A new role, a new team and a very familiar office
How do you join a team that's not there? Rich explains how lockdown rocked his first month in the Service Transformation team.
User research
Usability: designing for the future we want
To celebrate World Usability Day, Julie tells us how she's putting the user at the heart of designing for the future we want.
From market to user research
Georgiana's embarking on a user research journey travelling the country and tackling biases, and she's taking us with her.
Back to the futures: cohort two of Futures Academy
Futures Academy is back! This time our nine brave Essex staff have just five days to tackle the process of registering a birth using new ways of working. Find out how they got on.
User testing: Designing a new homepage
The Essex County Council website homepage is many residents first sight of our digital services. All other content hangs off the design and structure of this, so it’s important that we get it right. Here we share the first prototype …
Testing design options: Adult Social Care landing page
One of the tools we developed was a ‘Step-by-Step’ guide about adult social care. This had tested really well, so we decided to place a link to it on the top of the landing page for Adult Social Care. But when we tested with users, they struggled to find it. Here's what we learned.
Testing our homepage: navigation
We used website analytics and other research to generate new navigation headings for the ECC website Homepage, and we needed to test how service users responded to these headings and whether they made website content easier to find. Here's what we found.
User testing: creating our own user panel
I’m Narelle Ong and I’m the User Researcher in the Service Design team. It’s my job to help the whole service design team to understand the needs of our users, ensure we have these at the heart of our work, and that everything we build is robustly tested with them. In this post I’ll tell you about developing a pool of testers to support the work of the team.
Understanding the ‘why’: testing in the lab
This week, we're in the user testing lab, in an effort to better understand why our users act the way they do. This involves watching how people actually behave when using our websites
We're all user researchers now
Over the past few weeks, the content designers on the Service Design team have been rewriting parts of the Essex County Council websites. It’s about trying to understand what people are looking for, and working out how best to communicate that, in the most economical way possible.