Discovery about website rationalisation for Health Education England

We were asked by Health Education England (HEE) to carry out a discovery about the possible rationalisation of its web estate, to inform decisions on how best to proceed with their content on a new platform.

In particular, our work focussed on the user and strategic needs for a possible hub for nursing and midwifery content, and to consider how this and other content might be unified around a single domain along with HEE’s main website.

HEE currently has a number of different websites with different target audiences, and we ran a programme of user research to understand how users of these websites need to access and use HEE content

This included research with staff who work in nursing and midwifery, and those working in the wider health sector including education partners, and those considering an NHS career.

We carried out one-to-one interviews, usability testing and user needs sessions. And from this we developed a set of 7 user proto-personas and a backlog of 43 user needs, which were then validated in a survey of users, and prioritised by the HEE team.

We also ran a card sort activity, the results of which were used to help develop provisional site maps and concept prototypes, which we then tested with users. We were then able to conduct a tree test and further iterate the provisional site maps.

All our findings were presented back to the team, including the outcomes from a sample content review and landscape analysis of how others have approached similar challenges.

We made recommendations about what content to prioritise in order to meet user needs, and how to rationalise, organise and present content, in the context of a new web platform, wider organisational change, and the needs of users that were revealed by our research.