It seems like a while since the heady days of June 2010 when the website fell over following unexpected mainstream media coverage on version 1 launch day. Since then we’ve racked up a substantial 28,000+ registrants and the site continues to draw praise for its simple and free solution to a problem experienced by people of all ages, backgrounds and denominations.

We’ve purposely opted for a very quiet release in this instance to allow for snagging and rectifying the inevitable teething problems. We will be publicising the site modestly in February but in the meantime, here’s some background on the new features in version 2.

New opt-out services added

In line with our aim to increase the range of opt-out services covered by StayPrivate.org, we’ve added in the ability to register with the Direct Marketing Association’s Corporate Telephone Preference (CTPS) and Fax Preference (FPS) services.

Support for business registrants

Since the CTPS is business-specific and is unavailable to home registrants, it made sense to separate registration into distinct residential and business types. Residential registrants are given access to the Mail (MPS), Telephone (TPS), Baby Mail (BMPS) and FPS services whilst business registrants can access the CTPS and FPS services. Following account creation, indication is given in the dashboard section as to which type of account a user holds.

Delegated registrations

Feedback indicated that a significant number of users wished to register on behalf of a family member or friend lacking internet access and/or an email address. In response to this, we altered the account management area to allow multiple homes to be registered from a single email address. Accordingly, we’ve also provided the ability to manage each set of address details from the account dashboard.

Improvements to help and guidance

We receive a large number of queries requesting assistance on a range of issues from basic usability queries to concerns over the nature of marketing communications received by our users post sign-up. As a team of two that doesn’t work in this area exclusively, fielding these queries, let alone responding in detail to each one, is a massive task. We therefore place great importance in the quality and simplicity of the guidance information we provide and this has been edited, added to and repositioned to improve clarity, to provide as much assistance as possible and to reduce repetition.

Improving this information is not a science – rather it involves simple analysis of the queries received and a common sense approach to answering them. Ensuring that all issues are covered, keeping language as simple and free of jargon as possible, making appropriate information easier to locate by grouping and indexing questions, signposting where assistance is out of scope and stating clearly what CF Labs/StayPrivate.org can and cannot do are the basic yet fundamental tenets we have strived to observe. Along with instructing users to read the FAQ as the first step on our help page, of course…

Visual design

We’ve freshened up the design as well as made some necessary changes to accommodate elements introduced in version 2. There are now two sign up buttons to cater for the addition of business registrations to our original residential service. We’ve added big bold icons to the homepage to draw attention to information on the main aspects of the service. We’ve also included a visual map of the registration journey on our ‘About’ page to illustrate the process in a comprehensive way and further eliminate any confusion as to how the service operates.

Background improvements

On the back end, we’ve built a comprehensive admin system that allows us to do more things faster and more easily, from manipulating registration throughput levels to quickly updating service status messages. We’ve also added SSL security to the site, making StayPrivate.org even more private!

Feedback

As always, we appreciate any feedback you have. Either leave a comment here, or email feedback [at] stayprivate.org.

The team has been compiling quarterly data on the number of complaints about energy companies received through various sources including Consumer Direct, Consumer Focus’ own Extra Help Unit and the Energy Ombudsman.

We’ve worked closely with the team to design and develop a service for publishing this data in a meaningful format. CF Labs produced a number of prototypes designs which were refined through various stages before eventually reducing to 3 possible options. These options then underwent independent testing by TNS-BMRB in September which helped us to pick the final option.

Yesterday we launched the Energy Supplier Performance ranking system on the Consumer Focus website. The system ranks each of the ‘Big Six’ energy suppliers using stars – 0 for the worst performing companies, 5 for the best. You can read the methodology behind the rankings on the website and in the accompanying press release. The energy team will be publishing updated rankings on a quarterly basis.

As well as providing a ‘snapshot’ of the current rankings, we wanted to display the data in a bit more detail so we’ve included a second page to do this. This page contains a table and interactive graph showing the performance changes over time using a three month rolling average.

We’ve also published this data in JSON and CSV format so it can be easily reused. You can access these formats from the ‘Historical Data’ page. As usual, we’re publishing this information using the Open Government Licence for public sector information.

