1. Identifying the problem

Approach

We needed to understand what the current site has to offer and how it compares to the needs of the population of Islington. We quickly realised that Islington population is very diverse and we need to talk to as many people as we can to find out where the biggest problems are, so we focused a lot on user research and concept testing.

Domain research

Islington is the most densely populated London borough. It serves over 200,000 residents and 12,000 businesses providing a huge variety of services. Over 30% of its residents live in social housing. At the same time, twice as many residents are educated to degree level than the national average. The community is extremely diverse.

Most of the services are not supported online. The Council website serves mainly as a source of information and not a tool for citizens and residents to use Council services.

An independent audit provider for Public and Private Sector Websites ranked Islington council #324 out of 405 sites.

User interviews

We talked to 20 people who live and work in the borough to find out how the Council helps to solve their residential issues.

The issues were very diverse: from complaining about urban foxes to applying for parking permit. We weren’t sure how to prioritise.

Finding patterns

Looking into how often people communicate with the Council, we found the following picture.

Residents were mostly happy, and didn’t want to deal with the Council.

Yet, business representatives often depend on the Council services and deal with the Council regularly and directly. They are also an important part of the infrastructure.

2. Framing the problem

The research we’ve done gave us crucial insights into the problem the Council is facing. We looked at the initial brief again and decided to shape its focus. We wanted to first design for the users who need help the most.

Improving service delivery for business representatives (instead of common residents) was the biggest opportunity area. On the one hand, they were dealing with the Council most frequently and any improvements would be immediately visible and significant for them. On the other hand, the business section of the website touches on most of the residential services, thus our solution for the business will serve as a great MVP for the Council.

Based on our interviews, we created a persona of Andrew, a local business owner who regularly uses council services, like waste disposal (for which he needs to use specific waste bags that the council provides), and mapped his journey.

Andrew is frustrated about his lack of control when using regular Council services because he can only communicate with the Council during the Council’s working hours (9am-5pm Mon-Fri).

3. Ideation and concepts

Validating hypotheses

We brainstormed ideas and chose 3 to test. Using concept cards we once again came to Islington and talked to 6 different people who fit the description of our persona.

Proposed solution

Based on user feedback, we combined favourite features and proposed the following solution that would improve users experience with the Council:

A personalised online portal, where a representative of a registered local business may see, request and pay for the council services.

4. Evolution of ideas

We weren’t sure what information is the most relevant for people and how they would go about finding it. My contribution at this stage was to design the landing page. I took a concept of a personalised portal and after 5 user testing sessions delivered the result.

Initial idea:

Personalised landing page with an overview of services and the calendar where a user can see and schedule their regular services.

User feedback:

• Not enough personalisation

• Calendar is not the most important thing

• Want to see notifications from the council

• Want information about council account manager

Further iterations:

1. Renamed “Frequently visited links” to “My frequent tasks”

2. Notifications got hidden under the profile picture

3. The account manager information was there, but more discreet

User testing results:

• Easy to navigate through the page

• “My frequent tasks” section is clear and the most useful

5. Result for the user and the business

Design decisions

• Accessible: This is the governmental website, and we used GOV.UK accessibility guidelines as part of our design system. For the Council it meant making very little adjustments to their CSS since the website mostly follows the guidelines. For the user it meant clarity, familiarity and consistency since all the official government websites and many others now follow the guidelines.

• Informative: A new way of requesting Council services was an MVP solution to keeping the user informed and in control on what, when and how they are requesting from the Council. The user benefits from having access to the Council services 24/7 and making minimum effort to use the services and comply with the law. The Council, on the other hand, can significantly relieve the pressure on its call centres and manual registration of queries as well as track user behaviour online to analyse and improve even further efficiency of its service delivery.

• Personalised: Landing page for a logged-in user prioritises information relevant to the user account and pulls up relevant services, keeping the user’s cognitive load to the minimum.

• Actionable: Every section on the portal’s landing page is designed and named to help a user complete their tasks and manage their services, keeping the user informed and in control every step of the way.

• Auto fill: The Council often asks for the same business information on different occasions. Every time a user had to manually fill the forms. Now when a user requests a service, the information is automatically taken from their account, minimising errors.

• Desktop first: Users told us that they still mainly use laptop to manage their business, so we prioritised desktop view, yet kept the website mobile-friendly.

Now using Council services is not a hassle fo Andrew, but a controlled experience, which keeps his mind in peace and allows him to keeps his business running efficiently.

Demo

Reflections

Importance of prioritisation: We only had 5 weeks for the project and a large variety of users and their issues. We had to find a way to prioritise quickly and find a solution that has the biggest impact to the users and can be easily scalable later. We decided to have as many user tests as possible, which meant doing lots of guerilla interviews in the borough and iterating with pen and paper sometimes right in a local cafes or pubs immediately after interviews to keep the ball rolling.

Combine testing methods to achieve better results: Paper prototype was useful for quickly checking which ideas and concepts work, and what information needs to be included. Yet, observations during the usability testing revealed how users actually interact with the screens and what they expect to happen. It helped us make pages simpler and more applicable to users. Great experience looking at a mismatch between what users say with what they do.

Creating a solution for those who really need it - first: We targeted small to medium independent businesses operating in the borough to provide solutions for them. By focusing on who would benefit from our solution immediately we managed to create a robust MVP that the client can scale further to solve problems for wider audience with the same success.

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