Coronavirus changed how we are building our new charity website
The coronavirus pandemic has affected what we do at Action on Hearing Loss. With the charity being unable to operate its face-to-face local engagement services, teams are naturally turning to what we can do digitally to help continue providing vital support for people with deafness, hearing loss and tinnitus.
We had planned to launch a minimal viable product of the charity’s new website at the end of April.
After several months of detailed user research, we know that our existing website does not meet many of the needs of our users. It is overly complicated and hard to navigate, despite there being a wealth of useful information available.
With an urgent need to get information and support to users in the simplest possible way, our User Experience team last week did a major pivot in the product’s go-live roadmap.
The team had initially felt a conflict between being pulled off the project to assist with urgent coronavirus preparations and the desire to get the website live when we said we would.
The team paused the project for a discovery week to understand if and how organisational and user needs had shifted in light of staying at home and the closure of our face to face services.
By reframing the focus of the minimal viable product, the team realised that these two objectives did not have to be in opposition to each other.
Instead the team rallied around the idea of launching a beta site three weeks earlier than the original go-live date. We will instead prioritise the content and build for any pages that support people during this difficult time, accepting that for some areas of the website users will be redirected to our existing pages until they can be replaced.
By adopting this phased approach, it means we can provide relevant content in an accessible format sooner. The new website will also enable us to create any digital services that are needed quickly and easily, which isn’t the case with the current site.
The coronavirus pandemic is horrendous on so many levels, but there are always positives to be found. I am really pleased to see how the team have adapted so quickly by making some tough decisions around our priorities.
— Michael Wilkinson is the Digital Director at Action on Hearing Loss.
