The ScotLIS team recently hosted the organisation’s first ever alpha day. What is an alpha day I hear you ask? Read on to find out more about both this and how ScotLIS is gearing up for the beta development stage before launch towards the end of 2017.

First things first.

ScotLIS stands for Scotland’s Land Information Service and is an online service currently in development by a dedicated team here at RoS. It will ultimately allow citizens, communities, professionals and business users to find out comprehensive information about any piece of land or property in Scotland with a single enquiry.

The new service makes RoS ownership information more accessible with map-based searching; displaying RoS data, but with the flexibility to add other “layers” to give context and share data from other sources.

Ok, so that is ScotLIS in a nutshell. Now to crack alpha day!

To create the service, the team is using agile methodology which means working iteratively, getting feedback from a range of users, and responding to it throughout the process. And so you have the basis of an alpha day – a collaborative workshop that brings together key stakeholders and the ScotLIS team to share ideas and knowledge along with doing some user testing so that improvements can be made to the product.

Product owner Cheryl presents to stakeholders during the ScotLIS alpha day

Some images from the ScotLIS alpha day

Some images from the ScotLIS alpha day

Some images from the ScotLIS alpha day

Got it. So how did it go?

The day itself was a great success, running on 12 June from 10am – 3pm with around 20 customers attending from a range of sectors including solicitors, searchers, local authority representatives, mappers and GIS professionals. The ultimate aim of the day was to work with our stakeholders to gather their feedback but also to hopefully encourage a commitment from them to participate in later, beta stages of ScotLIS user research.

Hilary Brownlie, lead service designer at RoS highlights the importance of user experience events like this:

Collaboration like this is vital to the development of new services as part of our digital transformation programme at RoS. These events give us the opportunity to demo ScotLIS, whilst users provide suggestions and share their ideas and knowledge with us.

And what happens next?

Karen Alexander, senior responsible owner for ScotLIS tells us what is next for the team below and in the video round up of the day.

The feedback on the day was really positive from stakeholders; they liked what they saw and had lots of input for improvement which is exactly what we wanted.

The results of the follow-up feedback survey will be interesting, we can learn some lessons, and then take ScotLIS alpha out on the road to stakeholders outside of the central belt.

Find out more!

You can also follow the team via @RegistersOfScot on Twitter and on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube for more updates. Want to comment? Let us know below.