EPIC: Review process for service manual content

[sarawilcox]

What

Consider how we can best review service manual content and be transparent about it, so that users are clear how up to date our content is.

Why

We don't have a process for reviewing existing service manual content. We need to be sure that our content is accurate and up-to-date.

We don't know how users respond to older content and whether not having a review cycle/recent date undermines trust.

Tasks

• Test review date and updated date on service manual pages
• Agree review process for service manual content
• Set up a means for tracking review dates
• Start review process

More information

NHS website

The NHS website has a 3 year review cycle and some content, such as coronavirus content, is reviewed much more regularly. For health content, the clinical review is the key thing. Content may be reviewed but otherwise minimally iterated.

GDS

The service manual team at GDS is exploring how old timestamps on guidance are seen and how this affects users' view of its trustworthiness, relevancy and usefulness. Some research has suggested that timestamps confused users or led them to believe the content is out of date. Some teams have adopted last review/next review date and this has tested well with users. The principle of mainstream content is that it is always current - users should be confident that it is up to date. Mainstream content doesn't usually talk about the past or the future.

Service manual

When we first published the service manual, users found the "Updated: [date]" useful. But we didn't test old dates, just the dates on the page, which were recent.

We have had a comment about our accessibility guidance now, which was published in 2019. New legislation came into effect in September 2020. Do users still trust 2019 guidance to be up to date?

Users do sometimes let us know about broken links. Otherwise we don't check links routinely. A review of our accessibility guidance suggests that there may be more up to date info on GOV.UK that we're not linking to.

Some of our pages (for example, in the content style guide) are amended fairly frequently. But other pages haven't changed since we initially published them.

[sarawilcox]

Confluence page for recording review dates