South Hams District Council

Outcome of Expression of Interest: Not shortlisted

We propose to undertake a discovery project to research best practice methodology and standards for user testing of our digital services.

According to SOCITM, 35% of council digital services are not intuitive or function smoothly end to end. This costs each council over £1m per year in failure demand.

South Hams and West Devon Councils plan to work with our partner Software Solved in order to understand how take up of digital services can be improved, how we can eliminate demand created by service failure and why some citizens prefer not to use our digital services at all.

We want to produce a reusable methodology for understanding why digital services do not meet the needs of many of our customers and what the causes of failure demand are, and produce a user research report on how services could be improved or changed to make them more attractive for those who do use them, and to encourage non users to take up digital services.

We plan to produce user surveys, citizen engagement focus groups reports, a study on web analytics and tracking of online user journeys.  The methodology will propose a set of standards which will aim to address the barriers to digital take up that could be shared with other councils.

  • Digital leadership training (for council leaders, service managers or senior executives)
  • Introduction to user research
  • Introduction to service design