8 July 2024
As part of the website upgrade project, we’re continuing to work on the most popular sections of our website, making the content user friendly, accessible and easy to understand. We recently completed the School Admissions section.
We first worked with school admissions in 2019 after it was identified that they had a high number of unanswered calls. We carried out a full discovery which included user interviews, creating personas and user journeys, analysing call data, reviewing analytics and workshops with the team. Among our recommendations at the time were redesigning web content, introducing call handling software and an online contact form. Covid put a stop to this work.
When we returned to this section for the website project, we were keen to step out of scope to ease the pressure on this busy team. We started with the web content before moving onto the phones and online forms.
Website content
We carried out a full content audit, looking at accessibility, readability and how well the pages meet our content standards. This helps us understand where the main issues are and helps us to prioritise.
Problems
Through the content audit and by analysing feedback data we discovered a number of problems:
- the structure of the web content was difficult to navigate on a mobile phone and information was hard to find. 74% of our users access the school admissions pages on a mobile device
- the “Contact us” page, which only contained the team phone numbers and email addresses was the first page you saw
- the average reading age of the web content was 15. This is above the UK average and meant some people might struggle to understand the content. 84% of pages were hard to understand (assessed via reading age)
- the section had over 400 PDFs which are hard to make accessible and difficult to view on mobile devices
- users were confused over terminology and which application form to complete to apply for a school place, often calling the team to confirm
What we did
We redesigned the structure of the section, reducing the number of options on the landing page and moving contact options to the bottom, giving users the opportunity to self-help before contacting the team.
The pages were made more ‘dynamic,’ by only showing information that was relevant to that time of year. For example, Normal Point of Entry admissions are usually only open for around 2 months. Usually we try to make content ‘timeless’ but we could not in this scenario.
The service area wanted to add a page with a table that told the user what application form they needed to use based on date of birth of the child. This was something they'd seen on another council's website. We were sceptical because if the content is well-designed users should find the form they need. We agreed to add the page and monitor analytics data.
PDFs
Every year the school admissions team sent us hundreds of approved admission arrangements PDF documents to add to the website.
Keen to reduce the number of PDFs, we checked the school admissions code and confirmed that admissions arrangements only had to be on the school website or the council’s website, not on both. We removed most of the PDFs and replaced them with links to the school website. This has saved both teams a significant amount of time.
Parent’s guide
The parent’s guide is a 40-page document that covers all aspects of school admissions. Previously published as a PDF, we turned it into web content, making it easier to use. We can now link directly to useful information such as school admission timelines without duplicating the information
Has it made a difference?
The re-designed web content went live in August 2023, just before secondary applications opened.
One of our aims was to make the content easier to find and understand, so people could do what they needed before contacting us, so we were interested in how the changes affected the contact us page.
Analytics show a reduction of 35% in the number of visits to this page, suggesting that users are finding what they need. Previously we saw a spike at key times.
The graph compares visits to the contact us page in 2022/23 and 2023/24. There is no peak in visits to this page in November 2023 when primary applications open.
The average reading age for the section has reduced from 15 to 11 years old.
Initial data around online form findability is also positive:
- 95% of users find the accept / decline a school place form easy to find (previously 88%)
- 100% of users find the contact us form easy to find
As expected, not many users are visiting the page telling them which application form to complete. This suggests the content is well designed and people can find what they need. We will continue to monitor and consider removing the page if views remain low.
Redesigning web content was just part of the work we did with the school admissions team. Our follow up blog post will cover how we improved methods of contact.
Anyone interested in helping us to improve our online services can join our Digital User Panel.