This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 28 October 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 the Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment Support Allowance content because of the roll out of Universal Credit
- updated a range of student finance guidance with information relating to the 2017 to 2018 academic year
- conducted a content review for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) equine database service
- fixed an issue which was stopping emails from being sent from the European Structural Investment Funds finder
- fixed issues with the preview and save feature in Specialistic Publisher in documents that have a relatively high number of attachments
- fixed an issue with change logs and email alerts in Specialist Publisher
- fixed an issue with deleted translations in Whitehall Publisher for migrated page templates
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- published, improved and simplified content on applying for a veterans badge or medal following a collaborative project with Ministry of Defence (MOD)
- working with Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Companies House on phase 2 of a project to improve content and user journeys for people starting a business
- visited the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) in Liverpool to talk about improving content and integrating their digital services with GOV.UK
- published curated subtopic pages for Council Tax and business rates, as part of a content improvement theme
- continued work on the export improvement project
- migrated the list of ministers and officials to use the ‘finder’ format
- migrated the HMRC contacts format, removing 5,000 lines of code and using the improved finder format
- prototyped the next iteration of new unified navigation
- completed 2 weeks of machine learning experiments to see if that can help us to speed us the early stages of the taxonomy process
- completed the discovery on how we’ll migrate GOV.UK mainstream templates to the new Publishing Platform
- started building the next iteration of Local Links Manager to better meet the needs of GOV.UK admin users who manage links to local authority websites
- started running user workshops to understand user needs for our template consolidation work
- finished developing public content change logs on the Publishing Platform and converted Specialist Publisher to use this
- finished discovery into editor workflow on Mainstream and Whitehall Publisher to inform how we build this capability into the Publishing Platform
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- hold a workshop with HM Passport Office (HMPO) to improve the browse content for passports
- improve content around tax credits
- do a retrospective on the work to create a digital strategy for the Department for Education (DfE)
- publish the next round of improved content for starting a business, focusing on setting up and registration
- analyse the research findings for the new navigation and creating the next iteration for the next round of research in 2 weeks' time
- migrate services and information pages
- start preparatory work that will make it easier to start migrating mainstream page templates to the new Publishing Platform
- update our installation of MapIt to use the latest boundary line dataset for postcode search on GOV.UK
- continue discovery on frontend architecture
- review all of the insights from speaking to users and creating our high-level user needs for GOV.UK subscriptions and notifications
- explore technical solutions for subscriptions and notifications and creating a plan for the alpha phase
- finish migrating the document collection and HTML publication page templates
- start migrating the consultation and statistical dataset page templates
- start investigating how to improve end to end testing on the Publishing Platform
