How Busy is Toon

The How Busy Is Toon project receives £67,000 from the Local Digital C-19 Challenge.

The project procures Hedgehog Labs to be their delivery partners and sends out a survey asking residents about how they feel about life after lockdown and returning to the city centre.

The project recruits users for their upcoming user research.

They host their 1st and 2nd show and tells, where they share user research insights and present newly prototyped wireframes for the next stage of iteration for the website.

The project also present at LocalGov Camp and Digital Leaders Week events.

The project is doing a number of user research sessions to test the new look and feel. The feedback has been very positive with users saying, it ‘looks really clean and friendly’. They also publish a blogpost about insights into the challenges of monitoring and managing public spaces in a post-COVID-19 world and the technology available.

The project has their 3rd and final show and tell on 22 October. They finished user testing the updated version of the tool and share the findings.

The project has an end of project retrospective to reflect on how the project went and are finalising project outputs.

The project presents at Local Digital Collaboration Unit’s C-19 project showcase and do a demo of their work.

The project is preparing to launch the new website at the beginning of December.

New project page is launched. It contains information about safety measures, how to travel into the city centre safely and, of course, how busy the town centre is. The project also publishes their code on GitHub, and a final blog post.

The project prepares to apply for the next round of funding.

The project receives £100,000 of follow-on funding from the Local Digital Fund to continue their work. The next stage of the project will explore how to improve the existing How Busy Is Toon application and effectively scale it for other local authorities. This will include looking at how they might:

• increase uptake and promote howbusyistoon.com across a wider geographical area, in an efficient and effective way
• deliver a better user experience with safe travel and transport data
• use citizen-focussed data sharing to support economic renewal through safe access to leisure and tourism opportunities

The project has their first show and tell and are now busy with preparing for upcoming user research. In addition the team has a session to look through GOV.UK Design System in order to identify which styles, components or patterns could be reused to make howbusyistoon.com more user friendly.

The project put together a user survey to capture resident preferences on using transport to commute into and from the city centre and sends it out.

The project focussed on user research activities for the travel information workstream:

• carried out user research with residents
• analysed  survey responses and identified themes – COVID-19 safety, convenience, reliability and cost are being mentioned as driving factors people consider when deciding what transport to use
• hosted their first UR synthesis session to the internal project team that showcased what users need most when deciding the transport options for coming into the city centre
• held sessions about how to take the research forward. This included affinity mapping, identifying user personas, looking at available data to prove or disprove hypotheses arising from the survey and user research.

For the 2nd workstream, the team started drafting an onboarding guide, they changed the emojicon questions on the website and are tracking how user engagement changes as lockdown measures are eased. The project is also arranging a retrospective.

The project prioritised user needs and identified what needs in relation to ‘easy access to information’ their identified user groups / personas have. They also held an ideation session where they explored a number of ways to meet user needs relating to accessing travel information. They are now contacting users via an eform to verify some of the potential solutions.

The project held a show and tell to give an update on travel information workstream, onboarding and others.

They project is also preparing to present at Digital Leaders Week 2021 in June.

The project carried out desk research to understand the current usage and provision of traffic open data. Results suggest that no real time traffic information is currently available.

During their second show and tell they spoke about the next steps for HBIT, including finding a way to display useful travel information that meets users’ needs without duplicating existing solutions.

The project also delivered a Digital Leaders Week presentation where they spoke about the project’s past, present and future. You can watch a recording of the presentation or view the slides.

Project lead, Jenny Nelson, has published a blog post on our Medium that summarises their progress with Stage 2 of delivery to date.

The team also had a planning session where they agreed the next priorities to work on, including:

• design new pages for travel information
• update the website incorporating better accessibility and GOV.UK Service Manual guidance
• recruit users to test the new pages

The project team are focussing on how users interact with the site, and have been using Google Analytics to gather data. They have learnt that the landing page is visited by 82% of users, with parking information being the next most popular page visited by 4.2% of people.

They are also designing new pages for travel information that will expose travel busyness to the user and have been considering accessibility needs such as users that rely on assistive technology. They’ve been exploring what real time information about travel busyness would be best suited to add to the website:

• indicators of congestion (such as journey times, traffic camera counts)
• traffic cameras
• incidents

Finally, the project had a 3rd show & tell where they shared with the attendees how their designs for travel information evolved in the past few weeks, some insights from user research and gave an update on the progress with helping other councils adopt their versions of howbusyistoon.com. If you missed the show and tell, you can find the recording and slides here.

The project was shortlisted for an LGC award in the ‘Future Places’ category after the judges examined almost 700 entries.

The team worked on the build of the new howbusyistoon.com website, and lined up 6 people to take part in user testing and validation.

The project team wrapped up this phase of the project by delivering an end of phase Show and Tell on Tuesday 14 September.

Have a read of their slides and find out the results of their user research and the projects next steps.

The new look howbusyistoon.com website is now live!