sprintnotes.outputs

Sprint 8

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.

I was away for a lot of this sprint as I was taking some annual leave - but here are the big stories

What we’ve done

• Agreed to publish briefings using word as an xml editor
• Gave up on the idea of creating a markdown editor (for now?)
• Changed our beta plan thanks to the previous two points
• Mapped out where all the finished research documents are
• Created some more detailed journey maps
• Designed references for non-javascript users
• Built prototypes to test
• Ran some user research on how people are navigating in our pages
• Laboni helped us understand how people are using research landing pages and set some benchmarks for us to improve

What we’ve learned

We spoke with Jamie, Dan and Samu about publishing. During alpha we thought creating a markdown editor would help us publish briefings as it simplified the authoring process and reduce complications in creating an HTML page. Thanks to the support of Data and Search we have decided to move forward with Word. Markdown didn’t provide a rich enough format to produce these research documents and came with too many limitations.

There’s much more structure to the existing research briefing workflow than we expected. There’s on-going work to migrate these documents to SharePoint so it will be much easier for us to take all the existing briefings and republish them on beta. This is very exciting. Moving an existing service to beta.parliament.uk is a big win and it looks like this can happen much sooner than we had predicted.