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.
Navigating giant documents is hard. Research briefings vary from a single side of A4 to over 100 pages. Our research showed that despite the various measures we have put in place during this sprint (and previous sprints) users still struggle to actually use the content.
We tried:
We wanted to avoid breaking up the content, but we’re going to test how this works. Existing users like being able to search the entire document - but we’re keeping that by proving a downloadable PDF as well. I’m over-simplifying things as these are notes, but that’s the gist of it. We are very confident in the new designs. Hopefully research backs up our belief.
Alongside this work, we’ve been prepping for historical briefings. By the end of beta we’re hoping to shift across all briefings from the current site to beta. For this to happen we need a like for like page to link to old reports. It’s a small piece of work - but quite exciting.
We moved! All the product teams have shifted to Richmond House. Imagine an office mated with a castle - Richmond House is the offspring. Our challenge here is to maintain the same great links we had with other product teams even though we have been split up. Physical proximity might seem like a small thing to lose - but quick chats as you wander past can lead to important changes. At least we can wave across the courtyard at each other.