Hello, this is Dia, the product manager working on beta.parliament.uk. I lead the People team, and I am responsible for products involving people (MPs, Lords, staff), constituencies, parties and government departments etc. Alan, is holidaying somewhere nice and so this week 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
Identifying and understanding the issues on the Member pages/written questions
This will be a reduced edition as many of the team members were on annual leave during this sprint. Work continued on contact discovery, with the team contacting stakeholders and reviewing research.
Feedback
While we still have been reviewing more feedback, we now have a prioritised backlog of work to be picked up by the development team.
Stakeholders
The first draft of the stakeholder map is complete and we have an engagement plan. This was shared with a wider group at our sprint review today.
I have been scheduling in interviews with some members of staff, based in Westminster, to talk to them about contact.
We also took part in the Westminster roadshow, where we spoke about the work we are doing to improve the contact process for MPs and Lords.
Existing contact research
Marttiina has compiled the synthesis of all the research regarding contact and presented to the team and stakeholders at the sprint review. This included going through the themes emerging from the raw data and attempting to visualise it. The next steps in terms of research is to go through all the research as a team and come up with recommendations.
Content
Alan reviewed and revised user needs and iterated contact copy for MP pages. He has also been delivering ‘Creating digital content’ workshop and has revised CMS training for UK Parliament.
Live Issues
The team has also been busy looking at some issues on the Lords’ roles pages on beta.
The team will go through all the research that Marttiina has compiled and also the desk research that they did, and come up with a list of findings and recommendations for contact.
The team will also work on some of the issues highlighted in feedback received via the beta website. Some of the things we will be doing are:
I have been reading Ayan Rands’ Fountain Head, a different perspective, every time I read it.
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.