With the creation of NHS Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) on 1 April 2021, a brand new website was developed by the CCG’s Communications and Engagement Team and website development agency, The Web Orchard.
The website has been built for patients, the wider public, as well as clinicians and healthcare partners, to raise awareness of the work of the CCG; to provide useful local information on healthcare services in the county; signpost users to information provided by our partners; as well as a to provide a place for professionals to access important resources.
The primary aim of the new website is to ensure that information is easy to find, and that the site is simple to navigate and accessible to all users. In order to test this, a usability survey comprising 15 questions was completed by representatives from several different organisations across the county, including patient representatives, and their feedback was shared.
A focus group was also held to allow more in-depth discussion on what users liked about the new site as well as what improvements they felt could be made.
The feedback process was important to understand how different users could navigate the site, how they felt about the design, as well as the expectations they had on what information they could access.
The usability tests as well as the focus group proved to be a very worthwhile exercise and the CCG would like to thank everyone who participated for their time and constructive feedback.
The following is a list of the recommendations that were shared with the CCG’s Communications and Engagement Team and the web developers at The Web Orchard. These include cosmetic changes to the design of the site, as well as more technical amends:
- Making the search bar longer so that the majority of text input can be viewed (applied);
- Updating the Governing Body page to highlight those people in attendance as well as the Governing Body members (applied);
- Updating key pages with more accurate keywords so that the search bar functioned more effectively (applied).
Further amends included:
- The accessibility widget, and in particular the screen reader. When this was tested by a user without sight, it was realised that the screen reader was not functioning well. This is currently being reviewed and we will be updating the accessibility widget and our user tester as soon as possible to determine if the necessary improvements have been made (in progress).
- Improving the accuracy of the search bar – this recommendation was not able to be implemented because the search bar is as accurate as it can be. The search system currently uses ‘keyword matching’ which explains why some pages appear in the search results that are unrelated to the search terms entered.
- Including an option for users to decide how many items are displayed on a page at each time (for example, how many news items appear in the ‘Latest News’ section). The reason this recommendation has not been applied is because this specific format would need to be applied across the whole of the website and this would not work well for many of the pages;
- Using Google Maps for people to find a GP practice more easily – although a great suggestion we have not been able to apply this suggestion due to cost implications;
- Enabling individual practice websites to open in a new tab – this has not been applied as it is felt by our website developers that users tend not to like dealing with dozens of opened tabs, especially if they are accessing the website from their mobile phones. Research has also found that some visitors tend to become quickly frustrated with the disabled back button, strengthening the argument that it is not user-friendly and therefore not a good user experience.
We would like to repeat our thanks to those who fed back on the new website – we are also always happy to hear your suggestions relating to the site.
To share constructive feedback on your experience with the new CCG website, please email: stwccg.communicationsteam@nhs.net