Firstly apologies for being a little quiet about new.shropshire.gov.uk but you may have read on previous posts we've had a few 'hiccups' with Umbraco, but we're back on track.
We mentioned previously that we'd be looking at the Waste service area next, and have since carried out our preliminarily research by holding a kick off meeting with elected members from the Waste team so we could find out what their aims are and ultimately what their customers want.
We presented our findings to them, backed up with research from a few days spent trawling through Google Analytics, and to their surprise there were a few unexpected outcomes. Pages they didn't think would be so popular were, and there were several unexpected search terms used to find pages. Providing this information gave a better insight into what the customers wanted and helped the service area understand more what their customers expected from them.
With their aims and objectives now clear we translated our findings into sitemaps, wire frames and mockups. So with some hard work, copious amounts of tea and of course some tasty treats we set to work on a new sitemap, which took around 10 attempts to get right. We approached the design from two aspects. What the customer could do at home in terms of rubbish and recycling, and what they could do outside of the home for example at the local Household Recycling Centre (or tip ;) )
We have planned how we are going to present the information to the customer and what we need to do to make it as intuitive as possible. We'll be publishing another blog post shortly when we are a bit closer to a release to let you know how we are getting on.