Digital

Supporting Scottish business owners after the EU Referendum

August 25, 2016 by Jono Ellis No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a post by Laurna Robertson, one of our content designers.

The EU Referendum result means businesses across the UK face an uncertain future. The Scottish Government business policy team wanted to deal with this uncertainty swiftly. Following discussions with the Federation of Small Businesses, it was clear that offering up-to-date information and support for business owners early was crucial. To do this, they set up a working group with the following organisations:

• Scottish Enterprise
• Highlands and Islands Enterprise
• Skills Development Scotland
• Business Gateway
• The Scottish Local Authorities Economic Development Group (SLAED)

One of the first decisions the group made was to offer a support service for business owners across Scotland which answered their questions. As this is a service for business owners mygov.scot was the obvious place to host this because it’s for information and services for members of the public and business owners and gov.scot is for policy information and announcements.

The MyGov team suggested that this support service should take a two-tier approach:

1. An information page that is regularly updated
2. An online form for business owners to ask questions that weren’t answered by the information

This 2 tier approach was approved by the working group. Between this approval and our deadline, there were 3 weeks to deliver what we’d promised.

EU Referendum form

Research

When we’re creating a new piece of content for mygov.scot we analyse what search terms people search for in search engines about the topic (this example shows search terms people use in Google for online safety). We did this first to figure out whether business owners had begun to ask specific questions about the impact of the EU Referendum. Sadly, the search terms returning just 2 months after the result were generic and didn’t give us any depth of understanding about key themes.

Luckily, Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise had engaged with companies they support to find out how they were feeling about the EU Referendum result. This information was used to inform the first draft of the content alongside current policy positions.

A first draft of content was sent to the partner organisations for feedback and to ensure they were satisfied. The information was extended as different policy teams and partner organisations offered suggestions. It will continue to grow as more information becomes available.

Building the form

A cross-discipline team worked on the form creation including representatives from the:

• content team
• design team
• information security team
• product team
• technical team

The team had a fortnight to iron out details for the form with the partners and deliver it. As it was the first form to be delivered on the website, thorough testing was required.

New technical offering on the website

Forms are common on the internet and ours is fairly simple. This form is emailed directly to Scottish Enterprise via Amazon’s Simple Email Service (rather than being collected into a database like our feedback form) as this suited the organisation’s workflow.

For future forms we will offer the option to store form submissions in our own database – we already store feedback form data and have an interface for colleagues to retrieve that data. The user must pass a Google reCAPTCHA before they submit the form – we do this in order to keep spam down.

What happens once the data has been collected

The data that’s being collected on the form is directly emailed to Scottish Enterprise. The questions will then be examined by relevant partner organisations to prepare an answer, within 3 days, where possible. At this stage, a decision will be made about any additional support the business owner may be offered from the partner organisations.

It’s essential that we treat our user’s data with respect. We aim to help our users by not offering ways for them to overshare their personal data including on our form. We worked with the policy team to define what kind of information they need to collect whilst avoiding the unnecessary collection of sensitive data (such as home addresses). We opted for collecting regional location information by reusing our list of local authorities instead.

People who complete the form are asked to check the consent statement before being able to submit it which outlines why this information is being collected, where it goes and what will happen to their data.

What’s next?

The information page and form went live on Friday (August 19^th) and we’re currently working with our partners to promote it.

gov.scot homepage 23/8/16

Now that it’s live, we plan to do usability testing – asking a selection of people how usable they find the information and form in its current format. This may lead to recommendations for improving both that we will share with the partners for feedback.

The performance of the information page and form will be monitored and improvements will be made to the content based on its performance. As with all other pages on mygov.scot, there is an on-page feedback option where users can leave anonymous feedback.

This page will be the central information point for business owners in Scotland throughout the negotiations that lie ahead. We’ll update it regularly as the future challenges and opportunities for Scottish businesses following the EU Referendum become clearer. And of course the questions that come direct from business will be a significant factor in that.

If you run a business in Scotland, please raise your questions about the EU referendum here.

Keep up to date by keeping an eye on our roadmap and following our updates on this blog and on Twitter.

Comments