Digital

Last update for 2016 and the end our 60 day delivery cycle

December 21, 2016 by Jono Ellis No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

We’re almost at the end of the year and have just reached the end of our 60-day drive. It seems a good time to update you on all that we’ve been working on. Firstly, we’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the great progress made by mygov.scot, beta.gov.scot and Rubric over 2016. We especially appreciate all of the work done by fact-checkers and policy experts – your work has helped make mygov.scot an authoritative and trusted source for Scottish citizens. Our sincere thanks.

Over the past 60 days we have worked on three main workstreams:

The Digital First Service Standard

The MyGov programme designed the first iteration of the Digital First Service Standard and we’ve really enjoyed taking this further over the past 60-days. We are proud to have passed our Digital First assessment of Rubric – with lots more work to do before we consider Rubric to be out of beta and into live – and we also committed to expanding the detail of the Standard to help others work to it in the future. The Standard will see a big boost in content at the start of the year and our team have been busy working on the designs, information architecture and content needed for that. We have also helped with the assessments of Disclosure Scotland and Social Security for their Digital First Service Standard discovery assessments.

Disclosure Scotland

We’ve been working with our colleagues at Disclosure Scotland to develop content on mygov.scot with a view to decommission their existing website. This includes new content to provide people with easy access to information about key disclosure services and how to apply for the different types of criminal record check available in Scotland. It also included our first delivery of corporate content (how the organisation is managed and reports). Rather than simply repurpose content, we’ve worked closely with subject matter experts and stakeholders at Disclosure Scotland to embed our content design process and principles to help make sure content is driven by users and meets their needs. As a result, the 1,067 page Disclosure Scotland site has now become 18 discrete content items on mygov.scot together with redesigned forms – these are all live now and we look forward to hearing feedback from users who are experiencing a simplified user journey. This work also helped us look at how others follow our design patterns, and all of the assets that are required for this – more to follow in January.

One Rubric

We have continued to work towards a single SaaS model for our publishing platform, Rubric. This can be summarised as “techie stuff is happening”. We’ve been working through areas where mygov.scot and beta.gov.scot have separate features or functions and we’ve been working through the process of user researching and testing changes to ensure all of our content designers can use the tool in a way that’s fits. This 60 days we released five product releases focusing on this goal of a single platform – one of our biggest focuses has been on bringing the site publish time down from a leisurely 2 hours down to pacy 12 minutes.

Business as usual

44 new content items have gone live (Disclosure, consumer rights and human rights to name a few) and a further 94 are currently being fact-checked by policy owners. Business rates have also been updated in our business rates calculator. But we’ve been up to so much more – our highlights have included starting our support desk alpha, attending the DTS roadshow and the Digital Justice conference, discovery on funeral poverty at the Funeral poverty conference and supporting Scottish Government marketing campaigns for Black Friday, Human Rights Day and Ready Scotland. It’s a long list but suffice to say we’ve achieved a lot. And we’re already gearing up for 2017.

Holiday support

The office will be a bit quieter from the 23rd of December but we will still be monitoring the content mailbox daily. Technical support will also be available for our content writers throughout the holiday period.

We’ll be back to normal from the 4th of January and look forward to kicking off planning for our next 60-day cycle – see you then!

Merry Christmas!

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