Meeting content design challenges in local government

During this discovery, we wanted to:

• demonstrated the real-life impact that poor content design is having on existing services
• showed how making small changes in a short time could have a positive impact on the experience of users
• identified some practical changes that can be made with the existing teams that are in place

Saying that there is a problem is one thing, but observing users experience problems is incredibly powerful.

The local authorities have a shared problem in that content, both online and through other channels, isn’t being managed as effectively or as efficiently as it could be.

Content is often put online in a siloed fashion, with teams organised around departments rather than their end-to-end services. This leads to language and terminology inconsistencies.

Publishing under pressure

But with many pressures faced by local authorities, it has not been possible to prioritise making changes. And it’s sometimes difficult to fully grasp the impact changing language can have on residents. 

With pressure to make sure the latest information is published, the idea of managing the content lifecycle and retiring old or out-of-date content is often missed, leading to content becoming confusing or difficult to navigate.

Much of this problem is due to legacy ways of working, and not forgetting the need to manage a tremendous amount of information with increasingly tight deadlines and limited resources.

Council-speak

Content is often written by subject matter experts and while factually accurate, it’s written from an internal perspective. Things referred to as “Council speak" would find their way onto websites to describe or name services, without realising that citizens do not describe the service the same way or use that language in everyday life.

Challenges building a team

Hiring a team of content strategists, designers and user researchers might seem like the obvious way to improve things, but in reality, even if the funding was available to do this, there needs to be a willingness across the organisation to work in a different way.

By introducing some small changes we hope that this will start to seed that change.

We’re working with 4 local authorities:

• Blaenau Gwent
• Monmouthshire
• Newport
• Torfaen

The project is funded by the Welsh Local Government Association.

People from each authority are involved in various workshops, user research interviews, and co-design sessions.

The team have been publishing weeknotes which show what they've been working on so far.

They have also published a blog post about the first 6 weeks of the project.