This is a list of what we’ve been working on since the last update on 10 March 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:
- continued updating benefits and pensions content to reflect the new rules and amounts that come in at the start of April
- worked through several hundred updates to GOV.UK content relating to rates, thresholds and policy changes for the start of the new financial year in April
- worked with the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) to make the finder for employment appeal tribunal decisions live
- updated hand luggage guidance to include new restrictions for passengers arriving from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia
Improving GOV.UK
To improve GOV.UK in relation to the missions on our roadmap, we’ve:
- completed a 2 week discovery with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to audit all the waste-related content on GOV.UK - this will help the content transformation team to plan the audit for all environment content
- started building a draft taxonomy for environment content, to feed into user research
- created new outcomes for Thailand and Turkey for the smart answer for getting married abroad
- retired 2 frontend rendering applications from our architecture
- updated templates on GOV.UK for short text designs and prototyped long text templates
- finished reworking content for the relaunch of the business finance and support tool as a new finder through Specialist Publisher
- continued working with Valuation Office Agency (VOA) and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) service teams on user journeys and content support for new business rates and tax-free childcare services
- migrated places and licences to the new publishing platform
- run user research with social care workers using the new beta navigation and taxonomy for parenting and childcare
- created designs for optionally limiting site search results to relevant areas of the taxonomy and done initial research with users
- continued work on functionality to manage draft topics in the new taxonomy
- iterated the structure of the parenting and childcare taxonomy based on validation with users
Things we plan to do next
In the next 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- create a taxonomy that covers a 20% sample of environment content
- recruit participants for contextual user research of GOV.UK environment content
- do user research in Salford on simplified and improved GOV.UK content for starting a business
- make draft topics in the new taxonomy available for education organisations to tag to in Whitehall publisher
- analyse the usage data from the beta navigation and taxonomy for education to inform future iterations
