Local government content discovery – week 9

10 Mar 2023 - Matt Lucht

So this is it. The end of our final week of discovery. It’s safe to say that the past 9 weeks have flown by.

Our focus for this week has been around reflecting on what we’ve done, and wrapping things up to ensure that we don’t lose what we’ve learnt.

Iterating the prototype

Based on what we learnt through the user testing of the prototype we’ve been able to make some small iterations. We’ve not had the opportunity to test these changes in another round of research, but if this work is carried forward in the future then they’re ready to go!

We specifically looked at whether adding a contact preference of email or telephone would provide a more positive experience for the user. And also in the case of the student exemption journey, whether asking for either a student ID or a student certificate might test better.

These changes are live in the prototype now.

Welsh translation of the prototype

We also have the content for the prototype translated into Welsh. We worked with a Welsh speaker to try and ensure that when the translation happened it wasn’t a formal literal translation but something that was more intuitive.

At the moment the switching between languages isn’t hooked up in the hosted version of the prototype, but all the code is in a branch on GitHub ready to be used if needed.

A screen shot of the Welsh language start page

A screen shot of the Welsh language confirmation page

Writing up our recommendations

We’ve also been writing up what we’ve learnt and our recommendations. These will be published in two blog posts on the Welsh Local Government Association blog. We’ll also be cross posting them alongside our weeknotes.

Our recommendations are broken down into three themes:

  1. Identify content creators who are supported and empowered to own the content
  2. Introduce some content design best practises
  3. Pick a service (or part of a service) to run a transformation alpha

The blog post covers these three themes in much more detail.

List of things

Here’s a summary of some of the things we’ve made during discovery.

Prototype

Guides

Miscellaneous

Thank you

Finally, thank you to everyone who participated in this discovery. From folk within the 4 local authorities, residents who gave their time to participate in user research sessions, to everyone who attended show and tells and gave us feedback along the way.