Digitober Stories: How Manchester City Council’s ICT Team Is Building Better Digital Services For All
The Resident and Business Digital Experience Programme (RBDxP), marks a major step forward in how Manchester City Council serves residents.
When we listen to the voices of Manchester’s diverse communities, we can develop services that meaningfully address the wants and needs of the people they aim to serve.
This April, Manchester City Council’s ICT team launched the first phase of the Resident and Business Digital Experience Programme (RBDxP). The Programme, which looks to improve the Council’s digital offer, replaces legacy system with modern technologies. Moving beyond an ICT refresh, the project aims to transform the way residents use online services and establish digital as the channel of choice. By creating a smoother and more efficient system, the programme aims to make it easier for everyone in Manchester to use online Council services.
Inviting communities to join design processes supports the development of services that place the best interests of users at heart. To ensure the priorities of residents were reflected in service improvements, an extensive user research programme was carried out, gathering feedback from 263 residents on the ways in which digital services could better meet their needs.
Residents may be reluctant to use online services if alternative channels feel more comfortable, even when equipped with the necessary skills and resources needed to navigate the Internet effectively. To build online services that inspire wider engagement, ICT were conscious to address the concerns of residents hesitant to transition to digital, alongside regular service users. To gather a broad range of feedback, responses were gathered through a combination of online and offline methods, including surveys, workshops, library drop-in sessions, and community and business events.
For community engagement to have meaning, services must act on the ideas and insights they have gathered.
In response to feedback, the ICT team has improved the language and accuracy of e-mail notifications, creating a suite of more than 260 new and enhanced customised emails. Customers will receive the new e-mails when they submit reports for high-volume forms, such as potholes, fly-tipping, bins, and Neighbourhood issues, improving the clarity and transparency of communications.
Sessions with residents at the Town Hall Extension also highlighted concerns around the use of specialist language in online forms, which made them difficult to locate. The use of complex language and jargon and create barriers to understanding that disproportionately impact marginalised communities. To ensure Manchester City Council’s online services are genuinely accessible and inclusive, the ICT team has replaced challenging language with plain English, including re-naming the ‘Fly-Tipping’ form to the ‘Report Dumped Rubbish’ form.
The ICT team have also worked closely with different business areas across the Council to ensure that the new system fits the needs of both the organisation as well as residents. Through 80 hours of workshops, the team engaged service leads and specialists to review forms and process maps, visual diagrams outlining the steps in a process to help improve and understand it. This collaborative approach enabled the team to build a system tailored to real-world scenarios and validated by the people who use it as part of their day-to-day roles.
While the first phase of the RBDxP focuses on the system already in place, the team has already new introduced several new features aimed at improving user experience. These include improving site navigability, simplifying the language used on forms, adding the ability to upload photos, and customising notifications. The team have also conducted third party assessments to review and improve the accessibility of existing systems and achieved Public Service Network (PSN) compliance, ensuring secure data sharing across government networks.
To support the feedback gathered from residents, the ICT team has gathered information from a wide range of sources, including customer data, service experts, market research, and analytics from the Council website. By combining hard data with community perspectives, the team were able to build a comprehensive picture of the strengths, challenges and gaps in the existing system to guide balanced, evidence-informed improvements.
Over the next few months, the ICT team will continue to engage with residents and with colleagues in key areas such as Revenues, Benefits, Legal Services, and Complaints, to integrate their needs and processes into the Content Management System (CMS). Visitors can also expect a more user-friendly website, informed by user feedback and supported by a new CMS.
The Resident and Business Digital Experience Programme is about much more than upgrading Council systems. By engaging residents and colleagues in the design process, Manchester City Council’s ICT team aims to understand what is important to real users to ensure that improvements to services are aligned with human need. Working collaboratively across communities and the council, the ICT team are hugely proud to deliver the RBDxP. Centring people at the heart of service development, the programme will support residents to access the benefits of the online world, and ensure that digital services are accessible, efficient, and built for the future.