Consumer Council for Water
As a statutory consumer body CCW help people resolve complaints against water companies or retailers, while providing free advice and support.
My role
As the UK senior experience designer at Domain7, CCW approached us to develop their new website with a strong focus on content to improve its discoverability and accessibility, and develop more focused core journeys.
Research outputs for CCW website.
Discovery
Starting with stakeholder interviews to discuss their priorities, concerns and challenges with the current website, navigation was a clear common theme, this observation, coupled with the original brief and the online survey results we knew we had to focus on findability and accessibility.
Keeping budget in mind it was agreed with the team and senior CCW stakeholders to initially focus on the information architecture and search, making this usable with more logic to improve findability will drastically enhance the experience. The next step was to dive into accessibility research.
CCW Stakeholder synthesis and intercept survey quotes.
Accessibility research
The approach for this research piece was to assess the current website's efficacy and identify areas for improvement in terms of user journeys, look and feel to achieve a more inclusive experience for all users.
By holding 121 moderated research sessions with participants with varying levels of accessibility requirements, assisted technology usage, age, and digital competence we were able to harvest first hand human experiences, then explore and develop enhancements or solutions to improve overal accessibility and experience.
Observations and insights from this research were distilled into; areas of focus, concerns and improvements. These findings were used as the benchmark to inform all the upcoming phases.
Distilled findings from accessibility research interviews.
Data, not assumptions
Talking with users was critical to support research that would under pin a new IA. We ran several card sorting exercises with recruited users and industry stakeholders to gain deep insight in to how these people grouped and labeled information and ideas that was logical to them. These card sorts enabled us to make confident and informed IA decisions. The next stage was to test and evaluate the findability of this new data through scenario tree testing.
Online card sort and tree testing data.
Confident IA
Building upon the research pieces we then started to build out a new and confident first-pass IA. The IA is consumer led, with intentional labelling and routes that make sense to consumers. Having involved the stakeholders in the research exercises and shared all the meaningful outputs from the beginning the organisation had a deepernew insight from their consumers which really helped focus the narrative of consumer led data for the IA.
Content grouping, test scenarios and working IA