At the moment, the ranking system only covers the ‘Big Six’ – Scottish and Southern Energy (Atlantic, Scottish Hydro Electric, Southern Electric & Swalec), British Gas (and Scottish Gas), E.ON, Scottish Power, EDF Energy and npower – as these cover 99% of the domestic energy market. Consumer Focus is looking at publishing similar information for smaller suppliers next year.

We appreciate any feedback you may have on the system.

CF Labs was asked to find a way of presenting some of this information and making it available as an online resource. On Sunday we launched Community Post Offices, a simple directory to publish this data.

The website allows you to search for community post offices in your area, find out where they are located and see what services they provide. If the post office has a website, we’ve provided a link so you can find out more details. We’ve also built a form to allow other community post offices to register to be listed on the website.

We’ve also used the data to produce a few pages showing statistics such as the core activities, legal structures and services provided.

You can read more about the Community Post Offices project from the Consumer Focus press release.

Third Party Tools

We’ve made extensive use of MaPit from mySociety and UK Postcodes from Pezholio to provide location information from the organisation’s postcodes. This has allowed us to power the postcode search and pinpoint the location of each post office on the embedded Google Maps.

We’ve also used Google’s Javascript Charts API to produce the graphs on the statistics pages and Scribd to embed the accompanying report.

Data Licence

All the non-commercial data on the website is being released using the Open Government Licence for public sector information. This means that you are free to re-use the information as long as you acknowledge us as the source. More information about the licence is available on the National Archives website.

To make it easier to reuse the information, we’ve published most of it using machine readable formats. Initially we’ve done this using the JSON format and CSV for the statistics. We’ve published instructions on how to access these formats on the website.

Feedback

As always, we appreciate any feedback you have. Either leave a comment here, or email communitypostoffices [at] consumerfocus.org.uk.

There are a huge number of marketing opt-out services provided in the UK. At present, each service has its own website and forms required to register. These forms require much of the same information such as your name, address, email address etc, which means you have to type the same information in over and over again.

We wanted to make the process easier, so we developed StayPrivate.org. In this version we’ve merged the forms for the Telephone, Mail and Baby Mail Preference Services offered by the Direct Marketing Association. This means you only need to type in the common information once.

As soon as you have submitted the form (and confirmed your email address), the site will do the hard work of submitting your details to the services you want to register with.

We’ve also built in the ability to create a user account and sign up for a newsletter (both are optional). If you sign up for an account, you will easily be able to make changes to your information and resubmit it – just once! – to multiple opt-out services.

As the site is all about keeping your information private, we wanted to provide several options for how we handle your data. If you don’t want an account, we’ll completely destroy all your information once we’ve finished submitting it to the opt-out services. If you do want an account, you can decide whether you want us to keep hold of it (to make it easier to submit changes in the future), or we will destroy everything (except your name, email address and sign-up dates) when we’ve finished submitting your details. At any point you can ask us to delete your data & close your account by logging into your account control panel.

As with our previous sites, this is just the first iteration. Future versions will bring additional features and further opt-out services.

StayPrivate.org is a beta website, so please let us know your thoughts. We appreciate any and all feedback so we can improve the service. You can either leave your comments here, or email us at team@consumerfocuslabs.org.

StayPrivate.org is designed to make it easier to reduce the amount of unwanted marketing material you receive.  In this initial version we have taken the Telephone, Mail and Baby Mail Preference Services from the Direct Marketing Association and merged them into one submission form.

Sign up once and StayPrivate.org will do the hard work of submitting you to each of these services. There is also the option of a user account to make it easier to submit altered details in future and a newsletter so we can keep you up-to-date with developments.

We’ll post more information about the site tomorrow morning following its launch.  Until then, keep an eye on this blog and StayPrivate.org.

Consumer Focus Corporate Website

In October we announced that we had taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. One of our first jobs was to transfer the site from the ASP.NET content management system provided by the original developers to WordPress. This involved converting the existing design to WordPress templates, bringing over all the content and training the staff involved in updating the site. With everything completed we launched the “new” site in late November.

