Over the last few months the 5K team have been working with City Hall to redesign the new website for Mayor of London and the London Assembly. Matt Pollitt, one of the Directors at 5K talks about their involvement in the website redesign project.
City Hall’s current site has been live for four years, and the team felt it needed a much deserved refresh. However, instead of just giving it a new paint job - they decided to open the bonnet to find out how they could really create a new digital platform empowering the people of London to find out more about the great work that they do.
To do this for a site that has such a volume of content and has to speak to many different people, from many different walks of life as well as areas is no mean feat. On top of that, balancing the content to make sure it remains relevant and interesting while providing an easy to understand platform to speak to the people of London was always going to be a challenge.
So - how do you even start to apply an objective approach to such subjective subject matter?
- By working closely with the content team, technology team, policy teams and with access to the mayoral and assembly teams to discover the 'business' goals of the organisation.
- By speaking to the people of London - what do they want to get from the site? What is important to them and do they understand what the Mayor and Assembly do?
- By iterating rapidly and conducting constant user testing as you go. We quickly pulled together designs for key screens based on the organisational and user goals, then tied them together with the help of the inVision Prototyping tool for testing with users, carried out by colleagues from the Web Usability Partnership.
By quickly trying, testing, failing and succeeding, we have started the process of creating a site that London can be proud of.
Over the coming months we will be publishing more articles digging a little deeper into the processes we followed and challenges we faced. In the meantime, we thought we would give you all a sneak peek at some of the work in progress designs to whet your appetites before the public Beta this summer.
Please watch this space for the launch of the public Beta, when we would be very grateful for your feedback.