Creating a Local Offer that's more personal to you

Published Thursday 14 May 2020

Since its launch, the Local Offer has tried to be as reactive as possible to any feedback received from our users. We are constantly exploring new ways to improve the site and your online experience with us. With this in mind we wanted to share with you two new ideas that we hope will do just that.

Guided Advice - Helping people that don't know what they need

The inspiration behind the first of our two ideas (or projects, as we often call them) came as a result of learning that most families, who have a child or young person with SEND, are forced to sacrifice hours of their (already jam-packed) day scouring the internet to find helpful and relevant resources. This got us thinking about what we could do to enable them to steal back a few precious hours, and our thoughts turned to producing some kind of tool that could do the legwork for them. Recently we've been building on this idea and have drafted up some plans for a Guided Advice Tool that we can incorporate into the Local Offer.

The most common example of what we call a Guided Advice Tool can be found on your favourite online store. When shopping online, we are all familiar with the process of selecting a few tick-boxes, inputting some of our details and then hey presto, a list of personalised results appear on our screens designed to meet our needs. It would be wonderful to be able to achieve a similar personalised result on the Local Offer as we know it would really make a difference to the lives of families in Hertfordshire that have a child or young person with SEND.

Directory Integration - Bringing advice and support together

As you know, the Local Offer is built to let families know exactly what they are entitled to and what the council can do for you. Something that you may also be aware of is the Hertfordshire Directory, a catalogue that lists all of great support organisations from the voluntary sector in Hertfordshire (and beyond). At the moment we know that many of the families that use the Local Offer don't know that these invaluable organisations exist, and this is something we want to address. To do this we have started research on a Directory Integration project. We want to explore the idea of pulling details about these organisations straight from the Hertfordshire Directory on to the Local Offer.

If we manage to bring this project to life it will give us the chance to shine a much needed light (albeit a LED one), on the many great services and organisations available to families in Hertfordshire. It will also allow us to ensure that our users only need to visit one website.

Collaboration

To get the ball rolling on both ideas (and to stop us before we got too carried away with them), we tested initial workings with families in Hertfordshire. We held two parent sessions in March 2020, one hosted by HPCI and the other by Carer’s in Herts, with the aim of gaining valuable insight into how best to move these potential projects forward if at all. For our Directory Integration concept, we asked parents to interact with wireframes (basic webpage designs), so that we could observe and record exactly what you liked and disliked about the webpages, and idea as a whole. We also measured from the way you navigated the pages, how user friendly our initial designs were. Below are some of our findings.

The above wireframe was actually tested with parents.