Improving user experience at Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust

The challenge

Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRHT) provides safe and affordable housing and care for low-income and vulnerable people in the York area.

The existing website was being redesigned to improve the experience of users coming to the website to access information support and services. The aims were to:

• create an accessible and efficient user journey for JRHT tenants looking for services and support

• provide a shop window for the full range of JRHT housing and care options

• integrate the website with established ancillary digital platforms and person-led services

A really important factor underpinning the project was the need to make a website that could be maintained and sustained by a small team of mostly non-specialist content creators.

An external team of Drupal-specialist developers ran a basic user research project to support development of the website’s information architecture before building the site architecture for the client.

What they say about working with Scroll

“We are incredibly pleased that the work we did resulted in being ranked number 1 for accessibility against other UK housing authority websites. Working with Scroll helped us to get there – their focus on reliable user data and user-centred content helped us meet our project goals." 

Daniel Wigglesworth, Head of Digital Products, JRHT

The solution

• Scroll gathered data and insight from users and JRHT staff to identify issues with the current offering and opportunities for improvement.

• We improved the information architecture and user experience of the new website, including clearer micro-copy and simplified user journeys.

• We trained in-house staff in basic content design principles to lift content standards across the organisation.

• We created data-informed content for the new site using content design methodology, reducing word count and improving accessibility

How we worked

The team consisted of the client, one Scroll consultant and a small team of Drupal designers and developers from a third party agency. 

We worked collaboratively in the discovery phase, supporting a multi-disciplinary effort to gather and validate the user data and insights we needed to focus our design priorities.

Scroll was responsible for all content and micro-copy, and supported on information architecture. 

While the build was taking place, Scroll refocused efforts to train and support the client’s in-house content contributors in basic content design methodology. This was important to ensure that the standards and sustainability of the content strategy could be managed and maintained by non-specialist staff in a de-centralised content editorial model.