Taunton Deane Borough Council Website

Situation:

As part of their digital transformation programme, TDBC required a supplier with UX and Umbraco skills to assist in designing and implementing a new Umbraco public website. The scope of work covered architecture, site design, development, training, knowledge transfer and support of the local team.

Their in-house developers had very limited Umbraco skills, therefore an important part was for us to take their developers on the development journey with us, through total visibility, close collaboration and knowledge sharing/transfer.

Solution:

The project commenced with a full review of their existing site, content, analytics and user data, followed by a discovery workshop where we worked with them to define goals, audience, content priorities, task groupings etc.

From here, our UX and design team worked with them to define the IA, content structure and user journeys, which were then tested through user interviews and card-sorting techniques (internal and public). Once refined, we finalised the sitemap, wireframes, style library and look and feel, ultimately leading to page designs and templates. Our Umbraco developers then provided the build through iterative agile development sprints.

The overall process took a mobile-first approach and followed the Council’s brand guidelines and the GDS Service Design Manual, to a minimum of WCAG AA standards compliance.

Affinity provided further support through training sessions with their content editors and contributors.

To support their overstretched team, we were also able to provide additional support through the creation of a number of online forms, to quickly move their priority services online. We used our expertise in UX to redesign their forms according to best practice – subsequently arming them with a suite of ‘exemplar’ templates as they move more of their services online.

Results:

Since its launch 7 months ago we have had a very positive response from both the client and residents. Furthermore, their ranking on Sitemorse (which measures governance, risk compliance, SEO and UX among other things) has moved up 339 places into the top 5 local government sites for Q3 2017 - https://sitemorse.com/index/uk-local-government/2017-q3

and now...

Affinity is delighted to still be maintaining and improving the TDBC website through our flexible Support SLA. Albeit at a very light touch as their in-house teams are very capable now. We are actively seeking to extend our services into the wider business to support and inform their overarching digital transformation