27 Jan 2023 - Matt Lucht
Our focus this week has been around delving into the web analytics for each of the local authority websites, speaking with residents about their experience of using council tax services, and planning for a design workshop in Newport next week.
This week we started digging into the web analytics from each of the local authorities. We looked more generally at what was happening and then focused on council tax as our chosen area.
One of the things apparent from the data was that it’s difficult to track an end-to-end user journey due to the disparate systems involved and them not being linked together through analytics. This meant that some of the web pages where we’d anticipate a user continuing the their journey (albeit on a different system) it was showing as a high ‘exit rate’ – this might be misleading, but we can’t tell from the data. It’ll be interesting to see how users react to this system-switch through the user research sessions.
I like to caveat that when looking at things like web analytics the individual metrics in isolation can sometimes be a little misleading. The value really comes when combining multiple metrics and other sources of information (such as user research findings, call logs, etc) against user needs to help tell a story, provide some narrative or help evidence a problem. We’ll be doing more of that over the coming weeks.
At the time of writing these week notes (this week they’re being written on Thursday morning) we’ve had just 1 interview take place. Further sessions are scheduled to happen before the end of the week and a few more lined up for next week too.
With that in mind we’ll hold off drawing any conclusions but will say that the first interview was super useful and gave us a few things to think about, and it’ll be interesting to see whether we see and hear similar things from the other participants.
One of the things that we were keen to do from the start was to make this discovery as collaborative as possible. I’m sure that there’ll be some form of write-up at the end, but we didn’t want the only output to be a report. We wanted people to experience the challenges first-hand and be involved in the thinking about how improvements could be made.
Next week we’re meeting with representatives from each of the local authorities for a ‘design workshop’ in Newport. Aside from being excited about meeting folk in person, we’re looking forward to reviewing the early findings from the user research, working together on writing and prioritising user needs and exploring the current content publishing workflows.