What we’ve been up to this week.

picture of a sunset

New ways of scoping and prioritising incoming work

We’ve had our first few scoping and prioritising triage meetings.

A small team of us reviewed work requests in a few hour-long meetings to make an initial attempt at sizing up each job. For each request we considered:

  • whether the user need, user task or problem we’re trying to solve is clear
  • the impact the proposed work will have on users (numbers affected and whether there is an evidenced need that isn’t being met)
  • any similar content is already on our site, or provided by other organisations (for example GOV.UK)
  • our capacity to do the work – can we do make small improvements for users and the organisation, or should we consider bigger improvement work - or can we do both?

We‘ve been able to start work on some jobs straight away. An example is application forms where users aren’t being asked for information we need, or question flow or wording isn’t quite right. For other jobs, we’re setting up meetings with relevant subject experts to find out more about their intention.

Increasing search weighting

A recent software upgrade of our CMS has given us the option of increasing the search weight for a specific page. By increasing the weighting, we increase the page’s value so it will appear higher in the internal search list.

It could be a useful feature for content designers as our internal search results are sometimes unexpected. We’ll be testing any changes to search weights in our test site before using this option to make sure it does not adversely affect any other results.

Exploring GDS accordion pattern

Our developers are focusing on three prices of work over the next month including:

  • accordion component to allow users to show or hide content on a page
  • improved table functionality so users can search a whole table instead of selecting a field to search (as well as ironing out glitches in some tables)
  • an easier way of creating redirects

More on these as the weeks go on!

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • Hannah published her first consultation this week! Since joining our team, she’s been a great help picking up a variety of publishing tasks across the website and Intranet now she has full publishing permissions. Thanks for all your support Hannah!
  • James has been working on improving the UX for the SoNaRR PowerBI report. He’s also content designing a flood plan for schools.