Our collaboration with Region Norrbotten, in northern Sweden extends over 20 years. Thanks to our flexible IT consulting agreement, they can call on the help of Ductus experts when needed, whether it’s for a short project on an hourly basis or a long-term commitment. In this assignment, we strengthened their team with architect and developer expertise.
In brief
Challenge
To meet modern accessibility requirements, improvements needed to be made to the County Council’s digital accessibility and websites: norrbotten.se and vardgivarwebben. Norrbotten.se was to be transferred to a modern technical platform. Additionally, editing and updating the council’s websites needed to be simplified.
Solution
The sites have been redesigned and configured to meet the new requirements in the council’s content management system. Editors can easily update the sites manually and there is even a tool which automatically gathers and filters information from external data sources.
How we did it
Holding regular sprints, our architect and developers worked closely with UX designers and testers, as well as site editors and other colleagues, with the responsibility for the site’s content, to build a dynamic system.
Benefits
Citizens, editors, and healthcare workers can easily find, view or share the information they need on the sites. The system is ranked number one for usability among all regional healthcare authorities in Sweden on Funkas inkluderingsbarometer.
About the client
Region Norrbotten is a county council in northern Sweden. With around 6600 employees it has four different areas of responsibility: health and dental care, regional development, culture and education, and county technology and services.
Two decades of collaboration
Ductus has been supporting Region Norrbotten with IT service development for around two decades, both as BnearIT (as the company was previously known in Luleå) and now as Ductus. Over the years, this has included a wide range of IT Consulting services that contribute to the city’s transformation to a more digital organization.
Key communication channels
Region Norrbotten’s primary communications channel with the public is www.norrbotten.se. There, people can find contact details for the region’s health centers, hospitals, and dental care clinics among other things. There is also information on public policies, open positions and the latest news.
Vardgivarwebben.norrbotten.se is an important site for collaboration between regions and healthcare workers in the county, as well as private health providers and the like. It includes healthcare guidelines and routines, sample lab instructions and aid solutions. You can also find policies, forms and treatment advice on the site.
The need for improved accessibility
The websites include data gathered from many different private and governmental sites, such as the national healthcare service app for healthcare workers, in diverse formats, as well as information added manually.
“When the project was started, the sites hadn’t been upgraded for 6 or 7 years,” says Nicklas Karlsson, Key Account Manager & System Architect at Ductus. “A lot has happened since then, both technically and from a user-perspective. For instance, the legal requirements on web accessibility for public sector sites had increased significantly with the 2018 launch of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).” It was time to implement change and give users a far better experience.”
Streamlining content management
However, it wasn’t just changes on the web that were made, the number of content editors was reduced from around a hundred to just a few key people along with a small group of administrators.
“The sites were integrated into Region Norrbotten’s content management system to support a more dynamic user experience, streamline processes, and support the new hierarchy of users,” continues Nicklas
Agile collaboration
A team consisting of UX designers, developers, testers, and the website editors worked in four-week long sprints to drive the project forward and ensure KPIs were met on the way to a successful relaunch.
“It was important to get the architecture right to ensure simplicity for users, while gathering diverse data from many different sources,” continues Karlsson. “As well as developing the functionality of the site, we developed frameworks, templates, calendars and search modules, among other things.”
A key aspect of usability was developing the websites to utilize Google features. Much of the most searched information on the sites is now visible on Google which means visitors don’t always have to visit the actual site to get the information they want.
From lowest to highest ranked
“In autumn 2022 when Funkas tillgänglighetsbarometer reviewed accessibility of sites norrbotten.se was ranked at the bottom. A few months later following the relaunch, it was ranked as the top site. Additionally, our internal processes for content management have been considerably streamlined,” says Ulrika Leijon Åhlander, Web and Internet Manager at Region Norrbotten.