New Register of Commission Documents tested by external participants

As part of our Improving public access to European Commission documents action, the Register of Commission Documents was tested by volunteers to assess the ease of use of the new site.

The aim of the new Register of Commission Documents is to serve as a modern, centralised and user-centric register that is allowing all Commission services to publish official documents. The revamped Register of Commission Documents is in line with the European Commission Digital Strategy and therefore provides a transparent, digital, efficient and user-focused register. It has a new user interface and improved search functionalities, in addition to new document types being proactively published. The Register has also a new IT architecture, which lays the ground for its integration with other registers. This will increase transparency and reduce the number of requests for access to documents.

The units in charge of ‘transparency, document management and access to documents’ and ‘digital solutions and process efficiency’ within the Secretariat-General, conducted several live testing sessions in November 2020. The purpose of the testing was to check the user-friendliness of the features. The participants were therefore chosen amongst a selection of volunteering external users. 

The testing sessions were done online, as individual sessions, focusing on the tasks performed on the prototype created.  
The volunteers represented a broad spectrum of age, country and occupation.
The following research questions were presented:

• Can the user identify and clearly understand the sections in the page and their role?
• Can the user understand clearly how to navigate between the different pages?
• Can the user understand the searching and filtering options?
• Can the user understand how to consult the metadata, the attachments of a document and how to look for additional information about a document?
• Can the user understand how to sort and export the information on the page?

All participants managed to perform the tasks assigned by the moderators successfully, liked the new layout and found it better, modern and more user friendly than the existing version. They all agreed that there are many improvements in the look and feel, the information is better structured and they can perform searches that are more precise. At the same time, it was much easier to find information. 

Recommendations received from the participants were subsequently analysed carefully and served as a basis for improvement of the system was improved.