Here at Sitemorse it’s a privilege to work with great clients who carry out inspiring work. In this post we explore the work of the team at NHS Digital who have been able to significantly improve both the accessibility and the quality of their website content; we’re proud that the Sitemorse platform has played a part in this project.

NHS Digital is the national information and technology partner for the NHS and other aspects of health and social care in the UK; therefore, it must set the “gold standard” for various digital practices. However, when it came to their own website, there were multiple issues that needed to be addressed.

The project that was set up to make comprehensive improvements to the NHS Digital website provides valuable takeaways for other digital teams. Here’s our take on seven things we learnt from NHS Digital – you can also read about it in more detail in our full client statement.

1. You need the right mindset

   Having the right mindset in committing to make tangible improvements and being passionate about reaching a goal can make all the difference; it’s often the “ingredient X” that drives the momentum, persistence and focus needed to drive digital improvement.

   The NHS Digital website team had the right mindset, having an ambition to set high standards around information governance, data standards and more that would set an example for other NHS websites. The team also felt very strongly about accessibility and usability and had been champions for both, explaining that they had been “banging the accessibility drum across the business”.

2. Having a baseline for measurement is a must-have

   In order to drive a project to improve the usability and accessibility of the website, the team knew it was critically important to assess where they were, having a clear picture of the starting point of their improvement journey. They used Sitemorse to measure the state of accessibility, content quality and other website attributes as a baseline measure, meaning they could then use further measurement to track their progress during and after the project.

   They also knew metrics were very important to be able to engage senior management, demonstrate success and support any business case – therefore a reliable, independent baseline measurement that could then be repeated further down the line was a must-have for success.

3. Benchmarking provides tangible evidence of improvement

   The NHS Digital team also used benchmarking to measure progress.  Leveraging the independent INDEX benchmarking capabilities of the Sitemorse platform, the team were able to compare the NHS Digital website with other NHS sites across different criteria.

   With NHS Digital keen to set strong website standards, the benchmarking provided a strong message to senior management and highlighted the need for action, as well as providing poignant evidence of progress further down the line. The team explain “We performed two ad-hoc benchmarks against other NHS websites, and we were really pleased at the scale of our improvement when the two assessments were compared.”

4. Be ruthless if you want to improve your content

   A key aim of the project was to improve the content on the website, as well as findability. Here the team undertook what they dubbed a “content transformation exercise” which meant taking some fundamental approaches to improve content. One of these was ruthlessly removing content that was out of date or not providing value, resulting in the reduction of the website from 20,000 to 8,000 pages; here Sitemorse’s automated assessment capabilities proved invaluable.  The team also worked to reduce the number of future website contributors and provided tighter review processes on content to ensure pages maintained their high quality.

5. Use automation to test the accessibility of both templates and content

   A key aspect of the project was using automation to test for AAA-level accessibility compliance on the page templates for the new NHS Digital website. While this spotted issues which were then corrected, an important additional step was to repeat testing with real content added; this revealed that more work needed to be done.

   Here, a critical takeaway is to always test both the templates and then the actual content, because having compliant page templates in your CMS does not guarantee there are not issues with individual pages, even if they use a template that has been successfully tested.

6. Ongoing prioritisation is at the heart of steady improvement

   Once a new website had been launched it is critical to keep on driving improvement and ensure a site remains compliant, both as new content gets added and in fixing issues. A website does not stay “improved” or “compliant” without ongoing management.

   Here the NHS Digital team found out that ongoing testing and then prioritising the most important fixes were at the heart of steady improvement.  The team explain “Using Sitemorse’s assessments over a year allowed us to identify all the tickets we needed to work upon to ensure our site templates and our content deliver AA compliance as well as dramatically improve content quality.”

   The team continue “We focus on priorities and the relative importance. With accessibility, some elements are obviously part of the standard but they have less of an impact on real users so we try to work out which of the things coming up in the report are things that really make a difference to users compared to those which are a relatively technical fail.”

7. Learn as you go

   Another key approach that has proved useful throughout the project has been the ability to “learn as you go” and be flexible to introduce the right measures and deal with surprises. The team explain “It’s a learning process. We focused on the major accessibility requirements, which we’ve done pretty well now, but there’s always new things to learn.”

Download the free NHS Digital Client Statement now

We hope you found these takeaways useful. For more detail you can download the NHS Digital Client Statement – no form or credentials needed – just follow the link!