Jade Conroy was the Business Analyst in charge of delivering City Hall's new website. Jade tells us how the team re-designed the website in the most effective and user-focussed way using the principles of 'Minimum Viable Product'.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a term used in agile development projects to describe a set of features which are absolutely essential to a new product or service. The MVP doesn’t include all the ‘nice to have’ features which can often take a long time to develop on any project. MVP is sometimes described as the test applied to avoid developing a complex product which nobody wants, or needs, to use.
Whilst developing the new City Hall website the team constantly prioritised the long list of required development features by asking the question ‘Can the site go live without this feature?’
To answer this question, we regularly tested the beta site (a test version of the new website) to understand what members of the public found useful and which features kept them coming back to the site. We discovered that some features were needed to provide a seamless user journey, whilst others provided essential information which our visitors really valued.
We also considered the needs of the internal content users and our legal obligations. All these factors helped us answer the question ‘Can the site go live without this?’
We launched the site in November 2015 and user numbers and feedback received so far are overwhelmingly positive. Since launch we’ve had over 1.4 million people use the site with just under 2 million visits. Overall satisfaction is at 72.6%.
The journey hasn’t stopped now that the site is live. Customers and internal colleagues using the site are now telling us what more they want to see on the site now it’s live. This way, we are creating a really useful and responsive site based on genuine user needs.