Overview
Rushmoor Borough Council wanted to redesign their website to better engage their audience. This was a complete project from early discovery through to build.
Approach
- Some understanding of the audience was undertook particularly using a demographic tool called Mosaic
- Analytics on the current site was analysed to see members of the publics activity on the existing website
- Stakeholder workshops were also held to define the requirements of staff members and local councillors
- Four user workshops were held to gather user requirements from the local population. The council helped with recruitment for this after we specified the user groups that we needed
- Workshops consisted of brainstorming activities and affinity sorts to define requirements
- The information gathered from these workshops was articulated to the project team were the issues users were facing in the real world were worked through and how best the council could help and advise through the website
- Card sorting exercises were held with staff and members of the public to help define information architecture
- This was first an open card sort then a closed card sort
- Creation of a new information architecture based on analysis of card sorts and business requirements
- Several sketch workshops were conducted between myself and other members of the project team
- From these wireframes a of prototype of the website using Axure was created and
- User testing of prototype was carried out with staff and members of the public
- Presentation of findings to governors of the council
Affinity sort session workshop with user group
(Ideas and inspiration was gained from four brain storming workshops with different groups of end users, to discover what people wanted from the new site)
Sketching during brainstorming session prior to prototyping
(The right-side shows how the homepage was broken down into different areas from information obtained from user workshops)
User testing
A prototype of the solution was created and tested with member of the public and also council staff.
Outcomes
The most important issue that members of the public faced was centred around rubbish and particularly collection times. We fought hard against the clients insistence to include this in the main navigation. The card sort had shown us the information architecture was the right way to approach the navigation. Eventually through user testing and proving that all users found this information under the Environment navigation section and other areas of the website show that we had the right navigational structure.