2016 means our website has hit its third birthday in January 2017.

During 2016 the development team were busy improving some police facing systems, including building our new intranet, but they also spent a good amount of time on the website improving the platform by refining existing functionality (known as refactoring), improving performance and adding new functionality.  The content team also worked on a number of areas to improve the public experience.

Highlights

Adding inline feedback to “top task” pages

In January we added the option to feedback on all of our top task pages. These live in the Services and Advice sections.

The feedback from these pages gives us valuable insights into their effectiveness.  If someone chooses “no” we ask them to tell us why.

We received 2,017 pieces of feedback in 2016 that we reviewed.  This feedback resulted in tweaks to content on the pages as well as prompting a complete review of the Speeding section.

Theft topic page highlighting the "Was this page useful" box

Speed camera section

In July, we added a new Speed Camera section with all the camera locations. This used to sit on an old separate website, so this was completely re-written and embedded into the police site.

Map showing a speed camera location

Claiming Police Stations from Google Maps

This was covered in our article here, but it was a useful piece of work to help improve our service to the public.

New Crime Reporting Form

As a force, we changed our Crime Management System a while back.  This resulted in some changes to our internal processes.  As a result, our Crime Reporting Form was not delivering as efficiently internally as it should.

Working closely with our teams that process the crime reports we optimised the presentation of data to them as well as redesigning the form to offer a better public experience.

We have offered on-line reporting for the last fifteen years and have been through a number of iterations.  This time we analysed user data and behaviour to ensure the new form would be as easy to use as possible, whilst ensuring we capture the appropriate level of detail to process the report.

  • This resulted in a significant improvement in quality of submissions (up by 40%)
  • The time taken to process the form was halved
  • 81% of staff said the crimes are now easier to assess
  • The need to contact the public for further information about their report was significantly reduced
  • Internal transfer to a different department, when required, is much easier

The top of the crime reporting form

2016 High level statistics

Whilst we accept statistics only go so far in telling the story, hence our focus on meeting user needs and analysing user feedback, they are still interesting to review.   For our stats reporting we filter out staff use.

General

  • 2,761,392 Sessions
  • 1,506,560 Users
  • 6,479,402 Page Views

Acquisition

  • 40.5% Organic Search
  • 36.4% Social
  • 19% Referral

Devices

  • Mobile 56%
  • Desktop 28.73%
  • Tablet 14.32%

2017 plans

Dynamic Forms Solution

We have embarked on building an exciting new forms solution this year.  Our aspiration is to make this available for other forces to use should they wish.

The team are using a new technology for the platform and are adopting a progressive enhancement and “cloud first” approach.

This solution will provide us with greater flexibility, and integration opportunities than our current approach.  Most importantly, however, will allow us to offer an even better service to the public and businesses.

More details on this to follow in a future blog post.

We are the team behind Digital Services at Avon and Somerset Constabulary.  If you found this article interesting please share it with someone else who would too.