This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 27 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:
- worked with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to improve the Apply for Universal Credit page
- converted the ‘Make a SORN’ start page to a standard start page to allow content team to make changes without needing development time
- added campaigns content to the GOV.UK internal search index
- finished migrating info pages
- successfully practiced the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) finder deployment, this is the first finder we are putting live
- developed more consistent performance objectives for GOV.UK content designers
- investigated signon account suspension reminders not being sent and improved our monitoring for these
- continued with work to improve Council Tax and business rates content and user journeys
- observed user research sessions looking at guidance on dealing with the estate of someone who died
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- continued building ‘Local Links Manager’ to manage the links we serve from GOV.UK local transaction pages to local authority websites
- conducted user research with local authorities to identify iterative improvements to Local Links Manager
- explored the design of 'Find my local council' pages by prototyping and conducting user research
- recently updated the postcode finder tool to add the most recent postcode and ONSPD boundary data
- finished migrating mainstream publisher to the new tagging infrastructure, which completes this important mission for GOV.UK
- completed some technical clean up work to remove old (and now unused code) following the completion of the tagging infrastructure mission
- done more than 10 research interviews for the education taxonomy work, talking to people who work in schools to understand more about their information needs
- tested our draft taxonomy for early years’ content
- documented critical aspects of the publishing platform system so developers on call or on the 2nd line support team know what to do if something fails, and to identify ways the publishing platform team can mitigate for these
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- work with HM Passport Office to understand user journeys to and from the passport renewal page
- refine our information architecture and audit process, based on what we've learnt creating the draft taxonomy for early years’ content
- start looking at how we will build a beta for the new site navigation
- put the RAIB finder live, this will be the first finder built using Specialist Publisher version 2
- complete the Council Tax and business rates content improvement
- publish guidance and forms for part-time students who want to apply for grants for the 2016 to 2017 academic year
