Love Essex: The microsite built around the user
The creation of the Love Essex microsite is a masterclass in putting the user at the very core of the process. It makes sense, especially when you’re trying to fulfil the ambitious goal of changing user behaviour.
Love Essex a site that helps those living in Essex deal with waste in a responsible and environmentally friendly manner.
Love Essex is no ordinary website. It’s technically not even a website – it’s a microsite that has ambitious goals, the big one being to change behaviour. Essex County Council has committed to reuse, recycle, or compost 65% of waste by 2035. To do that, it needed to reduce waste, cut down on the number of items going to the landfill, and encourage reusing and recycling items. And the most effective way to do this is to make the waste management process as easy as possible for residents.
How did Essex and Annertech do this? By putting the end user at the very core of the creation process.
The new Love Essex site.
Background
Love Essex is the official website of the Essex Waste Partnership. The partnership is made up of the 12 district, city and borough councils in Essex and Essex County Council working together to ensure cost-efficient and sustainable waste management across the county.
Through the Love Essex brand, the Essex Waste Partnership (a joint effort between the county council and the region’s district, city and borough councils) aims to inspire Essex residents to reduce the amount of waste they throw away, reuse and repair items more and increase the amount of waste recycled.
Annertech has been working with Essex County Council since 2022, including building a new website for their Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) service called the Local Offer – a website for services and support available in Essex for children and young people with special needs and disabilities. The users needed a modern digital service that would help people find the right local information, whatever their circumstances.
Following the success of the SEND site, which was built on the LocalGov Drupal (LGD) platform, Essex County Council wanted to leverage the LGD microsites platform for their suite of microsites, the first one of which was Love Essex.
This site connects users, who have an item they need to dispose of, with options on what to do with it. Not only did the Love Essex website need to provide residents with the information that they needed to make informed decisions about their waste; it also needed a way for residents to easily do things such as report a missed bin, request bulky waste removal or special collection, or book a slot at their local recycling centre.
"Annertech's knowledge of the LocalGov Drupal product helped us to identify existing modules to meet our needs, saving us time and money on the development of new functionality. In developing bespoke functionality they took the time to understand our needs and those of the user, developing a product that is quicker and easier to manage, and gives us the flexibility to enhance the information available to users in the longer term."
– Jennifer Scopes, Senior Product Manager, Essex County Council, and Stephen Atkinson, Senior Circular Economy Officer, Essex County Council
Challenges
The new website replaced an older system built on Umbraco which was painful to keep updated, with its Waste disposal search data housed in an Excel spreadsheet. It wasn’t very user friendly and there was a lot of manual repetition with lots of opportunities for error.
The old system wasn’t very easy for end users to use either. It was difficult for them to find the information they were looking for and, because Essex County Council wanted to promote best practices when it came to waste management, they needed to find a way of serving up the information that users needed quickly and effectively. Ambitiously, one of the council’s goals was to change user behaviour, to get people to live more “green” lifestyles, and so the council had to get quite clever about how to educate users.
The bigger picture is that this wasn’t the first council website that would stand alone from the main website. When an organisation has many different websites it can become difficult to manage them all, especially when they're not on the same system.
Our solution
Management made easy
The LocalGov Drupal Microsites platform makes managing multiple websites easier than ever. The easy-to-use platform gives content editors oversight and control, allowing them to add microsites, content and users as they need them.
LocalGov Drupal Microsites allows to run several sites from one code base in a structured and organised way. The whole point is a lower total cost of ownership and more autonomy for councils - less reliance on developers to get it going. Love Essex is the first of many Essex County Council microsites. As others are added to the platform the council will really start to see the benefits.
Search
The Love Essex microsite was unique because the end user’s experience drove the process from beginning to end. In addition, the seemingly straightforward requirement of “we need a search” was adapted to become an intricate solution which looks elegantly simple to the end user.
