Public Sector Website

2017

Overview

The Council was running a digital transformation project aiming to redesign all services and improve their transactional website.
As UX Designer, I’ve been leading the user experience in the Digital team working with  Content Managers, Front and Back-End developers, Service Designers, while mentoring a Junior UX Designer. With the front-end developer I’ve also supported the visual designer for the re-definition of the new digital brand and UI.

What I’ve done

1. Service Managers Requirements and Users Tasks

I have defined the flow of activities and set up a process to go through for each service area. I have prepared, mentored and run ‘Service and user requirements workshop’ whose stakeholders have been the Council’s service owners. On the back of the requirements workshop, I have started creating user journeys to map the service and user requirements, defining interactions and functionalities therefore web components. I have also mapped the content on main layouts by creating content inventory.

2. UX Design, Usability Testing and UI Design

I have defined the design strategy by designing layouts/templates that would have hosted the web components. Therefore, I have designed the home page layout and then relevant wireframes. These have then been tested with real users with a usability task-based test.

Finally, I have created the Web Component Library on Sketch and liaise with the developers to handover with clickable prototypes, flows and wireframes.

As a final step, I have also led the Design team for the definition of the council new brand-self, created ta few versions of the potential UI and launched an internal survey.

3. Team leading and Junior Designer mentoring

The Head of Digital Transformation assigned the UX team the already in place Junior UI Designer, which I’ve mentored on the UX practice, in particular on interaction design, and to run usability testing and discovery workshops with service managers. I’ve involved the Junior designer in all UI definition activities and delegate to gather branding elements and draft initial visual designs.

Conclusions

Finally, due to a lack of development team availability, the Council Digital Team has decided to outsource the development of the website. All UX Design has been used to develop the new website, however they’ve have decided for a different UI. I’m proud of having transformed the user experience of my local authority.