CASE STUDY

Schools financial benchmarking

Creating a feature-rich benchmarking tool that provides school finance professionals with the necessary comparison data to help improve financial efficiency

We worked with the Department for Education (DfE) to redesign the schools financial benchmarking website. This service enables finance professionals, governors and teachers to compare their school finances against similar schools so that financial inefficiencies can be found.

Results

17%

increase in page views

78%

of survey respondents classified the website as ‘easy to use’

24%

increase in completed user journeys

Homepage of the old schools financial benchmarking service

The challenge

The old service consisted of two separate sites for maintained and academy schools, which were challenging for users to navigate fully and limited in the way data was displayed. A particular issue was the number of abandoned user journeys before the user had compared their schools with others.

The main aim was to create a single, accessible, feature-rich benchmarking tool that would provide all users with the necessary comparison data to improve financial efficiency.

What we did

In October 2016, Fluent was tasked with providing the service design and user research for a new single platform. Throughout alpha, private beta and public beta our user research and design team worked with the wider DfE project team in an agile environment.

We conducted a range of research techniques such as usability testing, accessibility testing, surveys, and focus groups to gather user insights and improve the service design iteratively. Depending on the situation, research was carried out on the live site in order to test with real users’ data or on a prototype to test new design variations. Approximately 150 school finance professionals, governors and head teachers were involved in the research.

The outcome

We successfully helped the wider team to deliver the new service and complete the mandatory stages of a GOV.UK digital service assessment.

We created a new, single platform for all schools’ financial data, displaying complex information in accessible charts with the ability to compare financial data against other schools using a variety of comparison criteria such as pupil numbers, school type and location. The website is user-friendly and responsively designed in the GOV.UK style with rich functionality that allows users to create and download reports.