Newcastle City Council (NCC) wanted to create a user-centred website based on an understanding of what their users wanted in order to bring it in line with e-government standards. In 2005 they contracted Serco to support them throughout the re-design process.   The NCC website provides a wealth of resources and information ranging from social services, business information to environmental health. For NCC the challenge was to provide all this information to the public in a useful and accessible format.   

The project began with a stakeholder workshop to understand the most important features of the current site, both from the end users’ of the website, and from the requirements of the people who would maintain it; the content writers and editors of NCC, and the various divisional leaders. From this NCC and Serco were able to define a series of key requirements to inform the purchase of a new CMS solution. The stakeholder workshop also produced important outcome criteria for the designers, against which they would be able to measure the performance of the revised site. For example, the site had to be perceived by the NCC customers as an improvement over the current site. Finally, the meeting produced a list of commonly performed tasks on the website, which could be used as the basis of user testing of the redesigned site. 

Following this, the NCC web team devised and created a sequence of wireframe pages for the site. The wireframes depicted how a page would look, in terms of the placement of features, and the overall apportioning of the page to different functions. Serco carried out expert evaluations of the draft wireframes to assess their usability and likely accessibility, and NCC revised them according to the findings. This review process was repeated until both parties were happy with the iterated designs.    

The NCC web team were able to use the revised wireframes to create functional prototype pages, written in HTML, to discover how the pages would perform in practice. Serco carried out another round of expert evaluations using the prototypes to understand whether certain functionality would work, such as expanding menus. These prototype pages also began to include elements of graphical design, such as colours and placeholder images. 

Using the initial findings of the research, NCC created a working prototype of the revised site. The prototype would allow users to explore the key scenarios that were defined in the initial stakeholder meeting. Serco worked with NCC to develop a discussion guide to use in usability sessions, and recruited a broad selection of NCC’s customers to take part in the usability testing, which took place at the council offices. During the sessions Serco consultants asked participants to perform the key scenarios on the revised site, and monitored their progress, probing with non-directional questioning. Each participant was also asked for their overall opinion of the revised site, and Serco also monitored for any usability issues arising. 

The testing revealed that although users were found to be indifferent to the original Newcastle City Council website, they were enthusiastic towards the re-designed site and left the session with a positive attitude towards not only the site, but also the council. The testing revealed some issues with the website navigation which were quickly resolved by NCC in the next iteration. The issues found were few and minor, reflecting the user-centred design principles that were followed throughout the work. 

During the creation of the prototype Serco provided training on writing for the web to NCC divisional representatives, responsible for the web content in their divisions. These representatives were also advised on the best way to explain the principles of writing for the web to their staff, thereby ensuring that the knowledge was efficiently transferred through the organisation. 

The final phase of the research was an accessibility audit. Serco carried out the audit on the new release of the website in April 2006 using the Web Accessibility Initiatives priority based guidelines as well as the Section 508 guidelines of the US Rehabilitation Act. In addition Serco tested the site using popular screen reading software and screen magnification software. 

NCC continues to make ongoing improvements to the site to ensure that it meets their customer’s needs and remains usable and accessible to all their users. It has now been launched and can be viewed at http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/.