Happy 1st birthday, ico.org.uk!

We held a little celebration last week to mark the first birthday of our redesigned ico.org.uk.

It seems appropriate to take a look back over the year and 4.7m visits, and ahead to some of the improvements and new services coming up.

Over the year we’ve seen that:

the top three services by usage were search the register of data controllers, register your organisation, and report nuisance calls and messages;
the top three pieces of guidance for organisations were all data protection related:subject access requests (213,773 page views); processing information fairly and lawfully(181,284); and security (145,343);
find out how to request your personal information (206,313 page views); criminal records, court records and police records (104,348); and CCTV (76,277) were the top three pieces of advice for members of the public;
an average 20% of users accessed the site on mobiles or tablets, increasing to 35% on weekends;
Tuesday 9 June was the busiest day on the site this year, as Information Commissioner Christopher Graham appeared on BBC Breakfast discussing the ICO’s action on nuisance calls.

When we launched the redesigned site, our main aim was to make it easier for people to exercise their information rights, and for organisations to meet their obligations. One of the things we’re proud of is that, in our regular meetings with users, we see people getting to where they want to be on the site faster than we ever saw with the previous version.

During the year we introduced a number of improvements, including:

the ability to filter our enforcement activity, and audits and advisory visits by sector – so you can quickly see the action we’ve taken that’s most relevant to you;
the ability to translate the site into a wide variety of different languages, using Browsealoud Plus;
the ability to download our main guides as PDF documents for easier saving, printing and reading later;
new sections for reporting a breach, and improving your practices where you can find free training videos, posters and toolkits in one place.

As expected, we’re finding that the better we understand users’ needs, the better we are placed to make improvements and design new and improved services (and we’ll make sure we continue to do this).

My colleague Paul Arnold previously blogged about some of the new services we’re planning, including piloting live chat, and redesigning our nuisance calls and spam text reporting service to allow customers to report more than one call or message at a time.

In the new year we’ll also be launching a data protection self-assessment tool, so that organisations – in particular small businesses – can find out how well they’re meeting their data protection obligations and get a tailored report to help them comply.

As always, we want to hear your feedback – about what you like, and the things that could make things easier for you. Please comment below.