Environment Agency undertakes usability study

22 January 2007

The Environment Agency has enlisted Rufus Leonard to help achieve its objective of developing a best of breed website and intranet. The overall project focuses on improving usability, structure, service offers and visual language.

Rufus Leonard has just completed the first phase, which was to undertake a comprehensive user research programme to determine where usability issues exist within each site. Task based tests designed to challenge the Agency’s key service offerings were run and monitored to establish key measurements around completion rates to feed into the next phase of the redesign project.  A total of 48 individuals participated in the project, made up of the Environment Agency’s various external target audiences and employees.

"The Environment Agency has worked hard to understand its key audiences. Teaming up with Rufus Leonard has enabled us to enhance our understanding of how our customers use our websites and how we can move towards building more useful and usable web services.”  Simon Ashley, Environment Agency

The output of Phase 1 is to provide the Environment Agency with a strategic plan for re-developing their sites, providing recommendations for methodology and re-design, which will enable them to achieve their objective of online communications excellence.