Website user experience design and user testing

Tender description

Why the Work is Being Done Cornwall Council website is the key information and transactional front door to our residents, businesses and visitors. Our Digital Cornwall programme has developed into enabling our customers access to services when it suits them and to bring the councils technology into line with our customer’s expectations. Since our redesign in 2014 we are overdue a refresh. As such we would like to provide a simple, user focused front end which provides our users the experience that enables them to transact with the council. The council is working towards improving its “get it right first time” and its engagement with residents and as such the site needs to both reflect a local focus whilst also ensuring we engage with our residents. Whilst we recognise that the aesthetics are a key component in delivery for this project we also want to review and revamp our information architecture and content construction in the same perspective of making things easier to find and navigate. In doing so we wish to enable our site to be consumable by other devices and as such any design should be done so in consideration to how this is made possible. Problem to Be Solved In order for our residents, businesses and visitors to access our services then we wish to provide an intuitive front end design, a modern and simplified taxonomy, consumable content in a responsive format. The user needs are first and foremost in our thinking and this needs to be translated to provide an exemplary user experience. Whilst we have already carried out some work around design with residents we wish to validate this thinking through co-design sessions. Currently we have built our platform using Umbraco version 6.3 but are planning to upgrade to version 8. We would wish to utilise bootstrap framework for responsive delivery. Who Are the Users As a resident, business or visitor I need to access information and transact with the Council As a member I need to find information about my area or the council, help residents find information and transact with the Council As a partner to the Council I need to find specific information about our partnership or about services we provide on their behalf or other information for instance for schools As a Council we need to be able to present our information, news and transactions in a simple and intuitive way Early Market Engagement None Work Already Done Initial consultation with residents on design preferences Comprehensive data analysis on website usage Working with local University during our discovery phase we have preliminarily engaged with a number of residents based on preferences which has provide us insight into local design preferences. Existing Team Head of Customer Experience Customer Excellence and Digital Manager Web Lead Web Programme Analyst Data Analysts Developers Communications team Current Phase Alpha Work Location New County Hall, Truro Working Arrangments The work will be site based at New County Hall or offsite at alternative venues if required. Suppliers will have the option of working from their own premises as the business dictates. When working with residents there may be a need to work with them in local venues. Security Clearance None Additional T&Cs Skills & Experience Experience of delivering user centred design Evidence of building responsive and accessible websites to WCAG 2.1 AA standard or above Evidence of delivery of user journey approach Experience of engaging with users to test outputs and iterating based on user feedback Experience in delivering responsive design preferably using Bootstrap V3 and above Experience in designing aesthetically and engaging templates Experience in redeveloping Information Architecture for large corporate website Evidence of delivery within specific time-frames including Agile delivering Nice to Haves Experience of working with Umbraco v8 Demonstrate at least 2 years’ experience of working with a Local Authority or public sector partners Understanding the use of markup language and its consumption by various other technologies No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 10 Proposal Criteria Provide details of your user centred projects delivered including your approach to this Provide examples of your compliance to WCAG 2.1 AA or above Provide details of your project management approach with indicative timeframes, mindful that we would propose no more than 2-3 months for this exercise Provide details of your proposed approach to developing the designs with customers Provide details of your approach to redesigning current information architecture Provide details of how you will approach designating areas for “marking up” content as part of the design for content consumption by other methods Cultural Fit Criteria Provide details of any social value you offer Provide details of reducing your Carbon footprint Minimum wage employer Develop a community of learning where council and supplier can learn from each other Ability to work with communities of were there is limited technical understanding Payment Approach Capped time and materials Assessment Method Case study Work history Reference Presentation Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 65% Cultural fit 5% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers No questions have been answered yet Budget range 60-70k