Our Recordkeeping section on For Government website has been reorganised to make it easier for you to find advice and information.
This new look structure will be implemented in the next week or so.
We hope that this new structure will make it much easier for you to find the advice and information that you need, fix some of the issues that have been raised, and also give us space to add more advice in response to the questions and issues you have.
Summary of feedback
Here’s some of the main issues you (and we) identified, as well as some of the things you said you wanted:
- clearer delineation between what are the mandatory requirements, official guidance issued by QSA, and operational advice
- need for a publications page (don’t worry, that’s staying)
- a separation of advice for digital and physical records
- some recordkeeping terms aren’t always understood by everyone, especially people new to records management
- the different parts of processes aren’t always together on the website
- not all section headings were easily understood, were too broad, or too similar
- searching the website doesn’t always bring up the right information because it’s searching the whole site not just the section
- a lot of topics belong in multiple areas.
We’ve tried out best to address the issues raised but obviously we can’t fix everything with just a structure change, so we will be looking into other solutions and options to help address those trickier issues.
Background info
For those of you who haven’t been following the project for the last year or so, here’s a little background info.
We moved our recordkeeping advice to the For government website in late 2016. Since then we’ve received a lot of feedback about the usability of the website, in particular that it’s not always easy to find the advice you need.
The restructure project started with a card sort activity, where participants sorted all 72 topics currently on the website into groups or categories that made sense to them. From those results a new structure was developed.
Both the new and the old structure were tested using scenario questions, where people had to indicate the page or section they thought the answer to that question would live. The results from this told us how quickly and easily (or not so quickly or easily) people found the answer.
The draft structure was then adjusted and tweaked based on this information to give us the final version.
Thank you
A big thank you to everyone who participated in the card sort and the scenario testing activities, and also for providing feedback over the last few years.
What’s next?
While this is it for big major changes to the structure, it is a continuously evolving thing so if you feel like something is in the wrong place, you can’t find something that you think you should be able to find, or you’ve got some fantastic idea on how to improve it even more, please let us know.
We do still have a few other projects in the works to help improve our little section of the For Government site, like better keywords in the page metadata to make searching easier.
We’ll keep you posted on the progress of those when we know more so keep an eye out for updates on those.
To stay up to date with QSA recordkeeping news, follow the Records Connect blog, subscribe to our regular QCN (QSA Client News) newsletter or contact us.
Government Records Innovation