Bristol City Council

Bristol City Council

Usability Testing

Summary

  • Intranet usability testing for Bristol City Council
  • 700% increase in usage of key intranet services
  • Significant efficiency savings across 10,000 staff users
  • Measurable increase in satisfaction levels among users


The Brief

Tickbox were commissioned to produce a usability report and recommendations for the Bristol City Council Intranet – The Source. The Council Services section of The Source was designed to be the first port of call for all staff wanting to find information or make transactions relating to their jobs, but the Council were finding that there was too little staff engagement with the intranet.

With more than 10,000 staff having access to the intranet, the ability to streamline work processes via the intranet offered the potential for significant savings for the council but that potential was not being fulfilled.


Our Work

Tickbox conducted a series of user tests, as well as a heuristic evaluation of the site and an analysis of data from internal staff surveys. As a result of our work we presented Bristol City Council not only with an analysis of usability issues with the existing intranet, but also robust recommendations and schematics to help them improve the user experience.

We presented a hierarchy of recommendations, based on what was achieveable using the council's current intranet and online applications, and what should be included in any future redevelopment of the intranet.


The Results

As a result of our recommendations, changes were made to the intranet which showed immediate results. One of the key goals for the council was to get staff using the intranet to find contact information for staff in other departments. One of the challenges in achieving this was that staff were used to using a stand-alone contact management application for this, and also there was an element of mistrust in the intranet with regards to the accuracy of its contact information.

Within weeks of implementing our recommendations, the number of user sessions on the intranet contact application had risen from around 200 a day to more than 1500 a day.

Follow on work six months after implementation showed that on the areas of the intranet where our recommendations had been implemented, satifaction rates among users had risen from less than 25% to nearly 75%.