exciting.
We will be building into the website our Public Register — we’ll talk about this in the next update but it’s an important part of what we offer to the public and so getting it right is key.
