Identifying Customer Demand – Folkestone & Hythe DC
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.
Preparing for the Homelessness Reduction Act
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.
Behaviour Change Revival
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.
User testing workshop
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.
Tonbridge & Malling Borough council website user testing
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.
Press Release: SDS news article for the Public Sector Executive
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 City Council – User testing & citizen portal account research
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.
Really useful workshops – User Research at the Discovery Phase
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.
LGA Annual Conference – Innovation Zone
We attended the LGA Annual Conference in Birmingham and gave a presentation in the Innovation Zone about the services we offer to local authorities.
Tandridge District Council website redesign
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.