Accessible, citizen-centred digital services
East Dunbartonshire Council
- Website
- Accessibility
- UX / UI
- Digital transformation
Background
East Dunbartonshire Council is the local authority serving residents, businesses and visitors across one of Scotland’s most desirable places to live.
Confident and ambitious, the Council works closely with local partners to deliver services that support everyday life and long-term wellbeing.
Alongside the Council, East Dunbartonshire Leisure & Culture Trust operates sports centres, libraries and cultural venues across the area, guided by its Play. Create. Explore. ethos. The Health & Social Care Partnership brings together social care, primary healthcare, children’s services and justice services, working collaboratively to improve health and wellbeing outcomes for local communities.
Together, these organisations support a wide and diverse range of citizens — many of whom rely on digital services to access essential information and support.
The Challenge
The council was on a clear journey towards digital-first service delivery, but its existing websites and CMS were holding it back.
User journeys were fragmented, self-service was limited, and internal teams lacked the tools to manage content efficiently, consistently and accessibly. Rising mobile usage, alongside the introduction of a new CRM, made the need for a modern, integrated platform impossible to ignore.
A critical accessibility audit by GOV.UK, with a fixed deadline for improvement, added urgency and clarity to the challenge.
The Council needed simple, accessible websites that could support joined-up, end-to-end services — not just for the corporate site, but also for East Dunbartonshire Leisure & Culture Trust and the Health & Social Care Partnership.
The Solution
East Dunbartonshire Council’s services exist for citizens, so our focus was on understanding who we were designing for — and prioritising their needs from the outset.
We began with user needs workshops to identify and prioritise key audiences, supported by insights from a user survey that captured direct feedback from real users. This evidence shaped clear user groups, needs and journeys across all three organisations.
To rebuild the site structure, we ran citizen-centric card sorting sessions with Council teams, deliberately stepping away from internal language and assumptions. By focusing on how people actually think and search, we developed a new sitemap and taxonomy rooted in real-world behaviour. This was tested and refined using UX methods including tree testing.
Accessibility was embedded throughout the process. Internal audits were followed by testing with disabled users through an independent specialist partner. The result was a suite of websites fully compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA and independently accredited by the Shaw Trust.
All three sites were built on a single, multi-site Umbraco CMS instance, using a flexible, component-based architecture. This gave internal teams confidence and control — making it easier to manage content, maintain consistency and continue improving the service over time.
Results
Post-launch surveys showed user satisfaction increased from 63% to 92%.
All three websites now fully meet WCAG 2.2 AA standards and are independently accredited by the Shaw Trust. The shared CMS platform enables teams to manage, evolve and improve their digital estate with confidence — ensuring services remain accessible, secure and genuinely citizen-centric.
3x
modern, secure, flexible websites
100%
WCAG 2.2 AA compliant
29%
User satisfaction increase
New EDC websites
You can visit our new websites for East Dunbartonshire Council here:
“We wanted to digitally transform and modernise our digital services, to ensure a citizen-centric solution, and to prioritise accessibility from the beginning. Bright Signals ensured all of this and worked with The Shaw Trust on aspects of accessibility accreditation. We are delighted with our new websites, they look brilliant, are so much easier for our citizens to use, and so much easier for our team to manage with complete confidence. It was a fantastic example of partnership working which Bright Signals embraced and enthusiastically encouraged!”
Lauren Mirzai, Communications Team Leader, East Dunbartonshire Council