▌ Enterprise Users

Whitelabel ∕ Engagement Portal

The public engagement portal is a whitelabel solution for local government agencies to publish and collect feedback from public consultations.

░ Opportunity

To improve the public consultation experience, from both a readership and a comment management perspective.

There is an existing proprietary CMS that powers the input; this is to focus on uplifting the public experience.

░ People

As the principal designer, I was embedded in a delivery team of 2 front-end developers, 2 back-end developers and a senior product owner, who consulted and provided direction as we continued to design and build.

░ Activities

Journey mapping
Workshops
User/SME interviews
Prototyping
Testing
UI Design
WCAG AA style guide
Component library

▌ Research

I first wanted to understand how proposals were structured, and to what extent the public can give feedback on said content.

We proceeded to explore the scale, submission and collation experience to feed into our proposed solution.

Methods:

Market research - other council portals
Auditing existing collateral
Expert interviews with councilors

░ Understand how proposals are structured, and to what extent citizens consult on the content

Observations:

People often consult on varying points throughout the proposal, not just on a document - could be anything
Usually lose context when providing a heap of feedback on a large document as there is too much to recall upon submission

░ Understand the scale and magnitude of documentation provided

Observations:

Readers also provide feedback on the attachments
More context is lost or scattered

░ Understand how readers submit their proposals via the portal

Observations:

Typically a 3rd party API survey within their site (white-label), which is not practical with large volumnes
Delivered to a PO Box via physical letter - same issue with managing all the feedback

░ Understand how staff collate and manage feedback

Observations:

Output is typically in a PDF format to print
Both parties would need download and find council responses manually using a PDF viewer

▌ Insights

These are partial insights only.

░ Users find it arduous to navigate throughout the documentation

How might we:

Look at how piece of content is tagged, configured and sorted within a documented?

░ Readers find it hard to keep track of all the comments they've been leaving on proposals

How might we:

Ensure that the artefact that the reader is providing feedback on is accurate?
Browse through the document with these new controls that isn't as intrusive or hard to navigate?

░ Users prefer larger form fields when leaving feedback, while also referring to the document

How might we:

Increase the feedback form for users without exiting the reading experience?

▌ Validation

We've tested with 10 of our users from local government from UK & NZ to validate a proposed white label solution stemming from our insights.

While there was an remark on the language and dummy copy - users wanted proper data for accuracy, feedback was primarily positive, noting the intuitive interface when browsing documentation.

░ Layout challenge

I proposed a 1:2:1 column structure where the content would sit in the middle, and both navigation and commenting controls would surface whenever necessary.
To increase the the form field, I explored of a full screen toggle - so that the experience stays on the same page.

░ Solving comment management

To solve multiple comments within several parts of the consultation, we explored sending comments as a batch, so users can review and edit the comments where necessary.
The CMS creates content by block, so therefore there is an identifier for each piece of content within the entire document. Therefore there was an opportunity to comment more specifically on the proposal and the management of it.
There are visual cues upon sending the first comment to help with onboarding.

Both mobile and desktop were tested for responsiveness, however the primary focus is for desktop.

▌ Post-validation

From the success of our whitelabel portal, further work continued on creating additional widgets to add, as well as developing a WCAG-AA compliant style guide for our users. This will help guide them when customising both the widgets and the portal for their branding.

▌ Wrapping up

░ Customer feedback

“The introduction of Objective's solution into South Lanarkshire Council has resultedin a 400% increase in the use of the council's planning website for consultations and a 30% increase in the number of representations taking place online.

Prior to working with Objective, South Lanarkshire Council employed a range oftraditional methods for delivering consultations to residents, with the majority of activity carried out on paper and all response tracking handled manually.”

░ Learnings

While some feedback focused on text sizes and language, the overall experience was very positive and we have since continued to create more widgets (i.e. polls, surveys) to add more value to our whitelabel solution.