Blog post by Andrew Gilchrist, communications officer here at RoS.
Customer engagement and user experience are both at the heart of our digital transformation. It’s no surprise then that we’re making it a centrepiece of one of our most important upcoming services, ScotLIS.
On schedule to be released in October 2017, ScotLIS is an innovative map-based service that will facilitate easy access to a variety of data relating to land and property in Scotland. We’ve already been working with customers developing the alpha stage of ScotLIS, and we’ll continue to do so as we move from the private beta phase into public beta and beyond.
User engagement hasn’t just been popular within RoS – our customers have found it a rewarding and insightful way to get involved with our new products and services from the start. We asked attendees at our recent ScotLIS Alpha Day for their feedback on the event, and the comments were overwhelmingly positive, from how the day was structured to the event’s format.
Alpha Day feedback
For those unfamiliar with the event itself, Alpha Day was at its heart a collaborative workshop that brought together key stakeholders and the ScotLIS team to share ideas and knowledge. Another key ingredient was user testing, so that improvements can be made to the product. The effectiveness of the format was very popular, with one attendee calling the sessions “well informed, interactive and well managed. Splitting the attendees into small groups worked really well”.
Even better for such an early stage of ScotLIS’s development, the content was considered to be extremely relevant by a majority of users. We not only gained valuable feedback on what we covered, but on what we didn’t cover as well. For instance, one attendee who considered the content very relevant worked regularly with RoS systems, but felt the programme had quite a residential focus, and would find it beneficial to incorporate features more relevant to commercial and rural professionals. Comments like this are exactly what we’re looking for at events like Alpha Day, and help us to shape products and services that meet customer needs.
The Alpha Day was also a great opportunity to find out what other services these customers were interested in – though ScotLIS was at the forefront, there was an appetite to discuss other areas like Land Registration (and its relation to ScotLIS) and sasine record searches. Fortunately, it’s something we’ll very likely have the opportunity to discuss in future – two thirds of attendees surveyed said they were extremely likely to attend a similar event in the future.
Private beta and beyond
Since June we have made significant moves forward; undertaking UX research sessions and a workshop in Aberdeen. Private beta commenced in August with a small number and range of stakeholders and is ongoing. We also have plans to visit Inverness in the coming months where we will run a further set of workshops demonstrating ScotLIS features and gather more feedback from stakeholder groups.
Get involved
Do events like our Alpha Day and user research sessions sound like something you’d be interested in? Then you’re in luck – we’re always looking for more engagement and insight from our customers as we continue to develop ScotLIS ahead of its full launch. Simply contact our ScotLIS team and they’ll be in touch with upcoming opportunities — scotlis@ros.gov.uk
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.