Sprint 38

Hi, I’m Colin a product manager working on beta.parliament.uk. Each sprint I’m going to keep a running update of the work we’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.

The team’s current focus remains on helping users to:

• find a MP or Lord
• contact a MP or Lord
• understand how a MP or Lord represent citizens

What we’ve done

This was designated as a Ghost Sprint as lots of people from around PDS & within our team were using up their last remaining leave. What we achieved;

• added ‘related links’ on MP and Lord pages - specifically showing personal websites, Facebook links and Twitter links. (understand how a MP or Lord represent citizens + an alternative way to contact members)
• we wrote out a draft strategy for links and began to define what we show and where - this will evolve over time.
• finished off government roles (understand how a MP or Lord represent citizens)
• fixed a bug on our postcode constituency lookup. Previously Find you MP would take you direct to an MP but the Find your constituency tool was also going direct to MP pages instead of the specific constituency. (find a MP or Lord)
• more work on cookie pages
• fixed content error on our 404 pages
• held a discovery session about speeches and oral contributions - this is prep work before our discovery phase into solving the need of ‘How does my MP/Lord represent me’. (understand how a MP or Lord represent citizens)
• some peer analysis on how others (inc. other Parliaments) display members activity to their users. (understand how a MP or Lord represent citizens)
• fixed a bug about accidentally linking to beta instead of the current site in the footer of our site.
• more work on adding content to our pages
• based on feedback from a usability session we also investigated if we could improve the maps on our constituency pages. We’ve picked out two immediate quick wins and will investigate about other longer term solutions next sprint.
• show and tell also occurred that went very well. The always engaging Matt shared updates & a great update from our ex-team member Dana about recent user research findings.

Random things I’ve learned

• really good to have another deep dive into other Parliament pages. Always interesting to see what others display and how it’s designed.
• when auditing links of members I came across some very strange ones. Started writing a blogpost about it…
• understood some of the ramifications around what happens when an MP gets suspended (and the difference between suspended by a party and by Parliament).
• reading about how citizens can be trusted with democratic responsibility
• alternative means of showing off the characters of the people of Parliament
• discovering ways MPs share the contact they receive and the activity they are up to