GB-Glasgow: Content Audit & User Research for RAF Website Redevelopment

The Royal Air Force (RAF) has many interesting stories and persistent objectives to inform the public of the role of the RAF in protecting the UK and its interests at home & abroad. However, informing and engaging the public and internal audience is becoming increasingly difficult with the current RAF web presence.

The RAF website(s) has changed little since 2006, while on other channels such as Facebook & Twitter RAF is successfully engaging users. Part 1 – Content Audit Part of the difficult facing the RAF is the size of the digital estate, there are approx 10,000 webpages across 143 sites with a corporate tone of voice, the structure & language reflecting that of the organization, rather than being user centric.

This will allow us to gain a clear understanding of the current content situation, namely the quality of the content, highlight the issues, challenges and opportunities: What content is relevant, redundant, duplicated, trivial?; What content should be kept, improved, archived? In an ideal situation a comprehensive evaluation qualitative and quantitative of all RAF digital content would be conducted.

However, due to time & budget constraints this is not possible. Thus we propose the following approach: Automated quantitative content audit of all RAF sites; Manually qualitative content audit of a representative 10% of RAF digital content.

Part 2 – User Research User Needs: What do people want to know about RAF, its work / equipment etc.?; Where do people go to find the information they are looking for and can they find it?; What do they think about the information they find – is it understandable? Engaging? ; What do they do with the content once they have found it? ; How do they want to engage with the RAF & what encourages engagement?

Structure/Info Architecture: Can the RAF web content be merged into a smaller number of sites?; How do the range of users talk about & think about the content?; Identifying the most appropriate language & content structure. The appointed agency will be provided access to analytics, satisfaction survey results, & previous user experience research once the contract has been awarded.

This project will be focusing on gaining insight about & structuring a minimum viable product. Thus, we won’t be looking to redevelop the whole RAF digital estate in one go, with high priority/high traffic content delivered first. General Public Primary Audiences and MOD will undertake research activities with the internal Personnel audiences and secondary General Public audiences in parallel with the appointed agency taking responsibility for the external Primary General Public audiences.