Renfrewshire Council

Around 2 million people visit the Renfrewshire Council website each year, resulting in around 10 million page views. For many people, the website is their preferred method of contacting the council and completing tasks, but the current digital experience is fractured and inadequately supported by the existing content, design, technology, brands, and ways of working.

The council were looking to improve their digital experience, removing the many difficulties their users were facing. The purpose of the alpha phase was to identify the main pain points, take insights, and ultimately explore and test solutions that could help to achieve their vision.

Working with a collaborative multi-discipline team, we focused on one of the most-used content areas – bins and recycling. It’s not the most glamorous subject, but very important to local government service users and provided the perfect opportunity for us to test a new approach for the alpha phase.

We adopted an object-oriented user experience (OOUX) methodology, a user-centred design approach that builds experiences around the objects in a user’s mental model. I sketched, wireframed and designed prototypes using this methodology, and based on the research we had conducted into barriers and pain points that users had been experiencing.

Alongside this, I formed a relevant, user-centred visual language, which translates the Renfrewshire brand to a digital design system, and incorporates important elements and principles of the Digital Scotland Design System.

Through iteratively sketching the design, structure and content for the agreed services, we arrived at a set of wireframes, which would then inform a prototype tested with local residents.

The current site received a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 50, where the new prototype scored 93.3 – a massive improvement and a validation of the decisions we made during the alpha phase. Even so, we learnt a lot through testing that allowed us to make further improvements to the design and content, iterating the prototype to better position the product.

Read more about the project activities and outcomes on Renfrewshire Council's blog.