This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 5 August 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:
- published the improved Universal Credit guide
- published the improved Check your state pension guide
- updated the content on buying and carrying knives to reflect changes in the law
- fixed a bug in the Whitehall Publisher tagging workflow that meant when adding topics (old specialist sectors) an error message would be shown until the edition was saved, this is fixed now, so topics can be added when first publishing
- fixed an issue that caused inconsistent breadcrumbs on browse pages
-
published Check how much Income Tax you paid last year which also allows you to claim a tax refund
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- continued to iterate the new content review process
- worked with the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) to improve lasting power of attorney content on GOV.UK
- added breadcrumbs to finders
- made it possible for publishers to redirect browse pages, this was previously a task for a developer that included deploying code
- found some machine learning experiments that might help us with tagging content
- worked on tools to help us make changes to a new single taxonomy
- put Competition and Markets Authority cases, International Development Funds, European Structural and Investment Funds and Countryside Stewardship Grants live on the updated Specialist Publisher
- started discovery on email notifications
- published a new tool to find out if you can get a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- start a discovery project with UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) to examine the user journey for family visitor visas and improve the application process for users
- continue to work on tools to help us make changes to a new single taxonomy, including thinking about how we might visualise the taxonomy
- finish the latest round of research analysis and start sharing our findings more widely
- start prototyping orientation patterns, looking what is needed at a content page level to help people move between content
- complete our work on supporting GovSpeak in the Publishing API, so that editors can control things like contacts and attachments consistantly
- accelerate format migration by improving the speed of bulk republishing in the Publishing API, this will mean more users can start benefiting from using the the new Publishing Platform
- finish migrating finders to the updated Specialist Publisher
- recruit and talk to users and understand their needs for email notifications and subscriptions
- work with two HMRC content designers on secondment at GDS for 2 weeks to improve mainstream content on tax and user journeys into HMRC services
- publish improved content on flooding following a project with the Environment Agency
- start second round of user research for a content improvement project with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on starting a business
- complete the improvements to Council Tax and business rates content
2 comments
Comment by John Ploughman posted on
Thanks for the update Hemita.
When the Govspeak work is done, will this open up the possibility of using markdown currently only available in mainstream (for example, the example markdown) in other formats, like detailed guidance.
It would be great to be able to display things like examples consistently, or warnings where there's either a financial or legal consequence for the user.
Comment by Mark Hurrell posted on
Hey John - yes it will make that possible, although it will also depend on front-end work as well. It's something we're working towards.