Major surgery for Health and Social Care website
CIVIC was recently appointed by the Health and Social Care Directorate of the Scottish Government to help them better understand the needs of their users, and to restructure their web pages in order to serve those needs.
By focussing on the needs of its users the Scottish Government is blazing a trail towards a new era of digital engagement, and this approach can be seen to be happenning across www.scotland.gov.uk.
If you live in Scotland there's a good chance you'll have encountered work by CIVIC: we recently redesigned the www.scotland.gov.uk home page, and completely redesigned and redeveloped the www.sqa.org.uk website.
The Health and Social Care Directorate of the Scottish Government is responsible for thousands of pages of content on the Scottish Government website at www.scotland.gov.uk/topics/health. The number of pages has grown organically over the years, resulting in a somewhat sprawling site that doesn't serve users well.
CIVIC has run focus groups with users of the site and undertaken a full content audit in order to get a better understanding of the site and its users.
We will then undertake a card-sort. This is a process which allows multiple users to sort content based on what seems rational and intuitive to them. The collated results of the card sort point the way to a structure that is broadly understood by most users at an intuitive level. The result of this will be a strictly rational Information Architecture with content where you'd expect to find it. And just to be sure, a process of user testing will verify that the proposed structure really does offer improvements before it is implemented.
Many more thousands of health care professionals, policy makers and members of the public will be able to find what they need to, quickly and efficiently, as a result of this project.
In terms of cost to the Scottish Government it's modest, but by going through a well considered user-experience design process, CIVIC will make a significant impact on Scottish healthcare infrastructure.
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