How we designed content that puts our advisers first
We’ve been working on creating new content for our advisers – here’s where we’ve got to and what we’re doing next
At the heart of Citizens Advice are our 20,000+ advisers, dedicated to solving people’s problems across England and Wales. Over the past year we’ve been designing new ways to create content for these advisers, so we can give them the detailed information they need and help them find what they’re looking for.
We’ve recently published the first version of this new approach. It features 44,000 words of new material on Universal Credit – one of the biggest topics for advisers.
Here’s how we got here and where we’re going next.
Finding what matters
We started by looking at what advisers need from their content. This initial research showed us we needed to focus on:
- adding more detail
- bringing content into 1 place
- making it easier to find specific pieces of advice
- clarifying how advisers can use external sources
Exploring our options
The next step was designing and testing prototypes. We tried a range of features and structures, including new topic homepages and sliding panels of adviser-only content.
For me the most important finding at this stage was the distinction between recovery and discovery. Sometimes advisers were trying to find out about a topic and how to help someone. But at other times they were trying to track down a fact they already knew – either to double-check the details or to put a reference into a case report.
This changed the way we wrote. Knowing advisers rarely read a whole page in one go, we made the headings briefer and more focused on nouns to make them easy to skim – and so easier to track down. This contrasts with our public advice, where headings focus on actions to take people through the steps of solving a problem.
Testing and refining
Trying out a variety of ideas at the previous stage gave us strong evidence of what was working and what wasn’t. This let us combine the best bits of our initial ideas into 1 broad design approach – ready to test more specific features.
One highlight from our feature testing was what advisers needed from a ‘quick links’ feature. As it turns out, lots of people had opinions, but no one could agree. What sounded like an easy win on paper led to more confusion rather than more clarity.
So we took ‘quick links’ out. Sometimes what you leave out matters just as much as what you put in.
We also abandoned some of our assumptions about structure where we found we’d based content on internal teams and processes rather than genuine adviser needs.
We had 1 more crucial piece of research to do before we were ready for our initial release: accessibility testing. This led to adjustments to our navigation menu design, and further tweaks to the page headings. As always, we found that better accessibility meant better design for all our users.
Ready to go
This took us up to June 2018, when we were ready to put our first version online. We published in 2 phases, giving advisers an opportunity to get to grips with the new approach and give us feedback before we removed the old content.
It proved popular, with good feedback giving us confidence we were on the right path. Advisers were pleased by the enhanced detail and clearer structure, saying things like ‘the new pages are a lot more comprehensive and yet very easy to use/navigate’. We’d replaced 157 pages of content with just 29, yet this meant more detail rather than less, as we’d pruned away jargon and repetition to make room for content that really mattered.
Armed with this feedback we gathered our whole content team to analyse how we wrote for advisers. Our discussions ranged from broad points about how to identify the right level of detail, to specifics about the most helpful way to link to legislation.
We’ve also been sorting through our initial feedback for fixes and extra details to add. We’ll be contacting advisers soon to tell them what we’ve changed.
Knowing what’s next
We’re continuing this adviser content work with a dedicated team who’ll be looking at new content. They’ll also be exploring new features like:
- better case note referencing
- customisable printing
- content version histories
We’re also looking at lots of other other priorities across the site as a whole – search, information architecture and content management system, to name just a few.
We’ll keep updating this blog as we make progress. Each step will be based on more research and feedback, so we can make sure our advisers have the information they need to give the right advice.
