Case study:

Supporting Newcastle City Council in adapting online services to meet user needs during the pandemic

The challenge

Newcastle City Council wanted to understand the needs of citizens impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and align their services and website to best meet them.

Our approach

To fully understand the landscape and needs of a range of multiple user groups including council employees, citizens and voluntary organisations, a mix of discovery and usability research was needed.

First, we needed to to utilise internal expertise and representation of affected user groups by talking to the people they interact with, which would inform the following in-depth research interviews with users themselves.

Finally, we should use information gathered from interviews (and data from analytics and staff interviews) to design typical tasks and routes each user group would take and evaluate them using remote user testing, complimented by an accessibility review.

What we did

16 research interviews with staff of the council and partner organisations to explore processes and needs of people involved in the delivery of support services to citizens.
8 research interviews with citizens of Newcastle to understand difficulties caused by pandemic and the needs of citizens.
6 usability tests on the NCC website, complemented with a rapid expert review to identify issues with the website’s ability to cater to the citizen needs we discovered.
We included a citizen with a visual impairment in the research to ensure the site was usable and accessible for them.
All research was remote, using Zoom and Microsoft Teams, with participants using their own devices (phones, tablets, laptops), in their own homes to achieve a more “naturalistic” setting.

Results

Identified bottlenecks and pain points in current service offering and 4 user journeys.
Delivered service blueprint showing ‘as-is’ service with suggested service improvements.
Delivered 4 user journey maps showing the paths citizens must take to gain support and the people and platforms they interact with along the way.
Identified 9 user needs for both staff and citizens, with actionable acceptance criteria to show how they could be met.
A usability study testing the website with real citizen needs (not just council goals) with 35 issues found and recommendations given.
Remote research helped us include a broader range of participants than in-person research might have. We navigated past recruitment barriers such as impairments, schedules, locations and of course, a national lockdown.
The study was delivered in 6 weeks, from inception meeting to findings presentation.