Research, UX Development & Content Strategy

Background

Voluntary Action Leeds manages a website “Doing Good Leeds” which acts as a support website for the third sector in Leeds. It is held in high regard as a primary source of information for the sector; the place to find news, volunteering roles, jobs, training, and events in relation to the region.  On average the site receives over 12,000 users a month and has approx. 7000 active members.

Its mission is to support and enable positive social action in Leeds to help build thriving, empowered and inclusive local communities. In order to do this, they focus their support on organisations and local communities to provide skills, resources and a voice and influence to develop and achieve positive social change from within.

The Task

The Doing Good Leeds website had become a bloated archive of outdated information, unvisited pages and static content.  The majority of the UX was outdated and there were issues around responsiveness across devices, language, accessibility, navigation, and repetitive content. The site was originally designed for third sector specialists and was therefore confusing and poorly signposted for anyone unfamiliar with the language.

The brief for Sculpt was to redesign the site to act as a useful resource hub for all groups within the Leeds region, not just the third sector. Our core focus was to make the site easily accessible for all users to connect with organisations and individuals across the city. Elevating the key content sections such as volunteering roles and job opportunities for individuals and prioritising support networks and communal discussion points for communities and organisations.

Ultimately Sculpt were tasked to redesign and build the Doing Good Leeds website to champion voice and influence for all users within Leeds and allow content to be self-curated and self-managed by users of the site.

Sculpt Analysis

Initially Sculpt interviewed the key stakeholders within the Voluntary Action Leeds group.  These stakeholders were from several different public sector bodies involved across the Leeds Region.

Our findings showed that there was a disparate and varying focus regarding the aims of the website across all these groups. Unaddressed this would have caused frustration as each party has their own “agenda” for the new website.  Opinions were appraised and discussed, Sculpt were able to finalise these discussions into a concise “brief” for all parties to agree to.  This helped with the strategy when planning the content and key website signposting for the new website.

To support the strategy Sculpt also undertook significant data analysis.  The UX analysis allowed us to understand which of the key pages had the most interaction. Users looking to Volunteer, read news articles, looking for a job and how to volunteer to help with Covid-19 accounted for over 80% of all site visitors.

This data enabled us to help with the revised content strategy for the DGL team and informed the team on which pages to focus upon and ensure that information was up to date and relevant.

Additionally, research showed us that the majority of visitors came to the site via search engines or via social links and only 15% of visitors actually landed on the homepage.  This demonstrated the importance of global design elements such as the header, clearer navigation and the footer of the website to provide a clear outline of DGL’s content and services regardless of the entry point to the website.

Another key finding was that only 0.21% of users use search, with over 6000 pages accessed over the last 90 days increasing the prominence of search with help users find content quicker.

Our Device research confirmed that most of the users accessed the site via a mobile device and the majority of these visitors were using Apple devices.  Analysing this data deeper we were also able to demonstrate the most popular screen size for all the users.

Our Audience analysis found that there were a low number of returning visits and 60% of visitors visit only once. There was a slight skew towards female visitors and the key audience range was 25-34.

Implementation and Reccomendations

Following the research and data analysis, Sculpt were able to help DGL to focus the key content strategy that the new website needed focus upon.  This helped the DGL team to strip out outdated and irrelevant content and ensure that the content migrated across to the new website was more relevant to the respective user audience.

Sculpt proposed wireframes that highlighted the updated navigation and header and footer elements to ensure that the key audiences were clearly signposted to their relevant content.  The research helped Sculpt and DGL to focus upon the UX for the primary audiences of the Individual and the Organisation and how their relevant content was accessed and prioritised throughout the site.

Search was updated to the latest standards and elevated to much more prominent position within the new site.  Search was also enhanced with suggested categories to make it much simpler for the user to access the information that they are looking for.

Having a more organised, structured site allowed the DGL team to introduce some of their personality also with updated imagery and content.  Archiving away the pages that were not visited, presented the user with a much more streamlined user journey.

Results

Technically the site performs better with faster load times more compliant SEO practices, a cleaner sitemap and better performance across all responsive devices.

Users are engaging deeper into the site with an increasing number of returning visitors. Organisational and Individual signups have increased and there are a number of new self-published articles being added to the site, something that was not happening previously.