Hello, I’m Fred, another product manager working on beta.parliament.uk. At the end of each sprint I’m going to write an update about what the outputs team have done and what we have learned.
If you’d like to read about another team, Colin writes up sprint notes for the people team, who did this first.
We finished our first sprint of beta. We had an interesting alpha where we explored lots of ideas and had some really good feedback from internal users. There were also some concerns but that is okay. It helps us prioritise our work and is another way to take advantage of internal knowledge.
After a hectic kick-off day where we re-assessed our timeline and agreed to a 12 week beta, our designs have been changing from the speculative realm to something that can actually exist on beta.parliament.uk
Alpha is a time for prototyping lots of different ideas and provoking new questions. Although we refined our designs into something workable at the end of alpha, it was still a bit of a culture shock learning how much we would have to change to be in line with the DOM (Document object model) to be able to produce these on beta. This is important because it helps us create the one Parliament experience, rather than the marauding mass of websites we’re currently faced with.
It’s been frustrating learning what we can and cannot do right now, but we’ve still got some good things to deliver. I am looking forward to research briefings being released into the wild.
Markdown probably isn’t enough to produce research briefings