On Wednesday 24th April I attended the Socitm Spring Conference at The Royal College of Surgeons and wanted to share my thoughts and experiences with you all. On the morning of the event, I woke up in London, a significant change to rural Shropshire and wondered what the day ahead may have in store. It was apparent from the Chair’s introduction that this was going to be a day full of interesting discussions, debates and ideas. The event got off to a great start with a presentation on Digital Insights by Martin Ferguson (Director of Policy and Research at Socitm) which was followed by a very entertaining presentation by Carl Haggerty from Devon County Council who talked about being open …
In case you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to recently on new.shropshire.gov.uk here’s a quick update for you about our work with Building Control, with a few words from the team themselves. Here’s what Mike Seager, Building Control Surveyor, had to say about working with us: “The Building Control department of Shropshire Council sits within the Development Control section. We were informed a while ago that our web pages were to be transferred to a new web system from the old Lotus Notes CMS, this seemed pretty good to us. The new system, built using Umbraco, allows for a more functional website and the new format is more in keeping with current website design. We haven’t gone live to date, …
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 …
When we kicked off the ‘recycling and rubbish’ phase of new.shropshire.gov.uk, it was made clear during the analysis stage that a page would be needed to allow people to find out ‘what can I recycle where?’. In this post we go through the bright ideas and failed concepts that led us to our finished page.
Dealing with the death of Umbraco v5
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 …