The following reply to my letter was received by email today
Your complaint about our service
Thank you for your complaint of 27th March regarding the Probate Search website. Please accept my apologies for not replying sooner.
I'm sorry that your experience of the new website has fallen short of your expectations.
We've liaised with the service provider on your behalf who have responded your concerns as follows:
Replacing the original system and creating a back up
The previous system, whilst perceived as working, had many shortcomings that were complained about by many users. The decision to deploy a new platform however was forced by the vendor of the software making the platform end of life.
The new development of the new system has been focused on making the web front end meet Government standards (unlike the previous system) and to provide a new platform for future enhancement of the service.
Concerns about new system design
One of the major complaints of the old system was the user interface when manually ordering a document. Not having the calendar page and the form easily accessible together caused mistakes and dissatisfaction.
The new system fixes that by giving a side by side view. We have had user feedback similar to your comments.
To fix this, the design team then implemented scroll bars within the window to allow you to move around the page viewer to get to the information you need to enter.
Calendar Searches
The calendar pages from the old system captured the first surname on the page, a page index number (starting from the first page in 1858, ending on the last page of 1995); the limited query made by the old system looked up the surname, then paginated the response by returning that page, pages before and pages after, then sorting them by the page number.
The new system is based on more modern technology (ElasticSearch and MongoDB) to provide a better platform for future development. Unfortunately, there were issues in getting this new search engine to emulate what the old one did, but it is necessary so that we can implement some of the enhancement requests made of the previous platform.
In April we finalised the deployment of a full text index search of the documents. With this release we now look at all the pages within a given year range (in your example 1965) and will pull out all of the pages that have in the text (Hugh Owen Roberts) currently this does return 130 pages; we are working on both the search algorithm and the user interface to further narrow this down in future releases.
This however has enabled users to search for names within the documents that don't appear as the first entry. Something we have not been able to do before.
The new platform allows us to take the user feedback and where valid make changes to the platform and deploy quickly, thus tailoring the platform to the largest need groups. Again something that hasn't been available previously.
Once again, I'm sorry that you're not satisfied with the new website but I hope that the points above address your concerns.
If you're unhappy with my response
HMCTS operates a Complaints Handling Procedure and should you be dissatisfied with my response please write to Miss A Lee by replying to this email, requesting a review of your complaint and providing details of why you're not happy.
Yours sincerely,
Ms S Craig
Complaints Investigator
Courts and Tribunal Service Centre (Probate), HM Courts and Tribunals Service | HMCTS |
