24 Feb 2023 - Matt Lucht
When we were planning out the work for scoping and building the council tax prototype we gave ourselves a couple of weeks for this work. However, we managed to get that everything we wanted to do wrapped up a bit quicker, this meant that over the past week we’ve had a slight change of focus ahead of a busy week 8 of user testing.
At the start of discovery one of the goals we set ourselves was to identify opportunities for practical changes to the ways of working within the local authorities when it comes to content workflows.
This week we were able to reflect on what we’ve learnt over the past 6 weeks and started gathering our thoughts on some proposed changes as well as recommendations for alpha.
Capturing user feedback from the website was something that came up during a few conversations. We’ve written up a guide for how to collect feedback along with some tips for how to analyse and use what you’ve learnt.
We’ve also created a template form with ideas for questions that might be useful to ask.
Another challenge that we heard from each of the local authorities was that content was often added to the website without any consideration for its purpose.
We’ve written some guidelines for how and why a content request process might help to introduce thinking about what user needs are being met by new content being added to the website and to prioritising the work.
We want to make sure that the prototype is able to live on past this phase of the project. All of the code is open source and lives in a public GitHub repository.
We’ve started writing up some high level instructions for how to spin up your version of the prototype and how to make changes to it.
Next week we’ll be focusing on testing the prototype. We’ve got 9 sessions scheduled with residents across each of the 4 local authorities.
Whilst you can’t really hear from too many users 9 sessions is probably more than we’d normally expect to run at this stage, but given our time constraints this allows us to account for any potential ‘no shows’ or last minute cancellations.
We’ve written a short blog post that describes why this discovery project came about and how we’ve gone about tackling the problem.