Community Directory

Service Directories are collections of services that provide support and things to do at all different scales. Typically the scale of these is that they are council-wide. I.e. if I needed money advice services it would contain those organisations (service providers) within the council boundaries.

However, some service directories are on a much smaller community-scale and others at macro/county/countrywide scale e.g. NHS services. Two years ago IEG4 built an API, place-based and open standards-driven Service Directory that was capable of managing multiple service directories in one place and also capable of being updated directly by service providers.

The beauty of this functionality being designed to be driven by APIs has meant that we have been able to make it seamlessly integrated into the user experience.

When a person accesses the Community Directory they will see the following:

Community Directory Home Page

However, to be more accurate, the user will see different areas dependant upon the different service directories you choose to link to this. I.e the above three options of Help at home, Things to do and Health and wellbeing are examples of directory names. The 'All Services' allows a user to search across all of them.

If a user clicks on one of these directories it will then show a list of customisable options contextual to that area selected:

Sub areas of a given directory

If I were interested in getting some help with 'Befriending and visiting' I click on that and instantly it then searches across the Help at home directory of services within 5km of the person's address:

Below the map there are there same details and the ability to drill in to see more details or 'Add it to their bookmarks'. Kind of like setting it as a favourite, which adds these to the Bookmarked Services function in 'Your Profile':

Service Listings

If they click on 'Details' they will see three tabs containing:

• What the service does

• Contact details

• How to get there

This functionality does of course also work in Customer Service Vu so you could for example guide someone on how to get to a service or which bus to catch, which all worked out automatically using Bing Maps route-finding services:

Equally, this will work really well with OneVu's 'Family and Friends' feature which allows a carer/loved one/guardian or friend to be granted access to a person's OneVu account. This would allow them to find services and add the bookmarks to provide details on how to get to sessions etc.