City of York focuses on user research and eye tracking technology to drive new digital service on mobile devices

June 15th 2015, Leicester UK - City of York Council has launched a newly redesigned website for delivering services to customers to meet the demand of increasing mobile and touch device usage.

Described by the council as a ‘dramatic redesign’, the project was a collaboration with the creative team from Jadu SPACECRAFT Agency. The teams engaged directly with customers, using a number of key research tools including eye tracking technology from Jadu.

The team at City of York Council organised a series of design discovery workshops, initially with stakeholders from within the council followed by user engagement sessions with customers. One of the customer engagement sessions was spent within the Customer Service Centre asking users visiting the council to help with feedback on the initial designs, by participating in feedback sessions and also eye tracking lab tests to help steer the look and feel along with the Information Architecture of the design.

Our residents have told us what was needed from their perspective and have helped us design and build a solution for York. As a result, we think they’ll find the new site both looks much smarter and clearer and is easier to read and use. But this is really just the start and some big improvements are to follow over the coming year which we’re very excited about and which will make it much easier and quicker for our customers to do business with us.

Pauline Stuchfield, Assistant Director in Customer & Business Support Services

Jadu’s Eye tracking technology provided data on how pages, content and tasks were organised and what areas of the design users were most attracted to. This was combined with a paper prototyping exercise Jadu calls ‘the Jadu content rating game’. Content rating helps organise a page layout by what users feel are the most important tasks.

“We are real believers in the Government Digital Service / GOVUK mantra of understanding user needs” said Matt Culpin, Creative Director at Jadu SPACECRAFT Agency. “We’ve created a number of research tools including eye tracking technology to provide us with the qualitative data on how users interact visually as well as emotionally to content and tasks. Added to our expertise in building accessible websites, the teams at Jadu and York were able to leverage a pool of tools and skills that make this website uniquely crafted for users, by users.”

City of York Council has launched its new website as an initial release to the public and intend to rapidly iterate the design based on customer feedback. The council started to engage with the public about the project as early as December last year and shared early designs as well as results of research on their blog at http://rewiringyork.com

The new design has been implemented on the latest version of Jadu Universe Continuum CMS, a continuously delivered content management system released every fortnight.

Jadu SPACECRAFT are the creative team behind many UK Government websites such as manchester.gov.uk, highland.gov.uk, southampton.gov.uk and coventry.gov.uk as well as a number of high profile commercial sites such as norgren.com and www.imi-precision.com. Last month, Jadu announced that the SPACECRAFT Agency had redesigned remploy.co.uk - the UK’s premium employment service for disabled people. 

www.york.gov.uk
More about Jadu SPACECRAFT Eye Tracking technology

Published: 15th June 2015