This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 9 December 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 Student Loans Company on content for prospective 2017 to 2018 students
- started planning for annual updates to tax rates and thresholds for the start of the new tax year in April
- worked with the Ministry of Justice to make the Administrative appeals tribunal decisions finder live
- continued with the preparatory work to simplify, speed up and reduce risk for migrating mainstream formats to the Publishing API
- moved the functionality to withdraw content and language settings out of the Panopticon application into Mainstream Publisher
- updated the Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) content with with information about new JSA (changes not live yet but will be on: https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance/overview)
- published new ‘Getting married abroad’ content for Kenya, Mozambique, Italy, Sweden and Latvia
- added a new case type for Competition and Markets Authority cases
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- started planning the template consolidation alpha, focusing on prototyping and testing our short text template
- reorganised the tax credits content to help users understand what they need to tell HMRC
- continued work to remove or reformat content that uses 4 retired mainstream formats to support migration
- given content support and done pair writing with the Skills Funding Agency to help with their new apprenticeships services
- moved campaign pages from Mainstream Publisher to the new campaigns platform
- written best practice on updating ‘Getting marriage abroad’ to make it easier for content designers to make changes to the content
- continued building the Content Performance Manager application - we’ll be testing it with a small group of users from next week
- held an event to tag education content to the new taxonomy - we teamed up with the Department for Education and its agencies to get through 3,000+ content items in one day
- completed work to migrate right hand side related links to the new Publishing Platform
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- have one of the new consolidated format prototypes ready to test
- organise a user needs workshop and content designer exchange with Student Loans Company
- publish content from the 2nd phase of a project to improve guidance for people setting up a business
- work with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on user journeys so we can improve the Universal Credit content ahead of changes coming in later this year
- work with HM Passport Office on the passport application content to make it clearer for users where the user journey begins https://www.gov.uk/renew-adult-passport and https://www.gov.uk/apply-renew-passport
- finish the migration of the ‘consultations’ and ‘HTML publications’ formats and continue working on other publication formats and news articles
- finish work on database integrity and correctness and speeding up queries within the Publishing Platform
- carry out remote tree testing research on our new taxonomy with 80 users of education content
- start building a tool for education publishers to tag to the new taxonomy within Whitehall publisher
2 comments
Comment by Jake - FCO posted on
We've just done some user testing that took in part of the Passport's journey. I think we can share it if whoever is looking at that would be interested?
Comment by Ben Mortimer posted on
Hi Jake,
Yes, we would be interested - I'll get in touch with you.