We’re redesigning our digital advice to make it more useful to advisers

Giving advice isn’t easy. Our network of advisers deal with complex issues, usually under time pressure. That’s why the digital tools we give them to help them do their jobs are so important.

We’ve made a lot of progress, but we’re keen to improve the experience advisers have when they use our content.

Our digital advice helps people solve their problems. It’s in plain English, and it helps people to think about the best thing to do next.

Writing for advisers presents content design challenges that are very different to the ones we find when we write for the public. Our advisers tell us that they like:

• detail and context to help understand the bigger picture
• to be able to find the content they need to give advice quickly
• to know which external resources they can trust
• appropriate technical terms — where they’re relevant

What’s more, advisers already know what they’re looking for because they use our content so often. In other words, they recover rather than discover information.

We give advisers the information they need in a lot of places. That means we repeat ourselves. We wanted to take the opportunity to gather it all together.

We also want to save advisers time by reducing the number of different places they need to look for things — like training and legislation.

We’ve turned all this adviser feedback and our own research into 2 new ways of presenting our information, starting with our Universal Credit content. We tested both designs with advisers at our Annual Conference in November 2017.

Design 1 brings together all the information advisers need on an issue

At the moment, if an adviser wants to look at the latest changes to the law or our training for Universal Credit, they’d have to search separate Citizens Advice websites. They’d also spend time looking for trusted external sources, then deciding what’s most useful.

We created a design which brings together the information advisers need on an issue. It includes a list of related advice that can complement what they tell people. This should free up time for our advisers to help more people.

We’ve given this design a similar feel to Casebook, our case management system. If adviser-focussed content looks like Casebook, advisers can use both easily. That saves them effort, so they can focus on helping people.

We’ve also concentrated on making modular content — in other words, smaller chunks of content that can be combined with others to create whole pages.

The content would only be edited in one place, unlike our current content management system (CMS). So we’d only need to write out information once — and then pull it through to the place advisers need it.

This would give us more flexibility in the ways we could present information, making it easier to change pages as our advisers’ needs change. That gives us more time to create useful content.

Design 2 gives detail on advice in a drawer next to it

The second design tests new ways to show advisers the extra detail they need to give people. Advisers have told us that they don’t like scrolling through pages and want to see adviser-only detail more easily. We’ve put the detail in a drawer next to the relevant public content.

This won’t just improve usability. It’ll free up the time advisers would spend finding what they need — time that could be spent with people, solving their issues.

Advisers have given feedback about the printing function on our advice content — which means they currently have to do lots of copying and pasting into documents. In this design, advisers can easily select what they want. The content they select can be exported to a PDF that can be printed or emailed to people they’re helping.

We tested our designs in person and on paper

The digital lab at our annual conference was a space where advisers and their colleagues could test drive the latest Citizens Advice digital tools. This included our 2 Universal Credit designs. Members of the digital team were on hand to answer questions and guide people through the designs.

We also ran workshops using paper versions of the designs. This gave people the chance to share ideas with colleagues from other local offices and write down what they thought. We wanted it to be clear to advisers that this isn’t a final product — as sometimes wireframes can give this impression.

Conversations with advisers confirmed something we’d suspected — no 2 local offices are the same and advisers from different local offices use advice content differently. This means we’re working on a solution that will support advisers in a variety of ways. Importantly, our discussions showed us that we’re thinking along the right lines.

What next

Testing showed elements of both designs were helpful to advisers. They gave us lots of ideas for improving the designs and plenty of feedback.

We’re making changes to how we work to reflect what we learned from our conversations at conference. For example, we’ve:

• changed the way we write for advisers in the new Universal Credit content we’re working on, adding the technical language and detail they want
• started talking to our training and expert advice teams to start bringing together resources and reduce duplication
• looked at improving communication with our advisers, ensuring they’re updated on content changes and get responses to their feedback

We plan to work with as many advisers as possible as this work continues. And we’ll iterate both designs until we’ve made it easier for our advisers to give advice.

If you’re an adviser from one of our local offices and you’d like to get involved in the next round of testing, please email userresearch@citizensadvice.org.uk. You can also follow our progress with designing advice to meet your needs in our upcoming blogs on We are Citizens Advice.