Relaunch for Surrey brings in Five Times Number of Visitors

Surrey County Council has seen a five-fold increase in visitors to its website since relaunching last year.

The website, which was relaunched last June after extensive public input, is now receiving over 30,000 visitors a month viewing around three million pages. This is five times as many as this time last year.

Christine Stevens, county councillor responsible for Corporate Planning, says the increase in people using the site reflects the effort put into making sure it is a valuable and useful resource. 'For example, people can report faulty street lights, renew library books and, from this month, report dangerous potholes and other road problems on the site.'

Flow Interactive was appointed to ensure easy navigation through the site, and they conducted user tests throughout the creation process.

Meriel Lenfestey, managing director of Flow, says that when the company was commissioned in February 2002, the Surrey County Council website 'was a great source of varied information, but was very poorly designed and structured. An analysis of the call centre feedback and log files illustrated that users were struggling with the site navigation and relying heavily on a confusing site index.

'Surrey County Council foresaw that an investment in usability for their site redesign could lead to large potential cost savings for their call centres at the same time as an improved experience for Surrey citizens.'

Flow managed a complete user-centred design process over a period of two months. This took the design through information architecture, interface design and visual design (the latter was completed by digital design agency Recollective). Surrey citizens and business people were brought into all stages of the design process using usability techniques such as card sorting and user testing on low fidelity prototypes. Recollective translated the new site's structure into a visual concept by working closely with Flow.
Surrey says that the site is to be continually updated and welcomes comments on all aspects.

Associated Link: Surrey's website

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