This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 29 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:
- fixed an issue which was preventing new content from appearing on mainstream browse pages
- updated passports content for the launch of the new online passports service
- updated register to vote content based on ongoing user feedback
- started discovery work on a project to better define the status of 'mainstream' content (services and information for the general public and small businesses) in the GOV.UK proposition
- amended the frequency of how often the GOV.UK survey test appears for users of the site
- supported the Service Manual team deploy Service Manual Frontend
- identified a way of deploying specialist publisher to live per specialist format - which massively lowers the risks when launching the rebuild
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- held a workshop with representatives from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), Ofsted and the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) about higher and further education content
- completed analysis of our card sorting pilot, made changes based on what we learnt and launched the first full card sort for ‘early years’ content
- made improvements to various user journeys from GOV.UK into the Personal Tax Account
- started the investigation and analysis work with Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) to help them reduce their call volumes
- being in discussion with Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to improve the user journey for pensions content
- completed discovery and planning for content improvement work on flooding with Environment Agency and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG)
- improved our ability to diagnose problems in the publishing API allowing us to look at requests that are made through the system when a single request is made in admin interface
- decommissioned the content register - we don’t use it anymore
- completed a product review of all 14 specialist document formats
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- continue to migrate Whitehall Publisher and Publisher to the new tagging architecture
- do further work with the Department for Education (DfE) on content strategy
- add more countries to the digital service for visa applications
- publish content and plan user research for the first phase of a collaborative project with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) on improving content for people starting a business
Thanks to everyone who took part in the ‘What we’re working on’ survey in the last post. The feedback was mostly positive, and it seems you’re all satisfied with the length and consistency of the posts and appreciate the transparency of the information we publish.
We found that the main reason most of you visit is to keep up to date with the various GOV.UK projects.
We want to maintain this level of consistency and make improvements where required.
Please leave us some feedback if you’d like to tell us what you want from these blog posts.
