How we delivered an online consultation for Heathrow’s Airport Expansion Plan

By Studio 24 Ltd
10 Mar 2021

About the client

Heathrow is the UK’s biggest port by value for trade with countries outside the EU*. Heathrow serves more than 200 destinations in more than 80 countries, connecting the UK to the world and the world to the UK. Heathrow Airport’s expansion vision is to provide the infrastructure Britain needs to secure its future as a prominent trading nation – by building a third runway.

From January 2018 to September 2019 Heathrow carried out four consultations. These gave residents and interested parties the chance to make their views known about aspects of the proposals and the design of the final plans.

* At the time of writing, before the pandemic.

The consultation challenges

Participants could access the consultation in a range of ways including by email, post, and face to face. The client preferred that feedback was submitted via the website.

For the online consultation, we had some big challenges to solve, including:

Here’s how we solved these challenges for the June 2019 consultation.

Data security and privacy

The challenge

It was paramount to protect the privacy of respondents and keep their responses secure throughout the consultation process. Both while submitting their responses and those responses being sent to the team who analysed them.

The solution

Cyber security

The challenge

A number of organisations were protesting the plans, so the site needed to be very secure to fend-off hacking attacks.

The solution

Performance, resilience, and uptime

The challenge

As the website was the main way Heathrow wanted people to submit feedback, it was important that the site remained online as close to 100% as possible – and that in the event of a site crash, a back-up mechanism was in place to give people access to the information. There was also a legal imperative to make sure that all content for the consultation was available for public review – so that it gave people the full amount of time to review and respond.

The solution

Access to information

The challenge

The online consultation had to legally give exactly the same information, word for word, as the paper consultation. No mean feat considering the volume of information being consulted on. This was a considerable user experience challenge, to display the information in a way that:

  1. gave enough initial information to be understandable and not overwhelming, while also getting key points across;
  2. signposted users to more detailed documentation where relevant / required.

The solution

A robust response mechanism

The challenge

Another user experience challenge – to direct respondents not only through the large volume of documentation required for consultation, but also to lead them through the questions that could be answered, and provide a mechanism to help users avoid losing their answers if their internet connection drops, the site crashes or they just want to ‘save and complete later’.

The solution

A ‘save for later’ function was available for users to save their responses and finish them later. Two weeks before the consultation was closed, anyone who had started but not completed their response was contacted to remind them they had limited time to finish. To keep the responses anonymous the ‘save for later’ data was abstracted away from the responses, and once a response was finalised and submitted, any save for later data was deleted.

To ensure the system performed well under high load we had to think carefully about how we managed caching in the application. Due to the fact the system captured and presented dynamic data, many of the pages could not be cached. However, every page that did not need to display dynamic data on page-load was cached. We implemented the injection of data after the page had finished loading to display the dynamic data we needed on cached pages.

High web standards

The challenge

Alongside the above, the site needed to work responsively across a large range of browsers and devices and was designed with accessibility requirements in mind.

The solution

I need to say a big thank you to you all for your hard work on the website over the last few months – and your patience in these final stages. The website looks amazing and the functionality you’ve built in is superb. I have been beyond impressed with the quality and professionalism of both Studio 24’s work and approach. Contract manager, London Heathrow Airport

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