While the temperature has cooled down this week we’ve just been warming up in the office, with the team busy in workshops, user research interviews and all manner of other things in-between.
User Research
Magda and Caroline M spent most of Monday in a user research interview for the ‘Find a childcare provider’ app. This 2 hour session, conducted at a residents place of work, was very productive and generated a lot of useful insights.
Georgi started to write guidance that shows how to use Service Patterns to build two specific services: Checking eligibility for a specific ECC-provided service/asset and Applying for an ECC service. She also planned and held a synthesis session for user research interviews with parents of babies & toddlers to test childcare pages on essex.gov.
Content
Caroline M held another content design workshop, this time with staff from libraries, social media, Music Hub microsite, and customer service areas. She also reviewed the register of essex.gov PDFs to see what info can be converted into more accessible html content.
Not to be outdone, Caroline A has been presenting the new planning and development structure to stakeholders and taking in final amends, while also completed a review of the council's planning portal.
Sheila focussed on finishing guidance to support our content strategy which includes guides on creating accessible PDFs, using website alerts and optimising content for search. All of this is going into the Service Design Toolkit that the team’s been working on, which will support the noble cause of building capabilities across ECC.
Development
Alongside developing our Service Design Toolkit and working with Tech Services around deployment, Martin has been using the Siteimprove accessibility tool to improve our accessibility score from a slightly below industry average score of 62% to an exciting 99%. The outstanding 1% is in the pipeline for very near future fixes and we are looking to roll out the fixes in the coming weeks.
Highlight of the week
The Content Workshops have been a great success with some fantastic feedback from service areas. With the last of the current sessions being held this week everyone involved can give themselves a well earned pat on the back on doing their bit to promote great content across public services.
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