The SDS blog

Dartford Borough Council wanted to gain user perspectives about their website. SDS tested the website with live users for ease of navigation, user-friendliness, the language and tone as well as the look and feel of the website. SDS engaged with 5 service areas, Enforcement and Regulatory, Waste, Housing, Planning and Environmental Health.

The SDS team have been working with the Local Government Association (LGA) in order to deliver six workshops (ranging from user research and user testing to developing a comms plan) to benefit five of their partners who have received funding to deliver digital housing and homelessness services to their residents, like the project delivered across Kent in 2017.

SDS were asked by three partner authorities in Cambridge (Cambridge City Council, South Cambs District Council and Hungtindonshire District Council) to test the most used web pages and forms on their websites to explore how users interact with the website and complete a specific task. This was to see how long it took for users to complete a transaction and whether they did so successfully.

In order to improve communications with residents and reduce avoidable contact, SDS were asked by Tandridge District Council to usability test 6 of their existing revenues and benefits letters with users. During the usability test, SDS suggested an alternative for each letter in order to gain insightful and constructive user feedback for both the existing and alternative letters.

In October, SDS conducted a day of user testing at Sevenoaks District Council, exploring residents’ views of their website and My account function. This involved residents attempting to complete various scenarios leading them to either set up an account or login to an existing account.

The Local Government Association (LGA) have published a case study of work Smarter Digital Services undertook for Kent Homechoice to deliver the online housing pre-assessment form, full application form and homelessness triage tool.

Tandridge District Council (TDC) invited Smarter Digital Services to deliver a series of Focus Groups with residents to capture the voice of the customer and gain a better understanding of customers priority needs when contacting, interacting and transacting digitally with the council.

The homelessness triage tool has been updated to comply with the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, and is now being used by all local authorities in Kent.

After attending our Behaviour Change workshop in May, Maidstone Borough Council put what they had learnt into practice by redesigning their Household Enquiry Form cover letter. SDS were asked to deliver user testing with 7 residents to review the letter and give recommendations for any further improvements based on residents' feedback.

SDS have been using a range of tools to assist Tunbridge Wells Borough Council with their website redesign project. Starting with a first click analysis, followed by a card sort analysis and finally a tree sort analysis. These tools helped us to identify users' expectations of where they would expect to find content.

Smarter Digital Services have been working with Folkestone & Hythe District Council to identify the customer demand broadly across all services, but specifically within Council Tax.

On the 13th February, we facilitated a workshop with Ashford customer services and housing options officers to agree and map out the required process that will meet both user needs and the needs of the new Homelessness Reduction Act legislation that comes into force in April this year.

At the beginning of January, Dom delivered a series of five training workshops for customer services staff in Swale, outlining the need to shift the way we provide services and interact with our customers, encouraging self-service wherever possible.

To start the year off, we invited our partners to a user testing workshop in Ashford where we explained and had a go at doing a user test, covering everything from recruiting people to take part, designing the scenarios to test, carrying out the interview and analysing the findings.

At the end of November we conducted 10 user tests for Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council, exploring residents' views of their website and the My Account function.

Catherine Bright, Smarter Digital Services (SDS) manager, explains how a partnership of 12 councils across Kent and Surrey are jointly funding a responsive, independent, not-for-profit consultancy to help them to achieve their digital ambitions.

Cambridge contacted SDS to use the team’s expertise to conduct a series of user tests on a selection of their online citizen self-service web forms. Cambridge wanted to explore the customer experience of transacting with the council via the self-service web forms to gain feedback as to how users feel when carrying out a specific task or transaction.

In July we held the first of our Really Useful Workshops at Swale House which was attended by collegues from several of our partners. This first session - User Research at the Discovery Phase - demonstrated how important it is to speak to your users/customers at the beginning of the project.

We attended the LGA Annual Conference in Birmingham and gave a presentation in the Innovation Zone about the services we offer to local authorities.

We are very pleased to announce the launch of the Tandridge District Council website on 3rd July after only 3 months in the making! In March, we were commissioned by Tandridge to assist in scoping out their new website redesign. The aim was to reduce the 1,000 content pages down to under 500 whilst giving the website a modern visual style that meets with today's responsive web standards.