What we’ve been working on since the last update, and what we plan to do next.
What we’ve done since 11 December 2015
Running and supporting GOV.UK
To keep GOV.UK accurate, available and secure, and to meet the most pressing needs of end users, we’ve:
- made changes to the 2016 tax credit information to include information about the national living wage
- replaced 6 Defra PDF maps with new content
- completed a batch of redirect requests for various pages
- run the first of two GOV.UK vision refresh workshops with GOV.UK Steering Group members and cross government GOV.UK leads. This will feed into the cross government digital strategy which will inform our priorities for the next four years
Improving GOV.UK
Things we’ve done to improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap:
- migrated smart answers, calculators, calendars, business support finder and licence finder tagging in the new publishing platform to content-tagger
- completed the initial work around automating content inventories
- analysed the findings from 'spiking' migration formats to identify complexities in migrating them. We now have a list of formats that we can start migrating because they have no blockers, and we are working to resolve the other complexities
- started work on an improvement theme for the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA). We're looking at how we can reduce the number of people who go to their car or motorcycle practical test ill-prepared because they don't know what they need to take with them or what they need to do beforehand
To meet the needs of the people who use the GOV.UK publishing tools, and our other colleagues across government, we’ve also:
- removed many incorrect service links from our GOV.UK database so that users are sent to the correct local government sites when using a local transaction page
- analysed the pageview data on local transactions on the old Local Directgov domain to find out what local transactions we should support on GOV.UK
- started the work to move our contacts pages to use the single publishing platform
- were adding webchat to 2 more HMRC self assessment pages
To keep our technology stable and up-to-date, and to improve our ability to support users in future, we’ve:
- migrated the preview environment to its new name of integration, the environment now looks more like production with the same IP numbering, OS version, seperation of 'licensify' and the same disaster recovery setup
- completed one of the last steps to deprecate the usage of alphagov.co.uk and move to publishing.service.gov.uk, having migrated preview
Things we plan to do next
In the coming 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- research with lawyers and tax officers to understand how they use the content published during the Autumn statement and identify what improvements could be made
- migrate take part to the new publishing platform
- create components for breadcrumbs and related links, so we can apply those design patterns consistently across the site
- adding an extra report type to the AAIB finder
- run the second GOV.UK vision workshop. We'll be putting together all the input we've received through the workshops into a final vision for GOV.UK
As always, if any of this is unclear, or if you have feedback on whether we’re prioritising the right stuff, please do comment on this post to let us know.
Jack Church provides Programme Support for GOV.UK. Keep in touch: subscribe to email alerts from this blog.
If this kind of work appeals to you, take a look at Working for GDS – we’re usually in search of talented people to come and join the team
