Sprint 37
Hi, I’m Colin a product manager working on beta.parliament.uk. Each sprint I’m going to keep a running update of the work we’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.
The team’s current focus remains on helping users to:
- find a MP or Lord
- contact a MP or Lord
- understand how a MP or Lord represents them.
What we’ve done
- Added a members position in a Government department. (understand how a MP or Lord represents them)
- Finished off work on members membership to a committee (understand how a MP or Lord represents them)
- Finished off work on writing up the findings from a recent usability session (related to find a MP or Lord)
- Had a brilliant session ran by our designer Victor about how to tackle the usability issues we discovered
- Had a great session discussing future work and possibilities in regards to written questions (understand how a MP or Lord represents them)
- Fixed a number of bugs - lots to do with our ‘all’ button on our list pages, one that amended our content on “immigation” and “bullet visas”.
- Worked on a more prominent status banner (with a neat little icon)
- Worked on our cookie pages
- More discussions around best ways to add content to our pages
- Discussions and background work to help add social media links and links to a members personal website on our beta pages (contact work)
- More research on bettering our contact journey (contact work)
- More research on what users need from voting records type info (understand how a MP or Lord represents them)
Random things I’ve learned
- Surgeries are a relatively recent occurrence. I had romantic views that MPs had been regularly going back to their constituencies for hundreds of years. In fact I was told surgeries are quite recent phenomena, only really got going from the 60’s onwards.
- Stuff on Written Questions that constrains what we might deliver in the first iteration.
- Information about Financial Interests systems and reporting.
- Also been thinking on the need for cross-Parliamentary network. Even started a blog post.
- Nice chat in the Lords about AI
- Good chats about democracy in the digital age with colleagues
- Bits and bobs in colleagues weeknotes.