Making advice accessible

Citizens Advice is an independent charity, providing free, confidential and impartial advice to everyone.

Background

Citizens Advice went through a digital transformation process in early 2015. This digital transformation was to take a look at what the offering of the service was and how that could change in an evolving climate where Google is the homepage and demand for help and advice was increasing.

The digital transformation was also part of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Digital Strategy to provide assisted digital advice and support for consumers and citizens.

 


Over

42m

visitors in 2016-17


Annual increase of

6m

visitors

Branding

The digital transformation was taking place alongside the rebranding of the charity. The first rebranding of the charity in over two decades. It was important the rebrand and digital transformation were developed alongside each other to reinforce the one service concept, bearing in mind how the charity is made up of over 600 individual charities.

Exploring branding and colour contrast for accessibility

Homepage design

Information Architecture (IA) with push down navigation

Homepage on mobile

Design style

Designing a digital service which provides advice on everything from courts to consumer advice and benefits to energy bills creating a design style which worked for all areas way imperative.

 
 

Design patterns

Maintaining that repository, so we could incorporate learnings from new research in the user centred design teams and new teams could easily include the patterns in a content page or digital tool was crucial to progressing the changes through the digital transformation.

 
 

Helping users self-serve

All of this work helped users to find the information they needed and to self-serve, which formed part of the one service strategy to reduce the burden on local Citizens Advice and the frustration of users waiting to receive face-to-face advice. It increased the traffic to the site to over 42 million visitors annually.

 
 

Integrated support

As well as created a stronger consistent ability to self-serve, the online service needed to support the local network of Citizens Advice and users who weren't able to self-serve. This included progressing the integration of local Citizens Advice branding and templates.

Developing localised branding

Developing localised websites templates

Accessible webchat

As part of creating a digital advice service additional service design was done to design a web chat service for users to find personalised advice instantly. I took that service design work and help design and develop the web chat service into an accessible experience.

Developing an accessible webchat interface