We've recently completed development work on the Libraries and Recycling and Rubbish pages, so, "what's next" you ask?
We're moving onto Planning Services (cue scary music). But you'll be pleased to hear we're off to a good start. We hosted a workshop the other week with the good people of planning to help figure out the content we will need. It's important to get the right mix in these User Experience (UX) workshops. You need people from all different areas, people who receive the planning applications, people who validate them, people who give the pre-application advice and people who have the power to make difficult decisions. We were lucky enough to have enthusiastic and engaged people along with the Planning Development Manager, who fully supports the radical changes we intend to make.
The workshop gave us a real insight to what Planning actually do and they had some brilliant ideas about how we could give the customer a better user experience.
In the next picture you can see the creativity that came out of the 2 hour session. I'll be working through the visitor statistics on the current Planning pages and these mockups to come up with a "top task" orientated landing page and a well structured navigation.
We'll be cutting down on the amount of pages our users have to navigate around and keeping to a strict rule - if another website is doing it, link to it! There's no point duplicating content, so with this in mind we'll be signposting users to the Planning Portal for information that already exists.
That's sorted that then! ;)
We'll be blogging more again soon so stay tuned!