TADS Weeknote #2

A lot of the team, including myself, were on annual leave for parts of the week, and those who were in the office had to deal with the heat wave with broken air con, so the update this week may be a little shorter than future ones.

My Maidstone

Rob, Ethan, Kathryn and Paul got together at the beginning of the week to go over the results of the user research sessions from last week. We had tested out various navigation options with residents and the two key messages were that they wanted direct links from the homepage into the transactions they use most frequently and that icons can often be confusing which supports the findings in this NHS Digital blog post 

Rob created some updated design options based on the research findings which will be tested during the next sprint.

Content & Dev

Following last weeks closed Alpha release of our new fly-tipping form, Michael has been making changes based on the initial feedback and has been putting the finishing touches to the back end processes that support the completion of the customer report.

As well as working on the updated homepage designs Rob put together the final design for the new Go Green Go Wild website to promote bio-diversity.

Due to the hot weather, there were a number of changes to bin collection rounds and Steven worked with the Waste and Communications teams to issue several text updates to residents via GOV Notify. Considering how strongly residents feel about bin collections they were particularly supportive on social media, especially of the communication during the disruption

Service Design

Kathryn ran the final member engagement session to discuss the street cleansing review and presented the results of the sessions along with the Parish Council feedback to the project board. She also designed the next stage of the project which is resident engagement.

New Ways of Working

Steven did a presentation to the Councils Wider Leadership Team on the development of a Staff Travel Plan to support the Councils strategies around transport and air quality. Not all of the ideas were popular but we now have a better steer on what options are more acceptable as we move forward.

Gary is the Transformation and Digital Services Manager at Maidstone Borough Council. If you have any questions you can contact transformation@maidstone.gov.uk.