Despite the sudden change to working from home, the team have been super productive this year releasing a range of new public online services.
Online forms
The most significant and impactful is the online reporting of COVID breaches service. We were the first force to launch this service which provided automatic integration with our internal data analysis capability.
We developed and launched this service in two days.
This ensured public reports went straight to the front line to identify hot-spots of breaches and to inform operational decisions.
We have also extended the use of the provide an update to an existing crime report further from its trial period. This allows victims of crime to update the crime record directly to their officer in the case without needing to phone 101. They can also use it to request an officer contact.
Other online transactional service highlights include:
- Expansion of our accident reporting service to include the generation of a non-recordable accident report
- A secure service for new starters in the organisation to submit their bank details before they have access to the network
- A form for communities to raise a local speeding concern that automatically integrates with our road policing analytics service
- Online payment service for family court disclosures removing the need to send in cheques.
- Registration for the Dementia Safeguarding scheme where people can tell us about someone they know who has dementia and would like to provide us with information to help in the event of the person going missing.
- The ability for people to electronically submit digital evidence of criminal damage during the Bristol protest
Content design
The impact of COVID
Due to the impact of COVID we had to make rapid changes across the website to provide information as well as guidance on services that had to be suspended due to the Pandemic.
This included:
- Removing events from the Neighbourhood pages
- A site wide banner linking to the COVID information page:
- Information boxes on affected pages:
New Jobs and Volunteering section
In May we launched our completely new Jobs and Volunteering section.
The work involved:
- Restructuring the section, eliminating unnecessary pages from the user journey
- Reviewing all content to ensure it is correct and works within the new structure
- Enhancing the user experience by including images on the Jobs and Volunteering landing page and role specific child pages so potential candidates get an understanding of what the job is like, and can ‘see themselves in the role’
- Strengthening the relationship between digital channels by using the same images on social media and the website to ensure brand continuity
This work tied in with our colleagues in Corporate Communication’s ’employer brand’ work and Recruitment’s new eRecruitment system which launched in June.
After the initial launch there have been further iterations on the section including the inclusion of additional police officer recruitment information.
New speed camera section
One of the legacy aspects that was still running on our old website platform was the speed camera section.
This has been redeveloped and is now part of the new website platform. We took the opportunity to automate the data entry process as much as possible making the information easier for our camera teams to maintain.
Improving the wellbeing section on our intranet
The ‘wellbeing’ section on our staff intranet was revised to make it easier for officers and staff to learn about the different wellbeing services available to them.
After feedback from staff that information was sometimes difficult to find, we undertook a complete review of the section, in collaboration with colleagues in Wellbeing Services.
This involved:
- Grouping content into easier to understand categories, aligned to user personas, such as employees, line managers and colleagues.
- Creating a new A-Z page which lists all internal and external support groups available in one place
- Reviewing all existing content to ensure it was accurate and consistent
- Improving search results for common wellbeing related queries
Before making any changes we conducted user testing and card sorting exercises with colleagues from across the force to ensure staff could complete specified tasks successfully and any changes improved their overall experience. The results of this testing helped us to shape the final categories.
New OPCC website
The content and development team worked together to deliver a brand new website for the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner.
You can read more about this in this previous blog post.
2020 Stats highlights
- 1.9 million website users
- Over 89,000 digital forms submitted
- Over 7,000 digital evidence uploads
Thanks for reading and have a great Christmas and New Year, we have got some really exciting things planned for our citizens in 2021.