We’re continuing to seek feedback and make improvements to the site. We plan to launch at the beginning of February 2016. Over the next six weeks we'll be making regular updates to improve user experience and add new functionality. Following these updates there will be a testing period to ensure that everything is working as expected.
We received feedback that it was difficult to find the data you wanted because often the breakdowns didn’t exist, and you ended up with an empty table. We’ve taken this feedback on board and we’re working on a new way of getting to the breakdown you want. We’re also acting on feedback to ‘de-nerdify’ the site as users told us they weren’t keen on seeing a lot of technical detail like links and large tables of metadata. However nerds needn’t worry because URIs, APIs and SPARQL queries are all still there, but will just be less prominent. Early testing is going well, but we’re really keen to get your views when these changes go live. We’ll update these blog pages to help explain the new features as they are launched.
Other planned developments include:
- Adding postcode, place name and geography searching to let you find data about a particular area
- Improving dataset descriptions and metadata to improve understanding and reuse
- Improving the area profiles to bring you more up to date information, alongside the most relevant areas for comparison
- Reviewing the structure of large datasets on the platform to make them easier to navigate
- Adding a 'data shopping cart' feature allowing you to select data from various datasets and combine them into a table for download
- Adding some simple data visualisations.
The development is taking longer than we hoped, but we believe it’s important to get things right before going live. We’re really keen to receive feedback; please leave comments below, send us an email, or call us on 0131 244 0442.