This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 13 May 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 register to vote content based on ongoing user feedback
- updated content on selling goods or services to the public sector as ‘G-Cloud 8’ is now live
- added several external links to our search results for content not on GOV.UK
- completed migrating the 'fatality notice' and 'document collection' formats to use the Publishing API
- removed promos relating to the EU referendum and register to vote ahead of the pre-election period
- continued to meet demand from government to keep GOV.UK content up-to-date and accurate
- arranged workshops for this week and next for content designers across government to learn about pair writing
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- met with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to agree next steps on improving pension content, and made progress with improvements to content about delaying your state pension
- worked on some tools that’ll tell us if anything breaks as we move from the old tagging architecture to the new
- started analysis of our first card sort exercise for early years’ content, following the pilot
- updated information about the work we've done on dependency resolution in the publishing API
- completed our 'path to live' work on Specialist Publisher
- held a show and tell at the Department for Education (DfE) with representatives from Department for Education (DfE), Ofsted and the Education Funding Agency about the early years’ contextual research
- started a search review of early years’ related search terms, working with departments and agencies
- worked on the longer term vision for the Publishing API
- implemented a rule so that fully capitalised URLs will not error
- added permission levels to the new Specialist Publisher
- planned user research, data and content design work for a joint project with Environment Agency and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) on flooding
- planned user research and content design work for the second phase of a joint project with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to improve content for people starting a business
- started work to upgrade the software supporting our local licence application tool
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- do more research on the tagging prototype
- send out 2 more audits for colleagues in departments, including lots of useful data to help inform content decision making
- attend content design meetup in Newcastle on 21 June to talk about accessibility and end-to-end content
- run 2 workshops in June on how content designers across government can work better with GDS content designers
- think about how we move ‘GovSpeak’ into the Publishing API
- look at moving error messaging into the Publishing API
- ensure the new Specialist Publisher can handle attachments
- publish improved GOV.UK content on travelling abroad with a pet following a collaborative project with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
