A Content and User Experience Strategy for local government

It is standard practice in the communications, marketing, and brand management industries to design content with a number of fictional people and families in mind. These fictional people represent the full range of possible users of the website.

These profiles let web editors and content authors picture real people, with real, clear needs, as the users of their web content. This is more useful than thinking of users as a generic, shapeless group of "just anybody." These profiles also remind us of the wide range of citizens we serve. These citizens want to do business with us, find out information from us, or otherwise transact with us — and we, in turn, want to transact with them. The profiles remind us not to focus on one group of citizens at the cost of other groups.

By nature, these profiles are broad types. But we do not intend them as stereotypes of users or places. Instead, we intend them as broad descriptions, useful for picturing real individuals visiting the website. We do not intend this list to fully cover every kind of person in the area. Instead, we intend it to recognize how wide that range of people really is.

These personas also include user needs based on the GDS Accessibility Personas. We use these to show that we should not think about accessibility separately from everything else. Instead, accessibility should sit at the heart of how we design for our users. Remember the mantra: "if we make it accessible, we make it better for everybody."

Every town, city, borough, or county has its own unique mix of people. Your own Citizen Insight team will have researched your local mix. But it is fair to say that most areas will broadly include the following kinds of people:

1) Mr and Mrs Mercury

A family living in ex-council housing, in a former council estate area. They have one child at school, another grown-up child living at home without a job, and an elderly relative living in a care home in the area. Both parents have jobs. They are not extremely poor, but they have little money left over for luxuries.

They are not sure about the internet — although they have internet access at home, we would not call them expert users. They are also not sure about the council. They know the council empties the bins and looks after the local park, but they know little about how the council works beyond that. They do not realize the full range of council services they actually use — for example, they still think the council runs the buses. As well as living at the physical edge of the city, they are also at the edge of taking part in civic life.

Mr Mercury is visually impaired and uses a screen magnifier. He does not consider himself disabled under the Equality Act, and never ticks that box on Equalities Monitoring forms. But his sight is still not what it once was.

2) Mr and Mr Venus

A couple of young professionals, living in a rented private apartment in a fashionable, up-and-coming part of the city. Most of their use of council services is in leisure and culture — libraries, sports facilities, the museum and art gallery, and council-organized cultural festivals and events.

They are both active online and active in local civic life. They take part on social media and on local blogs, and in the local Neighbourhood Forum. They campaigned to introduce a directly elected mayor for the city. They read the local broadsheet paper on their tablets, and they keep an eye on what happens at the Civic Centre, from both elected members and paid officers, talking about it with their friends. Environmental issues are high on their list of personal interests.

Mr Venus is a partially sighted screen-reader user. He started to experience gradual sight loss a few years ago.

3) Mr and Mrs Mars

A couple who run a family-owned business. They have little interest in standard household council services, beyond the basics of roads, bins, schools, and council tax. But they have a strong interest in council services for small businesses.

They pay business rates. Their rubbish is collected by the commercial waste team. They sometimes need the council's rat-catching service. They must follow the council's rules for their industry and hold the right licenses for their business. They are also interested in what help and support the council can offer to small businesses.

Mrs Mars has rheumatoid arthritis. She uses speech-to-text software for most text input, and an Elgato Streamdeck (a device with programmable shortcut buttons) for most tasks that would otherwise need a keyboard. She can use a trackball as a last resort, when a website or application does not work with the shortcuts on her Streamdeck. But in that case, she is more likely to switch to a different website than to keep trying.

4) Ms Jupiter

A successful career woman, living in one of the high-end city-centre penthouses. She has little interest in the services the council gives to residents, beyond core services such as roads. But she sits on the board of the Local Enterprise Partnership.

Although she has no personal interest in what the council gives her, she knows the full range of council services well. She is very interested in where the council's work crosses over into her own job.

She has a complex neurodivergent profile, with both autism and ADHD. She has learned to hide this among professional colleagues and contacts. Most of these colleagues do not know she has this diagnosis, and simply think of her as "passionate and excitable" — but hiding it can be very tiring for her. She gets frustrated by distractions on some websites, and by a lack of clarity about the steps she is expected to follow to finish a task. Bright, clashing colors cause her some discomfort, and she cannot use certain local and national news websites at all.

5) Mr Saturn

A student in his final year at the university, living in shared housing in the north of the borough. He plans to stay in the county after he finishes his course.

He has no job lined up for after he graduates in July, so he would not be surprised to spend some time on benefits. But he does not expect to be out of work for long, if this happens. He could just as easily walk straight into a job at graduation, as spend several months looking for work in what has become a tight, competitive jobs market.

Mr Saturn has dyslexia, and worries this may cause problems when he applies for jobs.

6) Mr and Mrs Neptune

These residents live in the south of the county, and represent the average person — the so-called "silent majority" who do not care about this policy or that plan. They are not interested in an exciting, engaging user experience. They know what they want, and just need to get things done with as little fuss and trouble as possible.

Mr Neptune has been profoundly deaf from birth, and uses British Sign Language (BSL). In most public situations, Mrs Neptune helps him as his interpreter. He is fairly relaxed about being deaf, but gets annoyed at how most people misunderstand BSL. BSL is a separate language in its own right, not simply spoken English shown with hand movements. As a result, people also misunderstand that people who grew up using BSL read and understand written English differently from people who grew up hearing.

7) Mr and Mrs Uranus

A retired couple, living in the relatively well-off north-east of the borough. They own their home outright, and have two grown-up children. One child lives nearby, and is close to making them grandparents. The other child lives in the South Yorkshire part of the Peak District.