John Durance is a Drupal developer and prolific blogger here at BrightLemon. John has been heavily involved in developing the
Civil Service Job Share Website over the last few months so we thought we would catch up with him over a cup of tea and ask him some questions about the project.
Why was Drupal a good fit for this project?
The site was built to meet the The Digital by Default Service Standard, which are a set of criteria for digital teams building government services. Drupal ticked the boxes for a number of these criteria such as ensuring the website was developed on an open platform and could be iterated on a frequent basis.
During development what problems were faced and how did you work with Drupal / the client to solve these problems?
Ensuring consistency in labelling and terminology meant a number of reviews were required by an experienced content editor from the Civil Service.
What specific feature did you like most about this project?
I liked that the site was built to match the GDS Style guide, which ensures the site is consistent with all other government websites.
How much of the site was built using native Drupal and how much was custom built?
The site has been built to meet Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, this ensured the site could be used by assistive technologies such as screen readers.
Is there anything you’d like to add to additional phases?
We hope to have input from a community expert in future phases.
In what ways does this project showcase BrightLemon putting the User Experience first?
We have created a plan for ongoing user research and usability testing, to continuously seek feedback from users.
Key Lesson(s) Learned?
User testing is an important part of the development process. A minimum viable product should be released early, then tested with real users, feedback analysed and updates made based off this feedback.
