Start with user needs
I haven't written a blog post before - but here goes. I'm Jodie, I'm 15 years old and I come from Dorset. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to complete my week of work experience with the Parliamentary Digital Service.
We have spent the past eight weeks researching our website users’ needs and their level of political engagement as part of a discovery phase using different research methods: face-to-face interviews, phone interviews, pop-up research, and an online survey.
The first two sprints of discovery for a new parliament.uk website have been extremely busy and very fruitful!
Within the Web and Intranet Service we are dedicated to improving the experience of users visiting the parliamentary website. As such, we carry out a continuous cycle of improvements in order to deliver changes, which we hope will make it easier for users to find information and better understand the work of Parliament.
On Thursday 15 May, web assistants from Parliament’s web and intranet service had the pleasure of attending a Bunnyfoot training course, “Designing for the Human mind/brain”.
We collect both quantitative (Google analytics) and qualitative (user survey) data on a regular basis about and from users of the Parliament website. This helps inform our plans and ideas so that we can develop information and services in line with user needs.
You may know that a couple of weeks ago Parliament published a report by mySociety as the culmination of several months of work to review Parliament’s online services. The review looked at how we plan, deliver and make decisions about digital and mySociety spoke to more than 100 people, looked at a lot of data and talked to many users and other organisations.