This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 10 February 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:
- made changes to business rates content to support policy changes and the new Valuation Office Agency (VOA) service
- worked with the Environment Agency to integrate the new fishing licence application service into GOV.UK
- developed a content model and style checklist for the rebuild of the business finance and support finder to support format migration
- started preparing for updates to probate fees
- worked with MOJ to make the Employment Tribunal decisions finder live
- published content for prospective 2017 to 2018 students
- made it possible for content designers to edit the related links on foreign travel advice pages
- continued our work to simplify Marriage Abroad Smart Answers
- worked on the Content Performance Manager ‘taxon’ filter, so the tool can filter out and examine how content in different parts of the single subject taxonomy are performing
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- finished migrating the Consultations Whitehall format
- improved the publishing platform to support the work of the team who are making it easier to find things on GOV.UK
- retired two frontend applications from our architecture - we’re also prototyping ideas for a consistent mobile navigation for guides and travel advice, as well as layout options for short text templates
- started the next phase of the joint discovery work for family visas with GDS and UKVI - they're working on improving the user journeys for people looking to join or remain with family in the UK
- improved versions of the marriage abroad content for Turkey, Greece, Thailand and USA
- made needs available in the Publishing API and moved the ability to tag content to needs from Panopticon to Content Tagger
- migrated help pages and answers to the new publishing platform
- retired Panopticon, an application that used to be the central administrative interface for content
- added a feature to Whitehall publisher that allows education publishers to tag content to the new taxonomy
- wrote documentation for GOV.UK developers about using the new A/B testing functionality we've built
- iterated the prototype for the new navigation to make it easier to find popular tasks and related content
- run a workshop at the Home Office to get content designers and subject matter experts pair writing to create content
- made the fifth cross-government content conference in March the largest ever with almost 300 content designers signed up to attend
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- continue working on Publications, World Location News Article, Corporate Information, News Article and Speech formats
- improve the publishing platform to support the work of the team who are consolidating templates on GOV.UK
- work with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) on supporting content and user journeys for the introduction of 'Making Tax Digital'
- work with DVLA to integrate the new medical conditions that drivers can report online, ensuring a smooth user journey
- continue migrating Mainstream formats to the new publishing platform
- carry out user research on the navigation prototype, talking to parents of children in education
- iterate the new taxonomy for education based on tree testing and publisher tagging at the Tagathon
