Clare McCarthy | Defra: Vet Gateway migration

Defra: Vet Gateway migration

40755

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Defra: Vet Gateway migration

Contracted to co-deliver the transition of content from the Animal and Plant Health Agency’s (APHA’s) Vet Gateway website to GOV.UK. The project is ongoing until at least January 2025.

I joined the small, multidisciplinary team (a user researcher (UR) and one other content designer (CD), as well as a business analyst (BA) and peripheral product / delivery managers) at the end of their Discovery Phase. My initial priorities included:

visual mapping of the Vet Gateway website, as well as my specific content work packages
onboarding into the GOV.UK publishing platform, Whitehall
setting the team up with a digital prototype
building relationships with my key stakeholders

Day-to-day tasks include planning, writing and testing content, alongside the other CD and UR, delivering packages of content to project deadlines, and improving the architecture of content during migration.

Content planning

Planning the content was an interesting challenge. Whilst some of the content could easily be ported over as-is, a number of pieces needed more specialist consideration; they had grown organically over a number of years to encompass a number of different, overlapping subject areas, and short-form content without any particular assigned category had been appended onto existing long-form content using a ‘best-fit’ approach. Using the visual map as a springboard, I broke down the content into its smallest parts before reorganising, deduplicating, improving factual accuracy and republishing in the in the GOV.UK style. The process encouraged out-of-date or not-fit-for-purpose content to naturally slough off, and user research helped us to further tighten tricky subject areas.

Prototyping

Prototyping was an enjoyable challenge on this project. The GOV.UK prototyping environment has relatively recently been updated to include a number of new out-of-the-box content types, including a blank GOV.UK guidance page. However, the specificity we required to prototype our new content is currently available, so I organised the code myself so we could test collection and publication pages, in addition to standard guidance. We also utilised the Whitehall preview function to fill in any outstanding gaps, creating a seamless user experience for external and internal users who agreed to give feedback on the new content and content architecture. As well as facilitating research insights, the prototype played a crucial role in raising the profile of user research within our critical stakeholder groups.

Meeting deadlines

Tight timeframes have meant we’ve needed to be circumspect in our approach to delivery. The other CD had parcelled up the content into different work packages before I joined the project, and during my time with the team we have worked hand-in-hand to renegotiate and maintain the efficiency of those packages as our capabilities and timelines have shifted, to ensure that we’re still able to deliver at pace. Managing our own expectations, as designers, has been crucial in order to allow us to deliver on our short-term commitments while collecting and collating any evidence required to support the drive for longer-term improvements.

Examples of work