Case Studies

Our Brief

To provide an information system for a telephone actionline together with web resources to support the Together campaign for anti-social behaviour professionals

Our Role

Consultants, Designers and Producers

What We Did

In late 2003 the Home Office decided to put in place a telephone actionline and website to promote good practice and provide support for the newly created roles of anti-social behaviour co-ordinator. The brief was to provide one content management system that could work as the information system for the actionline staff and serve the content for the public facing website. As this was a new field the Home Office wanted a system that would be interactive and that could evolve according to the changing needs of the co-ordinators.

After analysing the requirements we proposed using a knowledge management system (Knowledgebase) to provide the core functionality, customising it via an API to provide the extra functionality and the look and feel required for the Together campaign. We built two interfaces to the core content, one for the actionline team and one for the public website.

The Results

The resulting site enabled a very flexible information architecture, incorporating an advanced search facility and conversational interfaces for step-by-step guides. It also featured a news feed, a glossary, a most popular articles feature and a postcode look-up for people to find the co-ordinator for their local area. The structured article pages enabled users to rate the article or request more information from the Actionline staff, while an unmet search terms report enabled the editorial team to monitor areas where the site could be improved. Since launch we have had a maintenance agreement with the Home Office and have added an online chat facility for regular expert training sessions, a new section about tackling alcohol disorder and provided a simple mailing application to manage their e-newsletters.

In 2006 responsibility for tackling anti-social behaviour passed from the Together campaign to the Respect Agenda. A scaled back version of the Together site is available at: www.together.gov.uk.