The Research Phase

To familiarise myself with the context of historical and heritage sites in the UK, I opted for competitive benchmarking, researching what other trusts or charities were doing to deliver their mission to the public.

I looked at how they structured their website, what kind of informations they provided and where, how they presented their events, and how they approached the sticky topic of donations and volunteering.

Once I familiarised myself with such environment, I was keen to gain a deeper understanding of how users felt about the Bramcote's website. To initiate this I decided to run a series of usability tests.

I was interested in knowing what they looked for at glance and, mostly, whether there were any discrepancies between what they expected to find and what was actually there.

In the scenario presented, I told users they were planning a day visit to the site and wanted to go on the website to gather useful informations beforehand.

Results -

The results mainly outlined pain points related to either a lack, or misplacement, of information. Thinking about it, I resulted that the reason behind these issues was the different perception of what was important between the Trust's members and users. While the former wanted to give more visibility to their events, the latter needed first the basic information to then, eventually, develop an interest in the activities.

• The usability test immediately brought up an issue; the lack of immediate access to practical information. When landing on the website users looked for details such as, opening hours, directions, and general access availability, which were only shown at the bottom of the page. This created confusion and a certain degree of frustration.

• Secondly, they wanted to know more about the site and its history, and ultimately the work undergone by the Trust. At the time, the Trust had such information only at the physical site, resulting in a lack of information on the history of the tower online.

• Last but not least, even though people showed an interest in the activities, such as events and volunteering work, offered by the Trust, they weren't too keen on actually participating due to the lack of information presented online.

  That is bearing in mind that

  "What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things" - Margaret Mead