We've just finished phase 1 of a project to update the way in which we present our Early Help team's information. This initial piece of work involved editing and reorganising the existing content, bringing it across to our 'new v2' platform, and creating a new design for the homepage.
Phase 2 will involve adding more information for parents, carers and young people (at present the content is heavily weighted towards practitioners), and, more dauntingly, looking at the extent to which we can cleverly present the Early Help, Family Information Service, Local Offer, Special Education Needs (SEND) and even Early Years and Childcare teams' content under one umbrella. It may be impossible, resulting in a great big impenetrable and unnavigable mess, but if we can pull it off it'll give our customers, both professional and public, one hub to bookmark, giving them a whole host of inter-related information in one place. I hesitated to use the word 'hub' there, but it was just slightly preferable to 'portal' or 'one-stop shop' so I went for it, apologies.
To this end, Sophie's looking at what we've already got, and, using spreadsheets, algorithms, logarithms, alchemy, chemistry and what's then left of her sanity, identifying linkages and developing some sort of provisional site map. We can then consider fundamentally whether what we're hoping to achieve is even possible, and then if it looks worth a punt we can start to build it. It would be really useful to hear from anyone 'out there' who has tried, or is thinking of trying, something similar with their own young people's care teams, so that we can compare notes.
But back to phase 1 and how that went. Firstly, Kate from Early Help bought into the whole idea from the start, was open to our ideas, and didn't hesitate to say 'don't be silly' when we suggested something silly. This customer involvement was, as ever, crucial to the success of the project, and, as ever, unfailingly contributes to a better finished product.
Following a couple of UX sessions with Early Help team members, Dan put together an initial design based on splitting the content into three categories: practitioners, parents and carers, and young people, with visual depictions of each. This didn't quite work, so we simplified it and all parties agreed on the second design, to which Luca added a super little search function, which searches only within the early help pages, and was based on the one Mike developed for our Licensing team. I overhauled the content, stripping out anything redundant, and stripping down anything long winded. When we were done, Kate okayed the final offering, we agreed a go-live date, and the fruits of our labours can be seen via the link on the first line of this blog.
On to phase 2, although I'm taking a week off first!