Scottish Government - Planning and Building Standards
Transforming how people apply for planning permission.
Scottish Government - Open Data Team
Simplifying access to Scotland's official statistics
The ask
The Scottish Government provides open access to Scotland’s official statistics through statistics.gov.scot. With limited existing research on the platform’s users, the Scottish Government’s Open Data Team needed to understand how the site is perceived and used, in relation to the wider national landscape of open data and policy. As part of a Discovery project, we conducted research with a range of people using the site, including data experts, government staff, and those publishing data, to explore and articulate user needs and expectations.
What we did
Working closely with the Open Data Team, we planned an extensive and robust programme of user research. We conducted four workshops, four focus groups, 11 one-on-one interviews, and two co-design sessions with 46 people in a variety of related roles, such as statisticians, analysts, policymakers, and data publishers. These participants told us what they expected the site to do, showed us what worked and what didn’t, and gave suggestions for improving the service. We also reviewed anonymised feedback sent to the site’s support team to understand common issues. This generated a lot of data, which we explored through template analysis, ultimately producing a set of actionable findings about the service. This not only contributed to recommendations for improvements, but also gave us sufficient insight to create mobile-friendly prototype illustrating how those improvements could work, using the Scottish Government’s Design System.
For this project, one of our user researchers (Tom) spent every Tuesday with the Open Data Team as an external contractor. His days working with the team at Victoria Quay (just a few minutes’ walk from the Storm offices) were a highlight of this project; the perfect balance of collaboration, productivity and good chat!
Results
The research highlighted several issues. The current layout caused confusion, finding and downloading data was often tricky, and the site was prone to errors. Participants felt frustrated with these problems and often turned to other sources instead of the site. Even very experienced users also found the language overly technical, which made information harder to understand and undermined trust in the site. Although the original functionality of the site was admirably ambitious and relatively advanced, the people we spoke to were more interested in a simple service that got the basics right.
The overall recommendation from the project was a redesigned service, which eased less experienced users gently into the purpose and potential of the site, while allowing regular users to quickly find relevant, up-to-date statistics and easily downloadable datasets. We also recommend that future work on the site should include regular testing with a variety of users, including users of assistive technology, and those less familiar with digital tools, to ensure the site is accessible to as many people as possible, and make statistics.gov.scot a trusted source for Scotland’s data.
“Working with Storm ID has been an outstanding experience. The collaboration between Storm ID and the Scottish Government was seamless, and we’re grateful for their contribution and commitment throughout. Their expertise and dedication were instrumental in the success of our project”
Related links
Full report - Statistics.gov.scot improvement project: discovery user research report
Blog by Auren Clarke, Senior Product Manager in the Digital Directorate’s Open Data Team, Data Division
