With our Family Hubs project now underway, it became apparent to us that we needed a website to coincide with all the brilliant work that will be happening within the hubs. Our main website is confined to strict design standards as we are a governing authority, but through research and investigation we realised the Family Hubs website needed to represent our audience and our Web Content Team Leader, Kathryn, found a way to make this happen – through a micro site!

As this is a brand-new website, we had a complete blank page. To start with, we carried out some user research at the Family Hub launch days to compare a few different prototypes to gather insight into what users wanted to see. The language that is going to be used is also one of the forthright thoughts as we want this to be user friendly and easy to understand. Looking at common words used, we identified a few terms and phrases that people were unsure of.

This led to Kathryn organising a content workshop. 

The workshop

The session was held at our Little Harwood Family Hub, and she invited a range of people who have a wealth of knowledge and experience that we can tap into to provide the best content possible for our residents. 

We started with introductions; this helped us to identify which area each attendee sat within. 

Kathryn then led an important presentation about why we were holding the workshop, and what we hoped to gain. This gave our attendees and insight into the role they can play, and the importance of making our user the forefront to our design. 

We looked through the same prototypes we had used previously and advised that these would also be emailed out to staff with questions to find out which one they prefer and to see if this matches our current findings.

A card sorting activity was up next. We wanted to hear what topics they thought needed to be on the website, writing down one per card. This was our most silent part of the session as everyone really got stuck into this activity! The amount we received filled (and overfilled) our middle table!

Kathryn and Sarah, a content designer, then started an open discussion about how some of these topics could be grouped. Again, everyone really got stuck into this collaborative activity and we all talked through our ideas and opinions. Each conversation led to other questions and discussion about links to partners and to our local offer website. These discussions were invaluable and left us with a lot of food for thought!

The cards were sorted and banded together, ready for Kathryn and Sarah to work through back at the office. 

To finish our workshop, Alfie led a presentation about user needs and why these are so important. It was vital for us to share this as it helped to solidify the purpose of the activities and discussion had. In groups, we came up with a user of the Family Hubs and their journey to achieving their goals. It really helped to put things into perspective.

Next steps

The next steps for the website are:

• For the cards to be organised and built upon.
• More workshops will be set up, targeting specific topics
• Research about the look and feel will continue
• Our developer will be busy building the infrastructure of the site
• Begin to look at developing top tasks and user journeys