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 the drupal.gov platform to create and enhanced look and feel. The current site in discovery was shown to be failing in quite a few key areas was looking unrefined and very inconsistent 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 also. It was wasn’t directing users to the key service areas and therefore was putting a strain on email and delivery within customer service. So a lot lot of expense and time was wasted on repetitive call center management and messages for staff. A key goal of the new site was to direct users on a navigation pathway they needed go, rather than relying on contact centre support lines.

So to redirect users myself, alongside the Gulp digital team firstly looked at the number’s using heat maps and inbound Google pathways to determine which facets of the page were gaining the most sucess, 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 that was the major restructuring of the site.