Friends and families visiting HMP Rochester last week were the very first people to try an early version of the new online prison visits booking service – one of our exemplar services.
The team have been working on making it possible to book a visit online, and get away from having to telephone prison staff to check dates.
Last Monday, Jan, Mat, Gavin and Max spent some time in the visitor’s waiting room at Rochester prison with an early test version of the site running on a laptop. They invited people to have a go at booking a visit.
It was really helpful to see people walking through the test site and letting us know what worked for them – and more importantly – what didn’t. For example, the date picker that we used caused a lot of confusion so we’re redesigning it.
We’re really grateful to everyone who took part in trying out the service.
An online prison visit booking system will be up and running in 4 prisons by December 2013: Cardiff, Gartree, Rochester and Durham.
We’ll carry on testing what we’re doing at every stage of the project, and hope to roll it out to all people visiting prisons across the UK in 2014.
See more about how user feedback makes a difference to what we do.
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