sprintnotes.people
Sprint 54
Hello, this is Alan, a content designer working on beta.parliament.uk. At the end of each sprint I will provide an update of the work the members team have done and what we have learned in the process.
The team’s current focus:
Make written questions and answers easy to find, easy to comprehend and a trusted source for re-use.
What we’ve done
I’ve been away for most of this sprint so what follows is mostly based on updates provided by the team.
Written Qs and As
Dia, our product manager, was happy to report that written questions and answers are on beta. For the moment we just have questions, answered questions and questions that are ‘not yet answered’, but we are working hard to complete this next sprint.
Research
Marttiina orchestrated the team’s research session with a group of journalists and political researchers. The aim of the research was to learn more about:
- how these professionals find information about the work of MPs and Lords
- how they use it as a part of their own work
We also tested different designs for displaying information about questions and answers, which the team had worked on together based on the challenges outlined from last round of research.
MPs and Lords roles
The team are also working on MPs and Lords roles information. The objective is to provide a ‘snapshot’ of the roles our members have on their individual pages, but it is very much a work in progress at the moment.
This sprint’s role-related key findings:
- there are committee role titles that are very long
- some MPs have a lot more roles than we anticipated
- content and design need to rethink how we present the information
Bryony has been doing additional work on MPs and Lords roles too. This sprint she has extracted members’ roles to a new URL, which we hope to have on beta shortly.
Contact
The team have begun investigating how MPs and Lords are contacted. Naz led a great session where we reviewed the analytics for Lords contact, which generated a detailed discussion about what we need to consider when we scope the upcoming contact work.
Update on how our recent releases are performing:
- traffic to the members pages is slightly down, with 6.2% less pageviews
- clicks on the banner from the current site taking users to beta has decreased by 9%
- the number of feedback clicks also decreased by 25%
-
we believe these decreases are due to the recent parliamentary recess
- the number of email and telephone clicks have increased by 17% and 38% respectively
- there has been a 100% increase in the number of images being downloaded
Wider team work
Marttiina has been involved in discussions about service design in Parliament. The plans for implementation are still in their early stages, but there are a lot of different views being shared and interest around it is high.
Naz has been working with colleagues to automate some of our members analytics in a way that could be implemented across all beta pages.
What we have planned
- we are scoping our next big project: contact on beta for MPs and Lords
- adding ‘corrected answers’ and complete lists of answers to beta
- reviewing the current implementation of roles information on MP pages
Interesting things we have read or learned
Dia has been revisiting ‘How Parliament Works’ – an invaluable and frequently referenced resource within the people team.
Marttiina shared this blog post about transformation programmes and the problems organisations can have when implementing them.
Bryony learned that Ruby on Rails has a to_sentence method which turns an array into a sentence.
I’ve read a couple of interesting articles on the creativity and thought. The first was about how the simple cardboard box inspires creativity, and the second asks: where does the mind end and the world begin?
I may have read one or two (hundred?) articles about football and the World Cup, but it was Eduardo Galeano’s romantic and poetic book of reflections on the game, Football in Sun and Shadow, that truly ignited my excitement for the tournament.
Other teams
If you’re interested to read about the work of another teams, you can read sprint notes from the outputs team, and the data and search team.
You can also follow regular updates from the people team’s former product manager, Colin Pattinson, in his current role as product manager as the Department of Health and Social Care.