Testing The Electoral Commission’s website with real users

The Electoral Commission is an independent body that oversees elections and regulates political finance in the UK. Its website is an important public sector digital service, providing voters and other audiences with guidance, research and information about elections and democracy.

In 2019, we worked with the Commission and its digital agency Numiko to assess and improve the accessibility of its newly redesigned website. The following year, the teams came back to us to understand more about how people were actually using it.

Testing assumptions with real users

The Commission had spent significant time rewriting and restructuring its voter content and was continually using website feedback to make improvements. The next step was to test some of its assumptions with real people.

The team wanted to understand whether new and returning visitors could find the information they needed, the journeys they took to get there, whether experiences differed between mobile and desktop, and how easily people could use newly introduced functionality.

The findings would give the Commission evidence it could use to improve page design, content and navigation.

Designing the research around real journeys

We started with a discovery workshop involving the Commission and Numiko, turning the team's questions and hypotheses into a practical research plan.

Together, we mapped the high-level journeys people were most likely to take through the website and used them to create realistic scenarios for the testing.

Two main participant groups were identified: general voters and 'election enthusiasts' - an audience the Commission believed could be particularly interested in its more detailed policy, regulation and research content.

We recruited participants against agreed criteria, screened them for the study and prepared them for the sessions.

The research had originally been designed to take place in person, but the testing window coincided with the UK's COVID-19 lockdown. We moved the sessions online, allowing us to recruit people from across the country and giving participants the opportunity to use their own devices in familiar surroundings.

Key stakeholders could watch the sessions live, discuss follow-up questions and adapt the script as the research progressed.

During each moderated session, participants completed common journeys through the website and talked through what they expected to find. Where someone became confused or did something unexpected, our moderator explored why, helping to uncover the kinds of issues that can sit between UX and testing.

Participants also rated how easy they found each task, giving the Commission both behavioural evidence and direct feedback on the experience.

Turning user insight into improvements

The research gave the Commission a much clearer picture of how people actually navigated its website.

We brought together completion rates, perceived ease of use, user errors, participant feedback and moderator observations to identify recurring barriers as well as things that were working well.

The findings ranged from difficult language slowing down less experienced users to design elements that prevented some people from successfully using the main menu.

The Commission used the findings to make visual improvements to its homepage and navigation, simplify language and improve its voter content.

One of the most interesting findings came from the 'election enthusiast' group. Participants responded positively to the Commission's research once they discovered it, but many hadn't known the organisation produced research and therefore wouldn't have looked for it.

That shifted the problem from the quality of the content to how easily people could discover it.