Blog post: How a content audit led to a better user experience
Toyah Coolican, content designer, shares how auditing existing website content made redesigning part of the marine licensing section easier and more effective.
NRW issues marine licences for work undertaken in or near the sea. Licences for low-risk activities (known as band 1) are intended to be completed by applicants without help or input from us.
How the service was
The marine licensing section of our website has grown over time. A dedicated 'low-risk band 1' page existed, but contained over 3000 words, many of which were not task-focused. Instead of guiding the user through the task of applying, the page contained a lot of scientific details and other technical or legal information. We knew from heatmap analysis that most of this content was not engaged with.
This is not unique to marine licensing, we see it in many areas of our website. NRW often tries to tell people everything it knows about a subject 'just in case'. But for many people - especially non-specialists, or those new to the process - this is overwhelming and confusing.
Providing too much information often leads to mistakes or omissions in applications, as the useful guidance gets buried. People may start reading a page but skip over the information they don't understand and accidentally miss the useful content.
As well as this busy page, information relating to band 1 also existed on other pages within the marine licensing section. Applicants couldn't be certain that the main band 1 page was their only port of call (pun intended!), so needed to also explore elsewhere to ensure they didn't miss anything.
Faced with all this, it's understandable why people might choose to bypass the website and contact the licensing team for help instead. But this creates extra work for the team and holds up the process.
Problems for users
Compared to bands 2 and 3, band 1 is a more straightforward standalone process, but this wasn't reflected in the structure of the site.
Information was provided in a fragmented way, across multiple pages, so applicants had to locate and decipher what was specifically relevant to them. They risked missing key facts and guidance.
As you may remember reading in an earlier blog post of ours:
"This meant that teams did not receive all the information they needed to assess an application. There was considerable back and forth with applicants to try to gain enough information to be able to process the application. All this wasted staff and users’ time." ~ Samantha Evans, (October 18, 2024)
It's interesting to see how the same problems and patterns occur in different places. What Sam found to be the case with land permissions was exactly the same problem that marine licensing faced.
How we fixed the problems
We streamlined the information presented
We carried out a content audit of the marine licensing section, to capture all the information relevant to band 1 applications. The details were stored in a spreadsheet for reference. It became clear that some facts were duplicated on multiple pages, which was potentially confusing.
We used the results of the audit to rewrite the main band 1 page, stripping it down to focus on what would help people complete the task of applying. Then we referred back to the audit spreadsheet to remove duplication on other pages, so there was one single source of truth.
We helped users get it right
We created new content to provide clear instructions for subjects that we knew caused problems. One example of this is the need for method statements when applying to work in or near sensitive sites.
This was mentioned on the original band 1 page, but not in a very useful way. Lists of species and habitats that caused sites to be 'sensitive' were simply that - bullet-pointed lists.
To find out whether this applied to their planned place of work, applicants needed to interrogate an interactive map, but the link to that map wasn't provided alongside the explanation of method statements. We weren't making things easy for them.
We used our content audit to identify the locations of all the various pieces of relevant information. With this in hand, we wrote a simple page with a clear description of what to do and how to do it.
Outcomes for users
Band 1 applicants can now find everything they need to know about the process in one place. We guide them through:
- identifying whether their project falls into the low-risk category
- key details of the licensing process
- what extra information they will need to provide with their application, and how to prepare it
...before presenting the button to begin the online form itself.
The experience for users is now more of a linear path, and less of a scavenger hunt!
Next steps
This is one of our lower volume forms, so we've had few submissions and little feedback from users so far. But we're keeping an eye on how people are engaging with the revised content, to identify anything that may benefit from further iteration.
We'll also be following the same content audit process when we redesign other parts of the marine licensing section of the site.