New Media Awards 2007 Atos Origin

Child Support Agency

http://www.csa.gov.uk

Nominated in Modernising government award category.

The Child Support Agency plays a key role in tackling child poverty by ensuring that parents who live apart from their children contribute financially to their upbringing through child maintenance.
The CSA’s Operational Improvement Plan was launched in February 2006, alongside the Henshaw Redesign of child support. The Plan is designed to stabilise and improve the agency’s performance ahead of any move to new child maintenance arrangements. The aim is to ensure more responsibility from non-resident parents; delivery that is more efficient and effective; providing more money for more children and helping lift more children out of poverty.

1 nomination from readers

  • The CSA’s website is a key tool in supporting Operational Improvement Plan delivery, and it had been long recognised that the existing site did not fulfil the requirements of the Agency, or its audiences (clients, stakeholders and media). The previous website was characterised by a high level of compliance with W3C accessibility standards, but otherwise marked by a lack of engagement with the audience, any serious consideration of usability in design, interface or architecture, and was, aesthetically, beyond bland: the entire site was laid out in a series of boxes, using the two primary colours from the Agency’s palette, and was clinical, unwelcoming and did not meet user expectations. The new CSA website, created through a process involving audience consultation, completely changes this approach with a vibrant and flexible design which has been proven to work through two rounds of user-testing.

    This testing, and the over-arching revamp, addressed much more than just the visual appeal of the site; the Information Architecture has been completely revisited to ensure that the site meets the needs of its users, presenting the information in a task-based structure which seeks to avoid pigeon-holing users and enabling them to find the information they need quickly. Previously, that data had been laid out in a manner reminiscent of the CSA’s internal structure, which was neither logical nor intuitive for the audience.

    In line with e-Government requirements, the site is accessible to the ‘AA’ level of the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and has been designed specifically to work in all modern browsers, as well as being fully compatible with assistive technologies.

    Early evidence shows that the new website is a great success with the average dwelling time now 6 minutes and with far fewer visitors leaving after the homepage.

    Nominated by Justine Ephgrave, 31 May 2007