Louise is honing her skills as a UX designer in the Web Services team. She has a love for beautiful designs and enjoys re-engineering the way people use websites. When not at work Louise can be found working on her own websites, exercising at circuit classes or volunteering with birds of prey.
Earlier this week we had our neighbours from Birmingham City Council pay us a visit. It gave them a chance to find out about Umbraco – our new Content Management System (CMS) – and how we were getting along with it, and also give them a deeper insight into Project WIP. The visit was interesting for us all here. Primarily it brought us up to speed on Birmingham City Council’s plans for their website, and it also highlighted the common goals/issues we both face when trying to determine our target audience whilst also bringing about a culture shift internally to make our services realise how useful our websites are for them. Simon Gray, Corporate Web / Self-Service Development Officer, from …
We were recently invited by Shropgeek to give a presentation at their first ever Rebellion event at The Alb in Shrewsbury on Thursday 21st February 2013 (sorry, we know the post is a little late). The Rebellion event gave us an excellent opportunity to show people the thought process behind the development of new.shropshire.gov.uk – in particular Customer Journeys and the User Experience work that we are carrying out for each new service we add. We explained how Project WIP formed, who makes up Project WIP, how we chose our new Content Managment System (CMS), how we worked closely with service areas to redesign their online presence, and how and why we made the design choices we did. (Left to right ) Rob May …
Here’s our presentation for the ‘Really Useful Day’ event in Huddersfield
You’re probably aware that we’ve been busy working away on new.shropshire.gov.uk – to be honest it’s all we’ve been harping on about, how could you not know? As part of the new.shropshire.gov.uk project we’ve been re-engineering the whole look, feel and experience. Now, we think we’ve done a fairly good job, but, as the saying goes, “the proof is in the pudding”. So, armed with an iPad we visited The Shrewsbury Coffeehouse and sat with some friendly local residents who were kind enough – in between eating their cake and drinking their coffee – to carry out some testing on new.shropshire.gov.uk. First we asked our testers to use the site freely and to give general feedback. We then asked them …
We’ve recently completed development work on the Libraries and Recycling and Rubbish pages, so, “what’s next” you ask? We’re moving onto Planning Services (cue scary music). But you’ll be pleased to hear we’re off to a good start. We hosted a workshop the other week with the good people of planning to help figure out the content we will need. It’s important to get the right mix in these User Experience (UX) workshops. You need people from all different areas, people who receive the planning applications, people who validate them, people who give the pre-application advice and people who have the power to make difficult decisions. We were lucky enough to have enthusiastic and engaged people along with the Planning …
I attended a Local DirectGov Really Useful Day on Friday 26th October in Crewe on behalf of the Project WIP team. We were asked to give a presentation on the Customer Journeys and the User Experience work that Shropshire has been doing on new.shropshire.gov.uk. I met some super people from neighbouring councils all with similar problems to what we have and just wanted to say thanks to everyone for being such a great audience. The Project WIP team blog contains many informative posts about what we’ve been up to and the mischief we intend to get into next. If you are interested, please follow us on twitter to ensure you’re kept informed of our regular updates. Design for the customer… or …
I am going to start this post with a couple of questions: Why do you visit council planning web pages? Have you already visited ours? The reason for these questions is that I have been tasked with finding out what our customers really want, with the aim of improving our user experience for our new Planning web pages. “Easy” you say, “they surely come to you for planning related queries?”. Yes they do but what is a ‘planning related query’? It could be anything – “I want to build a conservatory”, “I want to build an extension”, “How can I comment on a planning application”, “I want to erect a fence”. So, yes you are right to think that they’re …
Firstly apologies for being a little quiet about new.shropshire.gov.uk but you may have read on previous posts we’ve had a few ‘hiccups’ with Umbraco, but we’re back on track. We mentioned previously that we’d be looking at the Waste service area next, and have since carried out our preliminarily research by holding a kick off meeting with elected members from the Waste team so we could find out what their aims are and ultimately what their customers want. We presented our findings to them, backed up with research from a few days spent trawling through Google Analytics, and to their surprise there were a few unexpected outcomes. Pages they didn’t think would be so popular were, and there were several unexpected search …
Yesterday Lorna and I went to Socitm’s Building Perfect Council Websites 2012 conference at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. We were invited to host one of the breakout discussion groups about new.shropshire.gov.uk and working in the open. We’d like to thank everyone who came to our discussion and hope that you all took something away from it for your own projects. One think we took away yesterday was what Tom Steinbery from My Society said: “Councils used to have a website but now they are a website.” In essesnce your website represents your council, if people see a rundown and old website they see a rundown and old council. We look forward to hearing from you on how you get on …
As you may know we are busy working on a new shropshire.gov.uk. If you didn’t know, where have you been? Check out these articles to get up to speed. Go on, I’ll wait…. As mentioned in previous posts we are completely redeveloping shropshire.gov.uk, starting with Libraries. Part of this overhaul is to look at the user experience (UX). UX (from wikipedia) is: the way a person feels about using a product, system or service Our aim is to provide the user with best experience we can possibly give them allowing them to do what they want quickly and easily. The new design should be forgiving if they make a wrong turn and be intuitive enough so they should be able to figure …