It’s slightly strange to be reporting on another week without a major launch but it’s something we should get used to. One of the main advantages of iterative working is that the big bangs of launching new products and platforms are replaced by the quiet work of releases, updates and improvements. It’s not as dramatic but it’s more effective, safer and serves our users better.
So, to that end, the quiet work this week has included:
The ‘mainstream’ team working hard on getting Welsh content ready for GOV.UK.
The content team tweaking and reviewing items, working with departments and publishing new items - 111 this week, giving a total of 2,822 published on GOV.UK.
Working with more departments to deliver the next phase of Inside Government. John Turnbull from BIS blogged about some of that work earlier in the week, as did Paola Wright from the MOD. Thanks John and Paola!
Doing summative testing on Inside Gov this week to give us an idea how it’s performing with users. We’ll share the results of that next week, alongside our lab testing results.
We’re also beginning to build up enough data on the traffic to GOV.UK to start looking at and understanding usage patterns. Peter Jordan wrote about some of this earlier in the week. In a nutshell, we were wondering why traffic to GOV.UK had been falling since the launch and it looks like it’s a seasonal effect. If you’re interested, you can keep an eye on the traffic yourself on the GOV.UK dashboard.
(Incidentally, right now, Inside Gov represents about 3% of visits to GOV.UK.)
Work continues on the Assisted Digital Strategy, on the Digital By Default Standard on trailblazer transactions and the IDA team are doing user research on some wireframes. And we’re digging into the planning for a cross-government digital event in January. More on that soon.
It’s all quiet work. But it’s important.
