Client: Government agency
Activity: Content design
Project: Website improvement project
Tapping into the insights of contact centre staff helped Weave transform content from just okay to great.
Background
Our client was a well-known government agency with an important role educating businesses and consumers about their rights and responsibilities.
After developing a new user-centred information architecture for the client, our next step was to work with them to design content for the new IA.
The problem
The existing content wasn’t bad – but we knew it could be better.
Work had already been done to explain things in plain English, but the results were variable from page to page. There were still a lot of complex terms that hadn’t been properly explained, and we suspected that some of the explanations of legal concepts might not be connecting with users. Our research also told us that while users appreciated the detail on the website, they found it difficult to scan the content and couldn’t always find what they really needed.
What we did
We knew that input from the agency’s contact centre would help us create content with a tighter focus on user needs. Like the lawyers and policy people, these staff knew the content. But on top of that, they had unique knowledge of the content’s users. They could tell us about users’ problems, questions and needs. They also had crucial knowledge of users’ language and mental models – that is, how users are already thinking about the issues before they read the content. They even knew exactly where the existing content was colliding with these mental models, leaving users with serious misconceptions.
After hundreds of conversations with ordinary people, contact centre staff were also experts at translating sometimes complex legal concepts and rules into everyday language and concrete examples.
To capture this knowledge, we involved the contact centre at each stage of the content strategy and design process, from discovery through to writing and review.
In the discovery stage, we asked contact centre staff to tell us about the public’s most common issues and the words they used to talk about them. We dug into the staff’s own experience of the website and their knowledge of when and how it was being used by the people they assisted.
When it came time to write, we reviewed some of the most important existing content in workshops. The discussions brought Weave’s content designers together with the agency’s web team, subject matter experts and contact centre staff. This gave us crucial insight into where the content was bypassing users’ most burning questions and failing to correct – or even fuelling – common misconceptions.
Once we’d drafted new content, it was reviewed by both subject matter experts and contact centre staff before progressing to legal review and final approval.
The results
With this input, we rewrote and crafted new content that meets users where they are. For example, we:
- tackled misconceptions upfront, with direct explanations of when the rules and concepts did and didn’t apply, and what the agency did and didn’t do
- addressed a terminology confusion at the heart of some of the website’s most important content
- explained crucial underpinning concepts, rather than assuming knowledge that most users don’t have
- covered common user scenarios and questions that weren’t mentioned in existing content.
When we tested our new content with users, they told us they understood it better and felt more confident using it. As one tester put it: ‘I don’t think my brain has to work as hard to figure out exactly how it relates to me.’
An added benefit of our collaborative process was that contact centre staff were familiar with and enthusiastic about the new content before it had even gone live.
