BANES Carers’ Centre

UX Lead • Project Lead • Account Manager

100% increase in traffic to the site, 17hrs of user testing

  • Role

    UX lead
    Product Owner
    Project Manager
    Account Manager

  • Team

    Laura Pinkstone
    Katherine Shotliff
    - UX Designer
    Dan Chadney
    - Frontend developer
    BANES Carers Centre team

  • Key Services

    User Profiles
    User Journey Mapping
    Wireframing
    User testing

01. Overview

BANES Carers Centre provides respite services, advice, and information for the carer community in Bath and North East Somerset.

This project was part of a broader digital transformation. The vision was to create a single web platform that was driven by carers and their feedback, ensuring it met their needs. The aim was for the platform to be continuously refined based on carers’ input, supporting the strategic objective of expanding services and meeting the evolving needs of carers across the region.

The new platform needed to be flexible, avoiding a return to the limitations of the current bespoke system, which had become outdated and unusable for the team. It was also essential that the team had the skills and capability to support user research, prototyping, and split testing on the new platform.

02. Problem

The existing website had become outdated, with only minor changes being made, as updates were challenging and often risked breaking the site. As a result, the team had to manage activities manually, with carers booking services and activities via email or by phoning the centre. This was time-consuming and left the team with limited capacity to support carers in other ways.

Additionally, the team lacked clarity on what carers needed from the website to encourage self-service and reduce reliance on phone and email enquiries.

It was clear that carers needed to be involved throughout the process to ensure the new website would effectively meet their needs.

03. Design Process

To begin, I needed to work with the marketing team to conduct a detailed discovery process to understand carers’ needs.

This started with a series of workshops involving key stakeholders from various departments to gather organisational knowledge about adult and young carers. We first explored all the users who might visit the website—both those the team knew were already using the site and those they hoped to attract.

From this, we were able to group users based on common goals. Once categorised, we worked to understand what would bring them to the site, what they aimed to achieve, and any frustrations they might encounter during their visit which we needed to make sure we would eliminate during the project.

Once we had a defined set of user profiles, we were able to map out the journeys for each one. Working closely with The Carers’ Centre team, we outlined the steps users would take and the information they would need when visiting the site. This helped to identify missing content which The Carers’ Centre would need to create for the site before the site was launched.

The final workshop was a wireframing session with key stakeholders and carers to explore their expectations for the website. Each participant was given an A3 sheet and asked to sketch six different versions of the home page, considering the various user profiles and the information they expected to see. This provided valuable insight into user expectations. The image below shows the output from this workshop.

From this, I consolidated the findings into a prototype, which we then carried forward into user testing to validate with carers.

During user testing, it became clear that some of our initial assumptions about the different audience groups were incorrect. For example, young carers were unlikely to use the website themselves—parents were more likely to book activities on their behalf. We also discovered that many carers do not identify as carers, meaning the website’s language needed to be more relatable.

Usability testing was invaluable in providing the insights needed to ensure the website’s success at launch.

04. Solution & Results

The comprehensive approach, which included 17 hours of user testing, ensured that the final website accurately reflected the needs of carers. The project delivered a new, integrated, user-led website that aligned with the organisation’s strategic priorities and ambitions.

The project successfully:

  • Brought carers back to the website by providing essential information and helping them discover available services.

  • Increased awareness that The Carers’ Centre is a charity and not part of the council.

  • Co-created the website through user research, testing, and feedback, ensuring accessibility while delivering an engaging and immersive experience across both mobile and desktop.

  • Seamlessly integrated the website with Salesforce to streamline processes and enhance functionality.

  • Built the website on the Umbraco Content Management System (CMS) allowing the team to continually update content on the website.

This meticulous process resulted in a highly effective, user-friendly website that met and exceeded the project’s goals.