This week’s show and tell focussed on things we’re doing to better understand our users. Nic Ward and Helen West presented the User testing lab workshops they, and other members of ECC, have been doing and James Pallister & Sheila Nicdao presented recent work the team had been doing into creating personas of adult social care users.
Adult Social Care and Waste journeys in the lab
Nic and Helen explained how lab testing works, why it’s useful, and gave a taste of some of the reactions that people had to the Essex County Council’s web estate. Nic showed a short video which compiled a series of short clips showing users in action, a very immediate way of getting a better understanding of how people actually use the sites, and what their perception is of the council. You can read more about this here.
Our work on personas to support the design of better website content
James gave an overview of what personas are, why we thought developing personas may be a good thing, how they help us. Sheila then went into detail about the work we started with; the process we used to develop a new set of more detailed personas, and how we’re now using these to inform our work on adult social care content. Watch this space for a blog post summarising the talk.
Questions and answer session
A lively discussion followed, some points included:
- Whether our lab testing encompassed mobile testing (it didn’t, but we’re aware that’s a big factor)
- How our work is taking into account changes in accessibility requirements
- How to understand better the difference between what people say they do, and what people actually do - and lab testing’s role in this
- A general discussion about other people’s experience of using personas, whether we would be publishing the personas, and whether we could workshop the development of personas with and for other teams across the organisation.
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