Redesign of the Waltham Forest .gov website and design system

Waltham forest is a council in London made up of 3 districts, Walthamstow, Chingford and Leyton. The council had problems with the design and functionality of the current site and they were looking to upgrade the usability trying to align themselves with other councils using drupal.gov with an enhanced look and feel. The current site in discovery was shown to be failing in quite a few key areas and was looking quite plain and dated compared to other councils, there was also a need for a high tier level of accessibility to compete with other councils also. Waltham Forest was in discovery it was shown was in need of cohesion of design, a new home page which showcased the key services and also some form flow redesigns which was causing some usability issues.

The homepage in its current form was not hitting the key performance goals set by Waltham Forest council. Firstly, it was wasn’t directing users to the key service areas and therefore was putting a strain on phone and support department of customer service. This meant a lot a lot of expense and time wasted on repetitive calls and messages for staff. One of the key goals was to direct users straight to where they need to go and reduce reliance on the contact centre department. So to redirect users myself alongside Gulp digital Ltd ( the agency hired to create the design transformation ) firstly looked at the number’s using heat maps on the current solution to determine which facets of the page were gaining the most clicks and it quickly became obvious that the most interacted with parts of the service were Pay for it, Find it, Apply for it Report it in descending order of priority