This week we entered the beta phase for the new Scottish Statistics Website, which will ultimately replace Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics.
The aim of our beta testing is to make sure that everything works and to gather your thoughts on the functionality and usability of the site. We’ve been developing this site for a little while and we’ve got used to how it works. We need some new users to give us a fresh perspective, and that’s where you come in.
We’ve brought you over 160 datasets from across the Scottish Government, National Records of Scotland and NHSScotland’s Public Health and Intelligence, totalling over 1 billion records. We have plans to expand this to other organisations as the site develops. You can browse the data in different ways using the navigation in the data site. The site is based on the PublishMyData data publishing platform for which you can find a user guide here.
Please be aware that our datasets are also in beta mode and should be treated as provisional until we’ve made our final checks on them.
Over the next few weeks we will be thoroughly checking the data and expanding the functionality of the site to improve your experience. We aim to move over to our new domain (statistics.gov.scot) in early July when the majority of our checks to the data have been made, and some new data publishing and browsing features have been added to the system. From July, we will continue to enhance the site and add more data.
Here are some things that you should keep in mind when you are browsing:
- Functionality: can I do what I need to do (e.g. can I find a dataset)?
- Usability: is it obvious how to do what I want to do?
- Manoeuvrability: can I move about the website easily (e.g. do all the links work)?
- Readability: are there any grammatical mistakes or spelling errors? Is everything laid out clearly?
During the beta, you can use the Disqus comments on this blog post (below) to provide feedback. You can post anonymously, but to provide us with a way to get in touch, we'd be grateful if you could log in to Disqus (it's free and you can use your Facebook, Twitter or Google login). Also, to help us recreate any issues that you come across, please let us know which internet browser you are using (e.g. Internet Explorer 11, Google Chrome 43) and a detailed description of what pages you visited and what actions you performed.
We'd also welcome emails too if that's easier - you can contact us through our Statistics Enquiries Team.
Thanks!