Digital

Developing disclosure services on mygov.scot

December 22, 2016 by Jono Ellis No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a blog post by Rachel Bhandari, one of our content designers.

One of the key workstreams in the last MyGov delivery cycle was to develop Disclosure Scotland information on mygov.scot with a view to decommission their existing website.

This included 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 (for example how the organisation is managed and reports).

The process has been both challenging and rewarding. Disclosure Scotland helps employers make safer decisions when they’re recruiting people. It also makes sure unsuitable people don’t work with vulnerable groups, including children. As well as a large body of legacy information, there are also some complex legal elements that need to be made accessible to users.

Bringing the service on to mygov.scot has meant unpicking lots of details and processes to help us understand what people using the disclosure scheme really need from this online information.

Ways of working

First and foremost this project has been a collaboration between the MyGov delivery team and Disclosure Scotland, with subject matter experts and stakeholders giving up their time to join workshops and pair write and fact check content. This helps us avoid simply repurposing what’s already there.

We use a set of delivery principles to make sure that we keep our focus on users and we test and learn throughout. You can see what that means for the Disclosure Scotland content below:

01 Put user needs first

The services delivered through our digital products are driven by the needs of their users.

One of the things we wanted to address in the new disclosure content was how to simplify what we offer to users, so that they can quickly and easily understand what they need to do. We needed to move away from offering users ‘everything’ – tonnes of information about every different aspect of disclosure – to focus on only what they need to answer their question.

To do this we needed to understand exactly what these questions – or user needs – were. We sat down with Disclosure Scotland’s subject experts and frontline staff (those who deal with the many enquiries the organisation receives daily), to use their knowledge to identify and agree:

• key user journeys – what are the main services that Disclosure Scotland offers and what does the typical experience of someone trying to use that service look like?
• common questions and user tasks – what are the main things that people need to know when trying to use that service?

Armed with the answers to these questions we could then agree content priorities for what it should cover. We created ‘user stories’ with the Disclosure Scotland describing scenarios around a particular user need, to give us a context for the content and a shared understanding of what it was there to do.

02 Consider the whole experience

We are delivering for people, not for the sake of technology

The work we are doing to transition information about disclosure services to mygov.scot, is one part of a much wider transformation project for Disclosure Scotland. It’s been important then, to make sure we’ve had good communication across the wider Disclosure Scotland team, third party suppliers and our own Digital Transformation Service, who are all working to support different aspects of the transformation project. The content we’ve created will continue to evolve to support their services as they change and improve over the coming months.

The Scottish Government’s Digital First Service Standard – provides the underlying framework for delivery of our digital services. The mygov.scot publishing platform has recently passed this standard and therefore provides a solid best practice baseline for Disclosure Scotland’s content, in making sure that priorities are driven by user needs.

03 Make decisions based on data

We routinely use performance data and user feedback to make objective decisions about what to deliver and when.

Using data to support decisions helps to take some of the guesswork out of what we’re trying to do. We want to make sure we’re doing things based on a need rather than on someone’s personal opinion and letting the data do the talking helps to achieve this.

We use website analytics to help us uncover where people’s interest lies on a particular website, as well as issues such as key information being missed.

On the old Disclosure Scotland website, we learned from the analytics that despite it being quite a big site – over 1000 pages – the vast majority of website visitors went to just 10 of these pages. Within this, over 60% went to just 3 pages! This gave us a clear direction to follow – if we could get the content on these pages right, we’d be answering the information needs of almost everyone visiting the site.

Once we’d developed new content, we got this in front of people at the earliest opportunity. As well as content workshops with Disclosure Scotland staff and stakeholder groups, we were keen to get feedback from genuine users new to the process. With the help of our colleagues in the User Research team, we ran usability testing on the content we’d developed to support people applying for Basic disclosure.

The usability testing gave us an opportunity to sit down together with MyGov and Disclosure Scotland colleagues and observe people interacting with the new content, both on and off screen. The 5 participants were recruited from outside the organisation and were new to disclosure, which meant we could get fresh, objective responses to the content.

The usability testing was a great way to challenge some of the assumptions we’d made about how people would interpret the content and gave us an indication of how successful it was or where changes might be required.

We gathered plenty of feedback…

Once we’d had a chance to review and prioritise it all however, we were happy that with a few minor tweaks, we were going in the right direction.

“If the rest of the website is like this, I’ll take it it’ll be quite straightforward.”
Basic disclosure usability testing participant

04 Release iteratively and often

To reduce risk, every delivery is small scale, tested thoroughly and deployed on a timescale of days or weeks. We repeat the process many times over, building up as we go.

We’ve worked hard with the team at Disclosure Scotland to make sure the initial launch of disclosure content is comprehensive enough to cover the key elements of their services and processes.

We’ve also worked hard though to only include what’s required to support these services. In doing this we’ve reduced the volume of disclosure content from a large site of over 1000 pages, to just 18 items of content.

The less content you have to manage, the easier it is to keep information easy to find and follow. While we’re aware that the amount of disclosure content on mygov.scot is likely to grow, we’ll make sure that future content additions are driven by evidenced user needs, including on and offline feedback from users, usability testing and new service needs relating to changes to service delivery.

05 Keep things simple

People should find all our products and services, familiar, easy to use and quick to produce the intended results.

Similarly, we follow a rigorous content design process to support the accessibility and readability of content on mygov.scot.

One of the things we wanted to address with the Disclosure Scotland content was how easy it was to understand in terms of reading age and the content structure. Some of the disclosure processes are quite complex and involve references to legislation. Despite this we need to make sure that people can understand what they’re reading without making mistakes or needing to contact Disclosure Scotland for clarification.

We’ve simplified the disclosure content in quantity, language and tone of voice, to help users find the information they need and use it successfully, first time.

06 Work in the Open

We share what we are doing as often and as freely as possible because scrutiny from users and colleagues makes us a more effective team and improves our products and services.

Gathering feedback from internal and external colleagues and service users (through user research and usability testing) has been an important part of the project so far. Our regular show and tell sessions with internal colleagues help us to share what we’ve been working on, hear about related developments and gather other perspectives.

We also share our news on our work publically via blogs like this one and social media, to invite conversation from our users (the general public) and to understand how people respond to our content.

Next steps

Our work with Disclosure Scotland has only just started. We’re ready to decommission the existing pages and redirect these to mygov.scot in January. At this point we’ll be able to see how users are interacting with the new information and make decisions on the next iteration.

Feedback from service users will also help us design the next phase of usability testing, planned for February.

“Disclosure Scotland’s shiny new website goes live today – reduced from over 1,000 pages (which nobody read) to around 18 all of which are based on user need. A step along the way towards being a Digital by default organisation. Well done and thanks to everyone who was involved, both in Disclosure Scotland and our colleagues in core Scottish Government.”

Lorna Gibbs, Chief Executive, Disclosure Scotland

You can find the disclosure content on mygov.scot at https://www.mygov.scot/disclosure-types/.

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