sprintnotes.people

Sprint 58

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:

Improve the process of contacting MPs and Lords

Overview

The new focus of the team is to improve the process of contacting MPs and Lords. We’ll refer to this product simply as ‘contact’.

While this will form the bulk of our sprint activities, we are still working on written questions and answers, and other areas of the ‘members’ pages on beta.

What we’ve done

This sprint we got our visual display mojo back. Before we moved office, we were a team who would map user journeys on walls, display our current work on boards, and invite colleagues to stick questions and comments wherever they thought they may be useful.

Yet when we moved we failed to carry the processes with us. Maybe it was the new environment, or maybe it was the move coinciding with changes in product and delivery managers. But for whatever reason we became less visual.

We now have the following up on walls:

The return to displaying our work has helped the team feel organised, focused and aware of the progress being made across the different work strands.

Written questions

There were conversations between the team about potential accessibility issues on the newly launched written questions and answer pages, and potential problems that may occur when we introduce more ‘contribution’ information (for example, an MP asking an oral question, or a Lord participating in a debate) to beta.

The conversations were positive. We have added the issues to the backlog and we’re putting a plan in place to improve the pages and send them out for accessibility testing.

Roles

The former MPs and Lords pages have a ‘current roles’ section. There shouldn’t be, so we are working on amending those pages.

We’ve also made some tweaks to date formats and had discussions about H1s, but they are relatively minor. We’re happy with the current iteration but plans are already forming for the next. Slowly, but surely.

Contact discovery

We launched contact discovery with a great meeting with colleagues and stakeholders where we:

Following the launch, Marttiina drafted and presented her research plan for contact discovery to the team. The high impact questions the team want to investigate are:

The team are excited to be working on another product that is at the heart of how UK Parliament functions.

Wider team work

Many of the team took part in ‘Fundamentals of Design Thinking, Ideation and Creative Collaboration’ training provided by Bunnyfoot.

The session was full of interesting ideas for tackling problems creatively. It made me appreciate how great our designer Victor is at putting these ideas into practice.

What we have planned
Other teams

If you’re interested in 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 at the Department of Health and Social Care.