Si Keane - Designer and Front-end Developer | London and Kent

— Project

Folkstone & Hythe Spotlight


— My roles

Project management

Wireframes and user-flows

UX/UI design

Running community workshops


— URL

spotlight-folkestone-hythe.org.uk


— Agency

ecce.


— Technology Used

Sketch

InVision

Folkestone and Hythe (like most local councils) pride itself on its community-run organisations and events. Over 60’s clubs, scouts, sports venues, the WI, and many more come together to support the local community. Traditionally these, manly volunteer-run, activities are very analogue with the odd Facebook page. The council wanted to create a single ‘hub’ where local people can discover all their community has to offer.


With a limited budget and little time to spare, the resulting app had some lofty ambitions;


  • - Simple and accessible
  • - Activities ‘Local to me’ a key theme
  • - Self-managing, requiring little insight from the council
  • - Activities and event kept as current as possible

With a brief in hand, we arranged a creative workshop. Held in the prestigious council chambers with both stakeholders and community members in attendance. To get the conversation flowing we created some initial low-fi wireframes and presented the initial vision for the site.


Each of the attendees was invited to use the app (via InVision) and asked to vocalise their experience. The resulting insights simplified the UI, refined the microcopy, and led to improved user experience. 


I led a group discussion to define all of the information each activity would need to communicate. We also lent on the local knowledge in the room to help define each of the council locals wards. These would become key to the location-based search during development.


The best takeaway, by running the workshop we inadvertently created a group of evangelists. Which even before the app was launched started sharing it's potential with their own communities. To help capitalise of the positive sentiment we created a ‘get notified’ holding page. Allowing people to send us their activity details months before the official Spotlight launched.


With the councils time stretched on the best of days, it was important they were not over-burdened with administering the new site. To help we made the sure the community retained ownership of their own actives. When a new activity is added it must first be approved by an administrator, this is only input mandated from the Council. The owner of the event will get an email every 3 months asking them to review and if required update their event. If the event goes un-reviewed for more than 6 months it gets removed from the site. This minimises the council’s time and keeps all events on the site current.

Results

The ultimate goal of the council is to strengthen communities and bring people together, and the new ‘Spotlight’ website is now able to facilitate this. Spotlight launched with just under 300 activities and hit over 500 in the first month.