Cambridgeshire County Council is one of the local authorities responsible for delivering and maintaining a wide variety of council services to the people of Cambridgeshire.
On behalf of a partnership including the County and District Councils, Cambridgeshire County Council wanted to redesign its community website Cambridgeshire.net. The site provides residents and communities in Cambridgeshire with easy online access to local information and services, including a database of over 4500 community organisations, events, activities and courses and an A-Z of local public services.
Strategy
The main objectives of the project were to:
• Gain insights into user behaviour and define audience requirements
• Assess the feasibility of ideas for desirable website features
• Investigate whether audience-specific designs were required and which audiences must be considered
• Improve the user experience of Cambridgeshire.net
• Increase site awareness, usage and traffic
We carried out a comprehensive user research and user-centered design project to help ensure that the site was redesigned closely inline with user needs.
Execution
The project began with a research and requirements gathering phase which aimed to establish users’ requirements. For example, people were especially interested in events listings. They wanted to be able to find free and family-focused events easily and to browse upcoming events for last-minute outings. They also preferred to quickly get into a search then easily refine their results down to a few very relevant ones. These conclusions and others strongly informed the final design.
We also uncovered 3 distinct user groups which were developed into the following personas to allow us to better target the new site pages and content:
• The reluctant surfer – Female, retirement age, married with grown-up children, lives outside Cambridge
• The busy mother – Female, early thirties, separated with young children, lives outside Cambridge
• The Cambridge newcomer – Male, late twenties, lives with partner in Cambridge
Following this we created the information architecture for the site, creating wireframes and then usability testing these before commencing the graphic design. Key aspects of the information architecture design included introducing a tabbed interface to separate out the different parts of the site’s offering and introducing tools enabling users to narrow down their search results in an easy and enjoyable way, filtering down by category, location, cost and/or audience.
When applying the graphic design to the site, it was important to think about the needs of the previously identified users. The site needed to be family-friendly so images of families enjoying local activities were used. We additionally used green as the main colour to help give the site an outdoor and countryside feel.
Finally, we built templates for the site using our accessible web design expertise. The pages we built are highly optimised for search engines, conform to the highest possible accessibility standards and display properly in every browser.
Results
Following the research and design process, the site was re-launched fulfilling the objectives and offering a redesigned site fully based around user needs offering the functionality and ease of use required by local people.