Here are the most significant things we’re working on in GOV.UK Departments and Policy this sprint:
- Social sharing buttons. We're going to add sharing buttons for social media (specifically Facebook and Twitter) onto consultations, news articles, speeches and world location news articles. We want to assess whether this makes it easier for people to share content.
- Email alerts for people and roles. We're going to allow subscribers to receive email alerts for announcements by specific people (e.g. David Cameron) or roles (e.g. the Prime Minister), so that they can choose to stay informed about the latest activity of public government figures. Although some migrated subscribers can already do this, we're going to make it a feature for new subscribers.
- Designing a better index page for GOV.UK blogs. This is the current index page for blogs, and we want to design a better one that encourages browsing and information-seeking.
- Iterating on the CSV preview feature. Last sprint we delivered a feature to let users preview CSVs on GOV.UK. We're going to make further improvements this sprint, as well as providing some advice on how to create a well-formatted CSV.
- Only showing translated documents when viewing a translated page. At the moment we include documents that haven't been translated on the 'latest' tab for translated policies or priorities. Users reading the foreign-language page select these documents only to find that there isn't a translated version. This is clearly frustrating and we get a lot of user feedback about it, so in future you will only see the translated documents from these pages.
For content designers this sprint will involve:
- sending out more spot checks to departments
- continuing the work of transferring the government Digital Strategy onto GOV.UK
- dealing with a bit of a backlog that has built up on zendesk - we do give style and content advice if we receive requests through zendesk so please don't worry about the backlog and continue asking for guidance when you need it
We’ll demo where we’ve got to on all this and more besides at the show and tell on Monday 9th December at 3.30pm. This is also a good chance to ask us any questions you have. Representatives from orgs who are live on GOV.UK are extremely welcome, please comment on this post or email me if you want to come.
2 comments
Comment by Matt Jukes posted on
I'll be interested to read whether the new sharing buttons have the desired effect - I read something recently that suggested they were no longer used as much in the past but I can't find the reference.
Comment by Ela posted on
Makes perfect sense to have public important content be as sharable as the nonsense which is often shared these days. It might raise the level of public involvement in topics that are crucial to our everyday life.