Sprint 13

Research goals from sprint 10

Due to the UK general election in early July, no research was conducted during sprint 11. The decision was made to conduct the research from sprint 10 during sprint 12, design then focused on planning for air quality alerts.

The research for sprint 12 involved participants from Scotland.

We focussed on testing:

revised page structure to check if users understood the different time periods: five-day forecast, pollutant annual means and hourly measurements
presenting the annual pollutant averages in a tabular format
exploring the addition of a related content panel
reducing complexity in displaying levels for nearby monitoring areas

Research findings

What worked well

In this round of research, we found:

the revised page structure helped users scan content and understand different time periods
historical information engaged participants
the navigation panel led to more exploration of underlying pages

What needs work

In this round of research, we found:

relying on the browser back button caused some participants issues
participants tended to gravitate towards the table containing the annual means for each pollutant rather than reading the text about the dominant pollutant
participants expressed a desire to see historical data over longer periods and in a visual form

As a team, we decided to note these points and park them for further exploration.

What we focused on in sprint 13

We agreed to start prototyping potential elements of an alerts service. These included:

what does an alert service look like without the user having to sign up (meeting the statutory obligations)?
how would an air quality alert be presented on a location forecast page?

Alert service - meeting statutory obligations

For this sprint, we decided to focus on publishing and displaying alerts within the web service, as this primarily met the statutory obligation for the service. We also wanted to explore whether or not this was sufficient to be classified as a minimum viable product (MVP).

Prototype scope

Air pollution topic landing page

In sprint 10, we started to look at the wider information architecture and how the service sits within GOV.UK. For the prototype, we decided to start the user journey from a topic landing page that contained links to:

Check local air quality
Air quality alerts
Sign up for air quality alerts
Why we monitor air pollution
Air pollutants we monitor
Health effects of poor air quality

This page does not contain an exhaustive list. In the future, it could link to other content, such as annual compliance data or services like ‘Get air quality data’.