Helping people apply for a disabled parking permit
Content design for the Blue Badge team at Leeds City Council in 2019.
The situation
Blue Badges are a permit for people who need to use disabled parking and get closer to their destination.
In January 2019, the Department for Transport (DfT) launched a new service: Apply for a Blue Badge online.
While the new GOV.UK online service was much easier for people to use, the applications themselves still ended up at local authorities for processing – just as they had done previously.
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That’s where Leeds City Council started experiencing a few problems. By August 2019, the council’s Blue Badge department was overwhelmed and struggling to cope with enquiries and inappropriate applications.
The brief
In November 2019, I was asked to take a look at the web content to see if I could find ways to reduce the issues these issues.
I had no budget, with no user researchers available to help me – this was a solo project. There was no potential for usability testing, aside from peer review.
I was also unable to bring about any changes to the GOV.UK form itself, aside from updating any URLs they had pointing to the Leeds City Council website.
Naming the problems
To understand the full extent of the problems, I completed a short discovery phase creating journey maps, doing desk research, and consulting the Blue Badge team.
Customer confusion
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My research highlighted that:
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people were not sending enough information or supporting documents
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people were applying when they weren't eligible
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ambiguity around the new rules for hidden disabilities was causing calls and poor quality applications
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there was confusion around how long it takes for applications to be processed, especially if an applicant had to have further assessment
​I hypothesised that some of these could be due to the eligibility criteria on our website not matching the options on the form. Also, it wasn’t possible to explain Leeds-specific processing times at the end of the form – where people expect it – so that could be causing confusion too.
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Referrals to our website
I diagnosed further problems through mapping and analytics, including several pain points when GOV.UK sent people back to our site for extra help. I discovered that their form was linking to an old sub-site with very little information on it except for a phone number.
People would reach this page:
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if they didn’t want to apply online (disabled people are about 4 times less likely to use the internet)
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if they couldn’t upload their documents and selected 'continue without uploading'
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if they couldn’t or didn’t want to pay online
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In addition, our analytics showed that 'Blue Badge' was still regularly appearing in the top five most searched terms on the council’s website.
With this in mind, I decided that it would be worthwhile making changes to our web content. People were still coming to us to apply and get the info they needed, even though they could just go direct to the GOV.UK form instead.
The image shows a map of the Blue Badge user journey including pain points and content examples.
First, I created new user stories in line with my discoveries and used those to rework all of our Blue Badge web content. This work included rewriting it all in plain English, using clear sub-headings to make it easier to scan, and ensuring it met our content standards.
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Highlights of my content changes included:
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deleting the old sub-site page and asking DfT to update their links
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creating a new ‘Help with your application page’ for those referred back to us
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changing the eligibility criteria to fit with the options on the form itself
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adding content to explain eligibility for hidden disabilities
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creating a step list and 'what happens next' to show people the full application process
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All content went through a thorough peer review and multiple prototype iterations. I also had to get sign-off from multiple stakeholders, including those in the Blue Badge team and customer services.
Creating content
The image shows the new 'Help with your application' page for any customers referred back to us from the online form.
Not shown are sections including 'Send documents by post', 'Pay by phone', 'Waiting times' and 'Appeal a Blue Badge refusal'.
To see more, visit the live page for Help with your Blue Badge application.
The image shows web content on the 'Who can get a Blue Badge' page explaining how people with hidden disabilities could qualify for a badge.
The term non-visible (hidden) disability was provided by the Blue Badge team and based on UK-wide consultations.
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To see more, visit the live page for Who can get a Blue Badge.
The image shows web content explaining how the Blue Badge application process works from start to finish. To see more, visit the live page for Apply for a Blue Badge.
The result
The busy Blue Badge team did not have the time to gather data on the quality of applications since my content changes, so it's hard to tell how effective my work has been.
But we do know that:
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the volume of Blue Badge calls eased off over the following months
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the reading level of the Blue Badge content went down two years, from age 11 to age 9
While the outcome isn’t exactly impressive, I learnt a lot from the experience.
It hammered home some very important lessons for me:
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clear content cannot fix every problem (though people often think it will)
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end-to-end content design for services is more effective than designing web pages in isolation
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even the most well-designed online services can have pain points, so people will always need somewhere to go for help