Redesign special licence page for Wellington City Council
The Wellington City Council (WCC) provides information on how to apply for a special licence for events held in Wellington.
WCC looks at ways to improve the information and application process to ensure that online applications are submitted correctly and applicants experience good customer service.
This four-week project was a part of UX master courses to solve the real problem Wellington City Council had. My focus was facilitating user interviews and low-fidelity prototype design for usability testing.
Tools needed: Figma, Miro, Otter
Skills required: Desk research, User Interviews, Facilitation, Presentation, Usability testings, Wire-framing, Prototyping, Information design
Initial desk research and Content audit
WCC internal staff identified that they receive poor quality applications through the errors people make on their applications. To understand the pain points of applying for special licences. We had initial desk research on
What a special licence is
Alcohol Licensing in New Zealand and what legislation requires
Special licences on other NZ council websites
Alcohol management in general
We also conducted a content audit of the special licence information on WCC’s website and the application forms. Through that process, we could better understand the information applicants needed to provide during the application process and where applicants might struggle.
As part of this exercise, we created flowcharts of the application form to understand where options existed depending on selected answers.
User interviews
We conducted six semi-structured interviews to learn more about people’s experiences with the application process.
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Could you tell us about your journey of applying for special licensing?
How did you find out you needed to apply for a special licence?
How did you apply (downloaded form or online application)
Could you tell us the challenges you met during the process?
What did you think about the information?
Was there any information you found unclear, and Why?
What documents did you need to prepare during the process?
Was there any document you found hard to have?
What information or advice would have helped you when applying the application for the first time?
The greatest difficulty first-time participants experienced was around pre-application information. It lacked clarity, and the amount of information was overwhelming. However, all information was required to display.
We concluded that we would focus on finding the optimum layout design to display the pre-application information best to understand it more straightforward.
Usability Testing
We created three design concepts using the same information but presented them differently to test with users and gather feedback on which layout people found the easiest to follow.
We used a comparative usability testing method with nine people of different age ranges. We presented three ideas in order, asked questions about their overall understanding and attracting. We purposely changed the order of those ideas to avoid first impression bias.
High Fidelity Prototype
Through usability testing, Concept A (visual storyboard) and Concept C (vertical flow) were the easiest. Concept B (journey map) was the least popular, although some commented that they liked the arrows. Having two concepts equally preferable, we considered some other points in making our final choice.
Are we allowing for more complex information to be displayed?
Be a better viewing experience on different devices, including mobile phones?
Does least affect the loading time of web pages?
Be better suited for the type of information?
Be better suited for a wider audience?
Considering these points, we chose concept C, which provided a better fit and more flexibility for the special licence content.
Reflection
Many informative websites have similar problems when users must get informed with a large amount of content. This project has taught me about how content design makes users get lazy and give up the process. The user testing result was interesting; content with graphics is always popular but not always the best solution for displaying information. It should be considered technical side whether it would be feasible in any condition.