Accessibility: our legal duty
The law about accessibility for public-sector websites changed in September last year. Find out what we've been doing to make sure our sites are compliant.
Helen West
Building the beta
It’s been a busy couple of weeks on the essex.gov.uk project as we’ve moved on to building a working version of the new site. This post talks about how we're managing some key aspects of the development during the beta phase.
Essex.gov.uk: the platform
The essex.gov.uk project has been progressing at pace over the last few weeks with most of the key building blocks either underway or completed. This post shares the work we've done to investigate technology options for the project.
It’s all about the content!
The foundation of a great website (aside from the technology) is content. Whether it’s words, video or images, content needs to be findable, useful, usable and accessible. We will be moving from alpha phase for the essex.gov.uk project into the …
Show and tell notes: 4 July
This week’s show and tell was about the alpha Essex work, the project to consolidate Essex County Council’s disparate web estate into one single, user-focussed site. We were in the ‘innovation space’, across the way from our usual home in …
Understanding the ‘why’: testing in the lab
This week, we're in the user testing lab, in an effort to better understand why our users act the way they do. This involves watching how people actually behave when using our websites
Show and tell notes - 9 May 2018
It feels like an exciting time in the service design team. We’re coming to the end of our first significant piece of work. We’ve had time - and produced sufficient work - to meaningfully reflect on what we’ve learnt so far, and these observations are feeding into our preparation for the next phase of work.
Kick-off for the essex.gov.uk project
Over the last few months we’ve been working to understand the current state of essex.gov.uk and plan how we might get to a better future for our web presence. We’ve gathered insights from available data and call centre staff and tested how easy it is for users to find things on the site.