The 'as-is' service was created a few years ago and it has a number of issues:
- It is no longer maintained and the original team responsible for it have moved on.
- It was built on the Microsoft Dynamics platform and does not use standard, accessibility-checked GDS components.
- It is extremely slow, with page loading often taking 30 seconds or more.
- The design and layout seem to be taken from older, Word document versions of the form, meaning it is hard to navigate.
- Some of the information it contains is out of date.
Work on this service
Most of our work on the as-is service has centered around discovery.
This involved:
- Mapping the existing content.
- Working with SMEs to find out what data we need to capture.
- Asking past users how they found the system.
- Speaking with delivery officers to find out what they want from it.
- Checking with Policy colleagues that the information we are providing, and asking for, is still correct.
Based on our findings, we chose to create a new, 2.0 version of the service with an intermediary 1.5 version to deal with some of the more urgent problems.