This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 15 April 2016, and what we plan to do next. As usual we’ve divided the work up into lists of what we’ve been doing to keep GOV.UK running, and what we’re doing to make it better.
Running and supporting GOV.UK
To keep GOV.UK accurate, available and secure, to support government publishers and to meet the most pressing needs of end users, we’ve:
- updated overseas passports application smart answer
- updated benefit cap and minimum wage calculators
- prepared content for launch of new Digital Marketplace framework (Digital Outcomes and Specialists)
- fixed a bug related to tagging policies, which meant that not all metadata information was shown
- continued to migrate Whitehall Publisher and mainstream Publisher to the new tagging infrastructure
- switched to Trello to better manage the content team workload
- hired 4 new content designers
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- worked with the content team’s developers on the marriage abroad code so that we can update fee changes more quickly in the future
- met with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to discuss effectively managing updates to the ‘Getting married abroad’ tool
- finished migrating policy/working group formats to the publishing API
- redirected worldwide priority pages to other pages across GOV.UK - users can no longer access that page format on the site
- added ‘publish intents’ to statistics announcements so the cache time is reduced when they are published
- reviewed the wording of the Signon password reset email, so that it causes less confusion to editors the next time it needs to be sent
- planned card sorting exercises on ‘early years’ content
- held an auditing workshop with colleagues from the Education Funding Agency
- ran a 4-day project in collaboration with Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to improve GOV.UK content for people starting a business
- organised a day-long visit from Environment Agency and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) content colleagues, focusing on improving ways of working
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- gather ideas on next content improvement themes
- assess success to date on pension content improvement
- get analytics on success of Digital Marketplace content improvement
- hold a couple of show and tell sessions of our user research findings with Department for Education (DfE) colleagues in early/mid May
- kicking off the higher education and further education sub-themes' inventories and audits
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