Between May and July 2003 Serco Usability Services conducted user research for the Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), using a range of methods and techniques to inform the redesign of their website. 

Defra are the government department responsible for the sustainable development of the environment, rural areas and of food production. As part of their remit, a key user group for their website is farmers. For Defra the challenge was to find ways to involve farmers in the redesign of their website in order to produce a site which farmers would be comfortable with using, and which would meet their information needs. 
 
Defra asked Serco Usability Services to help them to understand and identify what farmers information needs were. They also asked us to involve farmers in the redesign of their website, and produce a concept for the site developed directly with farmers. In order to do this we divided the user research into three phases.

The first phase involved gaining a deep understanding of the information needs of farmers, and discovering how they currently meet, or attempt to meet these needs (user needs analysis). We did this by visiting 10 farms in Gloucestershire and Cumbria, using a combination of ethnographic and usability techniques. The findings from this phase were then fed into the next phase of research, and impacted on the final overall concept produced for the Defra website redesign.

During the second phase of the user research, Serco Usability Services conducted 8 one and one-half hour usability tests with farmers in Gloucestershire. This involved testing the current Defra site alongside sites that could be considered to be its competitors (competitive analysis). This provided points of comparison with the existing Defra website, and from these we were able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each site, and learn lessons which could be fed into the redesign of the Defra site. 

The third and final phase of the project consisted of Serco Usability Services taking several paper-based design concepts to Northumberland, and running six 2-hour sessions with farmers (collaborative design). From the user needs analysis we had understood that farmers’ spouses, as well as farmers themselves, are key information users, sessions were therefore conducted with farmers and their spouses. Using task scenarios we asked the couples to change the prototypes as they required to complete the tasks. At the end of each session these changes were incorporated into the prototype design presented to the next pair. During the sessions participants were also asked to arrange 20 cards with examples of Defra content on it into categories meaningful to them (card sorting). 

The outcome of the three phases of user research was a robust concept for the redesign of the Defra website, developed directly involving farmers. Serco Usability Services involved Defra throughout the user research process, ensuring that both client and user needs were met.