Gambling Commission Website Project — Weeknotes 5
2 March to 13 March
This sprint has been busy — we’ve been designing some screen concepts for some of our corporate content pages that will be on the new website.
I use Sketch for these, it lets me do some rapid design work, doesn’t involve coding anything and can quickly create variations of pages. It also enables the user research team to use Maze to do usability testing on the designs.
We’ve got some concepts of landing pages, guides and transparency data content types. This means we’ve designed:
- Contact us hub
- Complain about a gambling business
- Lists of news and news article page
- Who we are hub
- Transparency hub
- Careers hub
- General content page
We’ve focused on these pages as they are either concepts that will flow across the whole website, are untested or are the most visited content on the website now or what we get asked about the most.
We ran a design crit on Friday 6th to go over the designs and using the sticky dot method marked each with what we thought could work to be taken forward into a prototype to try out.
It’s also an opportunity for a wider discussion about the design of pages and features on pages.
I’ve purposefully not included headers and footers or any branding in the designs.
I didn’t want there to be focus on something which we haven’t considered yet (we’re doing that next week) it also means people are focused on the core content and design of the page itself.
Our roadmap is coming along nicely and I went through it with the team in our sprint planning session.
We use Miro for this as it’s really flexible, somewhat easy to use (there’s some quirks with zooming and scrolling around which takes some getting used to). The overall result is easy to use, maintain and understand – which is the important thing.
Week 2
Did our 3rd show and tell it was a bigger turnout — the room we usually use is starting to buckle under the strain. Our next one on 27 March will be in our main hub which can hold most of the organisation.
Slides / Video
We did the design and prototyping phase of Sprint (that’s Tuesday afternoon through to Thursday morning) we’d already done Monday and part of Tuesday previously so know we wanted to tackle the homepage.
Our current homepage has remained largely unchanged from when it went live back in 2017. There has been no change to content or the focus of the homepage over the last 3 years.
We have lots of data on the most visited pages, what people are clicking on etc, the usual Analytics data. This has helped us frame areas to focus on for the homepage and also the wider website.
We want to be able to make our website more adaptable to changing content based on trends or what the Commission is doing, it’s difficult for us to do this at the moment.
The sprint
Day 1
We analysed the data, came up with themes and ideas. We talked through what the likely areas of focus should be.
Everyone came with screenshots of other sites and features they liked and we talked through these as a group. What could work, how it might support our content and what benefits using other patters could bring — using red and green dots and postits to highlight good/bad points and patterns.
We’re acutely aware that our website doesn’t perform as well as it should and that other sites have features that work well and help people navigate more easily.
Jakobs Law The idea that most people spend time on other sites to yours means your site should be more like other sites.
I really get this law and it’s true, players and the public won’t spend a lot of time on our website, so we need features that users will recognise and not have to ‘learn’ how to use.
However, people we licence will probably spend more time on our site as we are the regulator and we publish a lot of information about how to run a gambling business and be compliant. Therefore, it’s reasonable to expect that most people using our site, work in the gambling industry. This might mean that we can be more flexible in our design when it comes to the part of the website aimed at licensees. However, keeping in mind common patterns and design concepts.
We ended the day sketching out some ideas and started work on a prototype using Sketch.
Day 2
We refined the prototype idea and features and selected 4 full page prototypes to share across the organisation for feedback.
Next sprint
We’re running interviews for both the service design and user researcher roles we advertised so this is going to take up a lot of mine and the UR lead’s time.
We’re working through the content type design for our corporate pages so we can start to model these in the CMS.
We’re having meetings with teams across the organisation to gather high level needs for their own content and start to flesh out wider areas of the website roadmap for future sprints.
Working on design for the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice which is a big PDF of all conditions and codes. We want to try and look at how we can make it HTML friendly.
