This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 30 January 2017, 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:
- finished an audit of rates and thresholds across GOV.UK content as part of planning for changes taking place for the new financial year in April
- provided content support for the Environment Agency's new fishing licence application service
- worked with DExEU to create an HTML version of the 'Exit from the EU' White Paper'
- fixed an issue with archived browse pages appearing in the ordering list in collections publisher
- continued with the 'one output per path' Smart Answer work
- made lots of Smart Answer content updates
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- continued work with BEIS to migrate the business finance and support finder to the 'finder' format in Specialist Publisher
- collaborated with HMRC to consolidate 4 separate pieces of content on Machine Games Duty into a single mainstream guide
- started the next phase of getting married abroad improvements with a focus on 3 of the most popular countries - Thailand, Greece and Turkey
- improved 'Change your name or personal details on your passport' to make it clearer what the rules are
- finished migrating the Consultations Whitehall format
- improved draft links workflow so editors can see accurate previews of draft content
- iterated prototypes for short text templates and investigated the frontend architecture
- continued work on improving Tax Credits user journeys including journeys to 'Manage your tax credits'
- held a content meetup at the Intellectual Property Office in Newport, where over 25 content designers learnt new skills and shared what they’re working on - contact gov.uk-training@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk to set one up in your area
- supported education publishers tagging all their content to the new taxonomy
- analysed the results of remote tree testing research to continue the validation of our new taxonomy
- built a way for education publishers to feedback about the new taxonomy or suggest a missing tag in Whitehall publisher
- started work on the content performance manager beta - so that publishers can search for content by theme
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- prepare new content for the introduction of the new tax-free childcare scheme
- continue working on Publications, World Location News Article, Corporate Information and Speech Whitehall formats
- improve how content is updated when it’s linked to from multiple places on GOV.UK
- complete the first phase of improvements to Personal Tax Account user journeys
- publish content for prospective 2017 to 2018 students
- do user research on how people browse content tagged to broader topics within education
- make changes to the Whitehall tagging interface for education publishers, based on user research
- make user needs available in the Publishing API and move the ability to tag content to user needs from Panopticon to content taggers
- migrate help pages to the new Publishing Platform
