sprintnotes.people

Sprint 55

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

MPs and Lords roles

The team have been putting the final touches to content that provides a preview of the roles MPs and Lords hold, from their individual pages on beta. Thanks to lots of hard work from Bryony, the content will eventually link to a page with a comprehensive list of members’ current and previous roles.

We are very close to having this roles sections on beta. Here is a preview of how the page will look:

Roles on beta.parliament.uk

Testing prototypes and user journeys

Following recent iterations to our written questions and answer prototypes, we held a third round of testing.

This time we tested:

Thanks to the incredible efficiency of Marttiina we also managed to hold our first analysis session before the sprint closed.

The initial findings were fascinating and we’re all looking forward to the follow-up session were the next iterations for the product will be developed.

Research analysis

Welcome to Simon

We welcomed our new delivery manager, Simon Hudson, to the team. He joins us from GDS and has already dived into the deep-end by fully participating in our prototype-testing and analysis sessions.

Simon has also started planning shake-ups to our sprint ceremonies, which the team are excited about. I’ll provide a full report of the changes and their impact as they are implemented.

Goodbye to Victor

The team said our farewells to Victor Sonde who has been working as our interim delivery manager as we awaited the arrival of Simon. Victor has helped the team maintain momentum and we wish him luck with his new endeavours.

Wider team work

Designer Victor has been working with the Rapid Applications Team to make some adjustments to the new Hansard website, and the way it implements UK Parliament’s new brand, before it goes live.

He has also looked at making the headers more consistent across the UK Parliament beta website to make them sustainable for the future and better for search and usability.

Joshua has:

I delivered another ‘Creating digital content’ session to colleagues from the Commons, Lords and PDS.

What we have planned

Iteration

Following this sprint’s testing we will be making changes to:

Contact

The next major project on the horizon is around members contact. Preliminary work has started with stakeholders from both the Houses of Commons and Lords engaged.

The official pre-discovery phase will begin during the next sprint.

Our hope for the contact product is that it will:

The plan for this sprint is for Dia and Marttiina to:

Design backlog

Victor plans to work through design issues from the backlog, including data tables Making our tables better on mobile has been proving difficult as the data we’re receiving is not properly marked up with column or row titles.

Interesting things we have read or learned

Dia has been reading about change management, specifically the articles ‘Transformations happen with less work and more play?’ and ‘Change and emotion’

Victor has been considering the ethics of service design and agreeing with an article about the boring designer.

I’ve read about how slow innovation is the way forward and how Orwell predicted the challenge of writing today.

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.