sprintnotes.people
Sprint 57
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/people team have done and what we 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.
Overview
Last sprint felt very productive, with significant progress made on several fronts. This sprint, due to wider team commitments (detailed below), inevitably suffered by comparison.
The team still managed to move forward, especially in preparing for our next discovery phase.
What we’ve done
Delivery
- prepared for next week’s contact discovery sessions
Design and content
- identified and addressed empty states across roles and question pages
Development
- implemented new designs onto the written question and answer pages
- investigated ways to inform users that a table is scrollable
- identified a bug that hid an MP’s role from a written question page
Analytics
- implemented scroll tracking for roles pages
- defined measures of success for written question and answers
- placed a Hotjar survey on MP and Lords roles pages
- used a technical workaround to find out why people are getting error pages when using the postcode search on MP and Lords pages
Research
- reviewed of user needs from documents related to MP and Lords work
- formulated research plan for contact discovery
Wider team work
Analytics
- updated the cookies policy on UK Parliament website to allow us to collect data through Application Insights
Content
- delivered CMS training sessions to colleagues across parliament
- participated in a weeklong series of workshops on content modelling for beta
Design
- looked at repurposing existing filter pattern to filter members’ roles by type
Even wider team work
Victor and Marttiina travelled to Newcastle for GDS Service Design training, which will immediately benefit the team during our upcoming contact work.
Victor contributed to a workshop at the PDS hosted International Design in Government Conference, including people from Canada, Australia and Taiwan – it was a relief to find we all face similar challenges.
Naz facilitated a session about analysts and data science at a cross-government performance analyst conference.
What we have planned
- discovery sessions for contact journeys
- access all questions from the beta homepage
- access written question and answer lists from each question and answer page
- investigate the status of pagination across beta
Departures
Bryony left. The team have been inconsolable. They marked the occasion in the only way they knew how: karaoke!
Other teams
If you’re interested to read about the work of other teams, you can read sprint notes from:
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.