Sprint 39

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 unofficially a ‘wrap up’ sprint as the team is preparing to jump into a 4 week discovery phase investigating how we might help users understand how a MP or Lord represents them. Some things were finished, some were wrapped up enough that we can come back to them at a later date. What we achieved;

• we spent time on the next iteration of the contact journey. Interviews were conducted and designs were reviewed. There is more still to do but we will return to this as soon as possible. Will be a step up in improving how people can contact their representatives (contact a MP or Lord)
• continued to work on adding contextual information to a page
• we’ve improved the map on the constituency pages - there are new tiles and we’ve moved the buttons (Find a constituency)
• worked on a full screen mode for the maps (Find a constituency)
• worked on a bug to do with constituencies that are surrounded by another constituency. For example North East Somerset and Bath. This was affecting finding constituencies and the map feature (Find a constituency)
• more photos work - added a MP photo and fixed some cropping issues (Find a MP or Lord)
• Incredibly interesting chat about names, titles and seats within the House of Lords with stories of death, intrigue and opportunities for future blog posts. Conversations spurred on after the good work of Ben
• we commissioned a report from the Digital Accessibility Centre and got the findings. Really really good - great feedback session and some tasks to work on moving forward. Good news is we scored well and from the report… “Overall our analyst felt that they had a positive experience of the UK Parliament website, with only some minor issues present.”
• worked on changing how a member’s current roles are ordered differently from their historical roles (how does a MP or Lord represent me)
• fixed the last remaining issue with website links
• made cookie pages more mobile responsive
• made the MP portrait images clickable
• fixed a bug where the related links section of the page was showing on former MP and Lord pages when it should only be visible on current members pages
• further chats about measuring success
• a lot of the week was in preparation for a team discovery day. Organised so we could jump head first into the challenge of how does my MP or Lord represent me. We reviewed research, looked into what our peers do, were challenged to be creative, ate kimchi pizza and by the end of it left having a greater understanding of the problem we need to tackle.
• all the team attended a PDS-wide away day

Random things I’ve learned or have been reading

• went to the Glassroom and attended a few events. Well worth it. All about privacy, ethics, the role of government and tech. I know other team members went too. Curious people are the best.
• met with colleagues from around Parliament for different reasons and always interested to hear about their world. This includes project managers, business analysts, people that work in the participation team and people on the PDS front lines answering calls from MPs and Lords about fixing their devices.
• excellent show & tell attended with Tony Hirst speaking about reusable reporting among other things.
• saw an early prototype of a very interesting thing by Giuseppe Sollazzo - coming soon
• new report on the cost of voting - spoiler: it advocates online voting. Has MP backing.
• worries about the web and net neutrality concerns