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.
Improve the process of contacting MPs and Lords
This will a reduced edition as many of the team were on annual leave during this sprint, myself included. Work continued on contact discovery, with the team contacting stakeholders and reviewing research.
Feedback
We have noticed an increase in the feedback we are receiving via the beta website. There have been lots of useful issues raised and suggestions made, including:
Dia and Simon are meeting regularly to assess the feedback and convert it into items to add to the backlog for prioritisation.
Stakeholders
Simon continued to develop our stakeholder map. He is also working on an accompanying engagement plan to coordinate research interviews and inform stakeholders of our progress.
Dia has continued to meet with colleagues from enquiries teams within the House of Commons and House of Lords. The information received is helping the team understand why people contact the Houses.
The majority of enquiries for both House of Commons and Lords include:
The House of Commons also receive a significant number of enquiries about local or national issues and personal matters. People also contact the House of Lords to ask about their members’ work and areas of interest.
Existing contact research
Marttiina continues to work her way through the research archives. She is collecting observations and findings related to contacting MPs and Lords.
Marttiina is also working to prepare the data collected by labelling the findings. This will make it easier for us to sift through it as a team, which we plan to later in the discovery process.
Members’ roles
Naz has created a Google Analytics dashboard based on our ‘measures of success’ (i.e. usage and user satisfaction) for the roles pages.
He also worked toward fixing our Google Optimise tag, which is needed for A/B testing. This took him longer than expected due to our Google Analytics set up and amount of sub domains we have, but the issue has now been resolved.
The next steps will be to review the changes and begin testing.
There’s one more update from him: he was promoted to Performance Analyst (from an Associate role). Congratulations, Naz!
The team will continue to research how contact works across Parliament and review archived research.
The team will also work on some of the issues highlighted in feedback received via the beta website. This will include reviewing:
Marttiina has been reading a book, yet to be translated to English, called ‘Surrounded by Idiots: how to understand those cannot be understood’ by the Swedish author, Thomas Erikson. It’s loosely based on DISC model, which looks at different personality types and how they affect the way people communicate.
I read about ‘Frankenalgos’, ‘The Man Who Broke Ticketmaster’, ‘how to tell a good innovation story’, some articles about or by the architect and critic Alexandra Lange and a 185-foot stacked log cabin tower in the wilderness
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.