Digital

Making improvements: evolving our content based on your feedback

October 8, 2015 by craigmilligan No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a post by Jono Ellis, our Social Media Manager

As part of our commitment to meeting the needs of our users we have three different ways for users to give us feedback – a feedback area at the bottom of all of our article and guide pages, an email inbox and our Twitter account, @mygovscot.

Over the past few weeks we have received feedback on and improved upon a few different content items on our site:

• We were asked to clarify the eligibility for the home owners support fund page. This page deals with a fairly complex subject; supporting citizens who are at risk of having their homes repossessed and are requesting either a partial or complete purchase of their home through a government fund. The work here was to provide further clarity by reworking the wording, especially around the complex set of clauses as to who may be entitled to apply.
• We were asked to clarify wording regarding the advice for private landlords who rent property, specifically whether the text should read Care Inspectorate or Care Commission. This was updated to reference the Care Inspectorate as the appropriate organisation.
• For the transport help for older or disabled people page we were asked to simplify the content around what people are entitled to when they get a National Entitlement Card. Here we looked at really clarifying the wording of the exemptions, such as how card holders are generally entitled to ride on any bus for free but not on a night bus (midnight to 4am – as this is a premier bus service), and the conditions around Citylink cross country coach services.
• On our apply for or renew a disabled parking permit (Blue Badge) page we were asked how you track a Blue Badge application. We have updated this content with a new section, explaining what information you need to be able to track an application and which website to go to take this action.

Coming soon:

• We are working on content for the Scottish Welfare Fund – this content is going through our fact checking process at the moment. To get this right we’re making a change to the way our local authority lookup tool displays to the user so that we can make it clear to users that they need to contact their local council to track their applications.
• When we write our content we test the readability score against the SMOG readability formula, as recommended by the National Literacy Trust for anyone who is writing content for the general public. The readability score is worked out as a measure of the number of sentences and the number of polysyllabic words. As an example, an article from the Guardian newspaper may have a score of 17+ vs. an article from The Sun newspaper which may have a score of 14. As part of a review of some of our content we are looking to bring the average score over the set of pages in our audit down from 15.7 average to between 13 and 14. This should mean that the all of the content on our site is readable by someone age 14-15 year old.

We’ll be posting about future content and feature updates here on our blog, and also on Twitter. Have something to tell us? Let us know in the comments below.

Tags: content, Product

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