The problem
Team turnover on any project often means that multiple people eventually work on certain parts of a service, sometimes without knowledge of previous decisions made. We have also been working at pace to allow for iteration and growth, working new pages and features into the service. We have been stepping back and looking at the end to end journey with a view of ensuring that the service presents users with the information they need, when they need it to reduce friction and allow users to complete their tasks.
Our approach
We have conducted regular usability testing to identify areas of focus. We learned that when users were being taken away from the service to read guidance, they were struggling to find their way back to the service to complete the task at hand. We have also thought about points of the service where we can surface information where users need it. We recently organised a user centred design away day to take a deeper dive into guidance across the service, and collaborate as a team.
Our solution
We replaced the landing page with a start page to provide more information about the service and wider context of providing open data with plans to improve this further. We have improved service navigation to make guidance pages omnipresent so that users can access these at any point in their journey. The banner across the service is now as below.
We introduced a step by step page which appears for each dataset which has not yet been provided by LPAs to the platform. This design is based on the step by step pattern in the GOV.UK design system.
Next steps
We will work on actions from the away day which we hope will:* reduce friction between different websites
allow users to navigate to guidance more easily
allow users to find guidance more easily
create more coherent journeys for users
clearly demonstrate what the programme is trying to achieve
Take a look at the work from our UCD away day in Mural.
We are currently testing some new designs. We are planning to surface guidance snippets so that the information a user needs is present when they need as below. This was due to observations in user research that in order for a user to understand how to resolve the issue at hand, they would go to the guidance.
We are also testing improvements in the step by step page of the user journey as below. This involves:
- providing the user with the ability to select when they have completed a step
- including buttons as the call to action in each step to provide a clear next step in the journey
