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 higher tier of accessibility to compete with other councils.

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 email and phone support within of customer service. This meant a lot a lot of expense and time was wasted on repetitive calls and messages for staff. One of the key goals of the new site was to direct users directly to a where they needed to go, reducing reliance on the contact centre and support lines. So to redirect users myself, alongside the Gulp digital team 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, it quickly became obvious that the most interacted parts of the service were Pay for it, Find it, Apply for it Report it in descending order of priority. So it was about redirecting users to thee prominence of this.