This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 10 June 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:
- made some small changes to internal search rankings to add in some missing content and adjust the weighting
- published an improved start page for the personal tax account
- held a cross-government content meetup in Newcastle, with presentations on accessible content, user research, and a workshop on writing forms
- completed June’s batch of redirects across the site
- had a catch up with Her Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO) about our next steps in improving the passports content
- upgraded frontend to the latest version of govuk_frontend_toolkit and Metadata API to the latest Go version
- reduced duplication of quantitative results in Feedex
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- fixed discrepancies between our search API and the new Publishing API so that we can move to use the new tagging infrastructure
- done research to better understand what language users respond to and engage with on the green transaction start buttons
- started tree testing our draft taxonomy for early years content
- continued migrating mainstream publisher to the new tagging infrastructure
- started our Council Tax and business rates content improvement project with a workshop (GDS and the Valuation Office Agency)
- conducted user research with call centre staff on the business support helpline to understand how they work alongside GOV.UK content to meet the needs of people starting a business
- implemented our approach to handling GovSpeak in the Publishing API so that editors can control things like contacts and attachments consistently across publishing applications
- prepared RAIB reports to be the first format that switches over to the new specialist publisher rebuild (this is a technical rebuild of the tool to help us more easily maintain and iterate it in the future)
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- start the next phase of contextual research for the education taxonomy theme
- complete some tasks that will simplify our codebase now that we're using the new tagging infrastructure
- catch up with Department for Education about the content strategy they're developing
- migrate the statistics announcement, HTML publication, publications, document collection and fatality notice content formats to use the Publishing API
- add withdraw page functionality to the Publishing API
- handle GovSpeak in the Publishing API so that editors can control things like contacts and attachments consistently across publishing applications
- publish new content to support major changes to how limited companies send information to Companies House