The core of the whole system was the data model – how the different kinds of information are connected together in a useful and usable way. This involved a shift from putting recycling centres at the centre of the model to putting environmental rating and service proximity at the centre of the model.
Getting the data model right was going to be fundamental to success. And it was challenging. For example, we knew that users would be coming to the site to find out how to dispose of an item. But there are many kinds of items that people want to get rid of. There are lots of synonyms and misspellings and permutations. It was important for the data system to reflect that.
The spreadsheet has been replaced with a Drupal user interface that organises all the data neatly, in tabs. Editors can select districts, custom filtering, search for items that they need to edit, they can add items to places in bulk. Everything can be done via the user interface.
Additional complications were that people don’t want to drive hundreds of kilometres to dispose of one item, and kerbside collections of waste vary across the county depending upon the city, borough or district the resident lives in. It would be essential to be able to map services and direct users to their closest location. The UK works with postcodes – everybody has one. The system needed to find a service, match the postcode and then return nearby locations where they can dispose of an item.
For distance, post codes are used together with location data, which comes as part of the data model, and the website can calculate how far away (as the crow flies) the service is.
The results aren’t the standard search results pages. There are numerous differences:
- Presentation: The presentation of the results is designed to effect a change. Users don’t care about which recycling centre does what. They just know that they have an item that they want to dispose of, and they want to know what to do and where to do it. The search options reframe that question positively.
- Organisation: The main point of the site is to prevent waste. A disposal option became intrinsically linked with the service behind it and an environmental rating. So search results are organised according to the waste management hierarchy, by what’s best for the environment. Disposal is at the bottom of the search results, then recovery, then recycling, reuse and prevention is at the top.
- Other, helpful information: Love Essex’s search identifies the specific item that users are getting rid of and starts to give them suggestions on how to dispose of it – for example: sell it, give it away or charity shop. It also supplies related “Did you know” facts to try to drive interest and better choices, such as “You can purchase a reduced price compost bin to help you get started with composting your garden waste at home”.
Results
This was the first LGD Microsite for Essex County Council, and they were delighted with the results. Other microsites are now in the works, due to commence in 2025.
It’s easy for editors to update, respond to changing services and needs. Because it is a microsite, it lowers the total cost of ownership. And once the site was built it was quick to launch.
Love Essex’s performance is excellent. It scores a Grade A on GTmetrix, and its performance is 94%.
And users have had positive interactions with it. There have been 779,773 total sessions since launch. The majority of contact form respondents who were asked “how easy did you find it to use our website” responded “easy” or “very easy”.
The intention was to reduce demand on the contact centre by getting people to use the site, and the team reported a massive 98.5% digital take up.
There have also been 5,266 “did you know” clicks. These are the additional snippets of information that are displayed to users during the search experience. Plus analysing the top search terms allow the team to tailor the site content to what people are looking for, keeping it fresh and relevant.
“The site has already had a positive impact. These are people who come to make a booking and while doing so they’ve chosen to view the additional content about waste prevention. Although they’re not massive numbers, if we can get those people who clicked on the ‘did you know’ snippets to change their behaviour then that is a big impact that the site has had.”
– Jennifer Scopes, Senior Product Manager, while presenting Love Essex during LocalGov Drupal Week 2024.
Annertech was invited to speak about this project at the annual DrupalCon Europe conference in Barcelona in September 2024.
Annertech also spoke about the Love Essex website together with Jennifer Scopes from Essex County Council during LocalGov Drupal Week 2024.
Key numbers
The Love Essex microsite was a case study in how the motivations of end users can be considered to drive data models and interaction design.
And because the end users are at the core of the project, editors can respond to their changing needs and conditions in almost-real time.
And it’s not just the customer, or the end user, who was taken into consideration. Love Essex is a great example of how Drupal can make managing large pools of content efficient and straightforward.
Keen to leverage the power of the Microsites Platform?
If you run a few sites the LGD Microsites platform will take the stress out of trying to manage them all. Would you like to know more about it?