The Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat)

Transforming Ofwat's digital presence as its long-term digital partner

The Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat) is responsible for the economic regulation of the water and sewage industry in England and Wales.

In 2019, JBi Digital were delighted to be appointed to host, manage and incrementally improve the Ofwat website. We worked with them do devise and deliver a roadmap of improvements for their website.

Ofwat's website is central to its communications strategy.

When we inherited the Ofwat website in 2020, it was crucial that we worked quickly to understand the Ofwat team’s pain points and long term objectives for the site in order to build a long term partnership and roadmap.

With this in mind, we began our partnership with a series of meetings, stakeholder workshops and user engagements to understand Ofwat’s key objectives and audience base.

It became clear that Ofwat’s priority was to address key pain points with the website UX and CMS. In the longer term, it was agreed that a roadmap would be devised to optimise the website further and use it to portray Ofwat as a respected authority, but also a friendly, personable brand that encourages engagement from residential users.

We led a collaborative UX discovery to identify key insights and priorities.

Based on the insights and trends gained through stakeholder interviews, user research and workshops, we created user personas for each audience group and plotted user flows.

We also ran a comprehensive SEO and analytics audit which identified key improvement areas across the website, including priority content types, common entry points and key user interactions. Among other things, we found that:

• 60,000 pages were not being indexed on Google
• The site was filled with junk pages and non-validated URLs
• Approximately 2,000 pages were being hidden by Google

The outputs of this Discovery subsequently informed our long term roadmap, including information architecture optimisation, accessibility compliance and overall design direction.

As a large public sector organisation, Ofwat is required to adhere to WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards.

One of our key remits is to support Ofwat in bringing the website in line with WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards, which, as a public body it is obliged to meet.

JBi test accessibility across the website, through automated testing and manual testing and work with trusted partners to commission external accessibility testing. Over the course of our audits and testing, various areas of non-compliance have been identified and remediated, including:

• Ofwat’s brand colours did not pass accessibility criteria and their content used many acronyms and lacked descriptions for users.
• There were no alternative ways for accessing PDF files, meaning most of the legal content was not accessible for users.
• The website was using confusing page templates for users with cognitive disabilities.

A remediation plan is in place to address each of these issues and more, and the JBi team continues to work with Ofwat to bring its website in line with WCAG 2.2 AA compliance.

We continue to work closely with the Ofwat internal team.

Alongside the long-term roadmap and accessibility projects, our support team works closely with Ofwat to proactively support and maintain the website.

We use a collaborative ticketing system to fix bugs, perform CMS upgrades and respond to requests from the Ofwat team.

In recent months, we have integrated ReciteMe and Hotjar to improve the site’s accessibility and ensure that Welsh language was available and examine user engagement and interaction on the website.

We continue to deliver outstanding digital solutions for Ofwat and have built on our roadmap and recommendations to ensure long term success for the future.