Sprint 44
Hi, this edition is brought to you by mainly Alan (content designer) working on beta.parliament.uk (with sprinkles of Colin). Each sprint the team is keeping a running update of the work we’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.
Note: this entire sprint was devoid of Colin who was in the United States. The team are masterful and got on with business as they always do.
The team’s current focus remains on helping users to:
find a MP or Lordcontact a MP or Lord- understand how a MP or Lord represent citizens
What we’ve done
Continued discussing, then researching, of what we mean when we use the term ‘members activity’. From there we refined what we hoped to achieve with our initial prototypes ahead of the first round of testing.
What we have achieved during alpha:
- discussions were held with the development team about what we could achieve and potential back-up plans we may need
- discussed categories/topics and how we would progress knowing there is more work to do on this as an organisation
- prototypes were created – one organising members activity in a timeline and the other by topic/issue
- held a hypotheses session and a question session for team members to input what we wanted to learn from upcoming testing
- plan y from the week before progressed - great work from Jake et al
- good chats with colleagues took place on questions and answers.
Wider team work:
- show and tell – where our discovery findings were shared with PDS and we learned more about the great work taking place in the guide to procedure and research briefings teams
- the House of Lords member photos are selected, cropped, packaged and delivered
- gave more thought to how we present former members on the previous parliaments section of beta
- product descriptions were created to help communicate the work of the People workstream to the wider organisation
- further work on government departments - another team clambering for them to exist so they might appear sooner rather than later
Random things we’ve learned or have been reading:
- Alan joined in with Duncan Jones’ Twitter-based book club’s aim to read a selection of his dad’s top 100 books. Will update as the year progresses
- how Strava is grassing on the US military
- had a peek at Govt.nz’s combined style and design guide
- WhatsApp use in India
- redesigning train tickets
- Parliaments publishing of activity via social media. Oldie
- debate and decisions by citizens about Brexit. Need to get public more involved and also show reason why of vote?
- Interesting suggestions on how to fix Facebook and its effects on democracy
- another argument suggesting no more acquisitions by big tech companies