This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 26 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:
- run a week long project to improve guidance for government publishers
- fixed data discrepancies between the search api and the publishing api
- drafted new guidance on the GOV.UK proposition so we're better defining what counts as mainstream content
- updated HMRC’s PAYE software tools
- amended the accessibility wording in Whitehall to make it easier to request documents in accessible formats
- fixed a bug with statistics announcements where the announcement was not redirecting to the statistics page when they were published
- published a new mainstream guide on how to send mail with the British Forces Post Office
- reduced the caching time on specialist documents so that changes and new documents appear in the finders faster
- rebuilt the functionality to send out email alerts to subscribers when content is added or major changes are made
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- continued to work on pensions improvement, e.g. Get a State Pension statement
- completed audits for schools funding, types of school, and inspections content
- completed the inventory for safeguarding children content
- done card sorting analysis for ‘early years’ content
- started work on simplifying content on expenses and benefits for employers including changes to reflect the abolition of form P9D
- created endpoints for expanded links so that the Finding Things team can retrieve information from the publishing API to drive search, filters, sub-topic pages etc
- added the functionality to the publishing API to trigger consistent error messages in the publishing tools
- started training 4 content designers to join the '2i pool' so more people can review and publish mainstream content on GOV.UK
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- improve the user journey for the new help at work if you're disabled service because users who aren't already aware of the help available don't know now to find the help they're entitled to
- run a workshop with departments involved in the education theme so that we can prepare for the next phase of contextual research
- analyse the user interviews that have been done for the Whitehall publishing process
- start work on a 6-month project to produce a beta version of improved content on importing and exporting goods
- run a 1-week collaborative project with Valuation Office Agency (VOA) to improve content and user journeys for council Tax and business rates
- publish new mainstream guides on travelling abroad with a pet, and getting a copy of armed forces service records
- migrate statistics announcements, HTML publications, publications document collections and fatality notices to use the publishing API
- add withdraw functionality to the publishing API
- work out how we will handle GovSpeak in the publishing API so that editors can control things like contacts and attachments consistently across publishing applications
4 comments
Comment by Andrew Robertson posted on
Hi, the link in the bullet "amended the accessibility wording in Whitehall to make it easier to request documents in accessible formats" doesn't work for me.
Comment by Hemita Bhatti posted on
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for letting us know. This has now been amended, you should be able to access the link.
Kind Regards,
Hemita.
Comment by Sheurie Warner posted on
The 'Things we plan to do next' section mentions “migrate statistics announcements, HTML publications, publications document collections and fatality notices to use the publishing API"
Will this change impact on the front-end or publishing-end of GOV.UK? We will need to alert our News team if anything is going to change with the Fatality notices. Our statisticians will also be keen to know of any changes to their announcements.
Comment by Hemita Bhatti posted on
Hi Sheurie-
Thanks for your message.
This is a technical migration, so there should be no impact for users or publishers. There is information available if you wish to learn more about rebuilding GOV.UK's publishing platform.
Kind regards,
Hemita.