Since then we’ve been working on the second phase of work – a complete content restructure and update to make content easier to find across Consumer Focus’ target audiences. This, together with several tweaks to the look and feel of the site (designed to take advantage of some of the features available in WordPress), will be completed in the next few weeks.

Both phases have been a huge undertaking, but we felt it was important to make it as easy as possible to make changes in the future, hence the switch to WordPress. One of the advantages of the WordPress platform is that it is so easy to extend. Where we need to add in new functionality, it is likely a plugin already exists to do the job. If it doesn’t, creating one is fairly straightforward.

For those that are interested in some of the technical aspects- the site now uses WordPress MU on a LAMP platform. We control all the code through our SVN repositories and deploy to the servers using Capistrano. This is almost identical to the way in which we manage our other projects such as this site and Recalled Products.

Guidelines for public sector websites

As some of you may be aware, the Central Office of Information (COI) publishes a set of guidelines for UK public sector websites. We’ve spent a fair amount of time working out what we need to do to reach compliance and we’ll be making the necessary adaptations to all Consumer Focus and Labs websites over the coming months.

Does Directgov Deliver?

In December we launched ‘Does Directgov Deliver?‘, Consumer Focus’s first report to allow comments directly from members of the public by way of consultative website. The report itself was produced by the Public & Community Services Team within Consumer Focus and looks at whether Directgov delivers on its promise to ‘provide information and online services for the public all in one place’. We wanted to make it easy to comment on each part of the report, so WordPress was the obvious choice. We adapted the Commentariat theme developed by the BIS innovation team to power the website.

If you want to comment on the report, head over to the website. Comments will be closing soon but the website will remain online. Sign up to the mailing list on the website (powered by Google Groups) to be kept up-to-date on Consumer Focus’s work on Directgov.

We are now looking at how we can improve the process of collecting comments on our reports, so keep an eye out for future experiments like this.

Recalled Products

As you may have noticed, in December we turned on another set of features on the Recalled Products website. We now pull in photos and related documents for products when they are available. We’re also experimenting with producing some statistics on the number of recalls we import every week, what categories they are in and what the dangers are. Let us know what you think of these and how we can improve them.

Prior to the start of the switchover in Wales, our parent organisation Consumer Focus Wales conducted a mystery shopper survey of aerial installers in Wales.  The aim was to see how well aerial installers in the country were responding to the challenges.  The outcome of the survey has been reported across the media in Wales.

We’ve put together a small and simple website to expose the results from this survey.  The site provides a little backgound to the survey, some analysis, and the results in a Google Spreadsheet.  We’ve released the data under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.  This means you can use the data in any way you like as long as you link back to us as the original author.  If you do use the data for something, please let us know – we’d love to see what you do with it.

You can see the website at http://dso-wales.consumerfocuslabs.org.  A Welsh language version is also available.

We’ve been talking for a while about the first project that we’ve been building, and today we’re pleased to be able to switch on the Product Recalls website.

The issue of product recalls is a tricky one.  Some companies publish notices in the national newspapers or display a poster in their shop window. Some of these notices are published on the Trading Standards Institute website; others are published on the European Commission Consumer Affairs site.  However, without checking these sources regularly, there is no easy way of discovering if something you have bought has been recalled.

The website aims to solve this problem.  It collects UK and European product recall notices from the European Commission and publishes them via RSS and email.  You can sign up for weekly or monthly email alerts, search the database of recalls for keywords (such as product or brand name), and subscribe to them through your RSS reader.

We’ve tried to build the site so that recalled products can easily be found in existing search engines – an issue not considered by some of the other solutions.

The site is in its first iteration, so we will be looking at how we can improve the offering over the next few months.  In the mean time, take a look at the site and let us know any comments and suggestions you have.

Late last week, we released an early beta version of the site to a number of people within Consumer Focus, and those signed up to our mailing list. Since then, we’ve gathered some feedback, and are making some final few tweaks before launching the site as a public beta.  Once these little bits are done, and we’ve solved some last minute logistical issues, we’ll let you know.

Keep your eyes peeled ;-)