Inside Inside Government

‘Task completion is a minute faster than the previous testing in April 2012’. Results from latest summative testing of Inside Government http://t.co/uOwQnwNT

User testing on Monday and Thursday

We last did some qualitative user testing back in November, with DFT and DCLG users. Angela wrote up the results here. It went extraordinarily well (the most positive user testing the research agency had ever seen!), and gave us some clear ideas about how to improve the product and we’ve made a fair few changes in response.

Since then, the site has expanded massively in terms of content volumes and audience. We have some known challenges around search and navigation. So it’s timely that we test it again to make sure the improvements we are planning are the right ones.

We’ve recently been through a round of summative testing with remote users. Nick is writing up the results of that as a blog post for the main GDS blog, coming soon. 

On Monday, we’ll also be putting Inside Government through its paces in the lab with a handful of MOD’s users, and again on Thursday with a sample of DECC’s users.

As usual, we’ll share the outcomes here or on the main GDS blog. 

Making statistics and consultations easier to find

We’re making a few changes to make government statistics and consultations easier to find. From user testing and feedback, we know that users are struggling to find both of these content types.  

The first of these changes is already live -there are now “Statistics” and “Consultations” links in the primary navigation on Inside Gov. 

The next change is being worked on right now, so you can expect it to be shipped in a few days. We are changing the design to split out consultations and statistics as separate lists from the publications on organisation and topic pages. 

Here is a mock up of how that might look (with dummy content):

User testing today and Monday

We’re lab testing Inside Government all day today and Monday, with 12 participants: 6 in London today, and another 6 in Leeds on Monday. There will also be some remote testing with a small number of people, to help validate what we see in observed conditions. 

The participants we’ve lined up, working with RedEye, are all frequent users of DCLG and DFT’s existing websites, working in professions that require them to know the details of central government planning, housing, local government and transport policy.  

Here’s what we’re looking to test:

• Proposition - what is it, who’s it for and who’s it by
• Policy format - titles, sections, clarity, length, tone
• Org homepage - featuring, in-page nav, length, usability
• Top nav - titles, order, clarity, positioning, usability
• Topic format - titles, list filtering, page structure, usability, clarity, length, tone 
• Announcements format - titles, list filtering, page structure, usability, clarity
• Microcopy - position, clarity, length, tone

We’ll get headline findings next week and a full report later on. We’ll share, as ever, here or on the main blog. 

Guerrilla testing the new organisation pages

Last week Angela and myself spent a day testing Inside Government with a half-dozen employees of a local authority outside London, who are regularly use central government websites to track policy. 

Reflecting the way that organisation websites are currently separate, we set the users a series of realistic tasks with the new organisation homepage as their starting point; finding key information, the organisation’s published documents - that kind of thing.

We discovered loads of stuff that we need to polish, such as microcopy to explain features like the filter on list pages and making sure information is labelled in common, established language (‘contact’, ‘follow us’ etc) so that pages are easy to scan.

We also found that a few areas we already had doubts about really do need some attention, like how we display org details in search results and the fact that we need to make browsing the list of organisations less stressful (our ideas that you saw last week).

But the site works.

Despite the rough edges users were able to quickly carry out their tasks and they instinctively understood the value of gathering this information under a single domain.

On a couple of occasions we saw users pause in the middle of a task after glancing a piece of seemingly unrelated information about another department: “Oh that’s interesting… I didn’t realise they did that”. Which was pretty exciting. 

A productive day, and as Inside Government iterates we intend to keep testing with different users to keep it clear and relevant throughout.