Sprint 48
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 Lordcontact a MP or Lord- understand how a MP or Lord represent citizens
What we’ve done
Mostly big releases and wrapping up alpha.
What we have achieved:
- Work on PeerPortraits.
- PeerPortraits dropped! (some Bishops in the mix too). Lots of collaboration with other teams, photographers, peers + bishops, those in the House of Lords and data and search colleagues. Our team did a whole bunch and I hope they get the credit they deserve.
- Watching people share them and do cool things with them.
- Responding to requests from colleagues
- Lots of effort on alpha wrap-up
- Including coming to a shared understanding in the team about what we discovered
- Passionate discussions
- Splitting down users from alpha. E.g. in discovery we started with intermediaries, we learned more and started to look into journalists and now we know even more about the different types of journalists that amplify members activity to a wider audience
- Bit of empathy mapping
- From findings we wrote jobs to be done. Giving them a go for beta.
- They are in the backlog and prioritised by the team
- In reality we are constrained with what we can deliver right now, this means we can’t pull from the top of the backlog, but we have a plan to how to get there. It’ll take a few months, but we have a path forward agreed with colleagues. A blast of written questions will come first.
- We unveiled a banner on the current website to beta. Aim is to gather more user feedback on our pages.
- Extra business analysis with MP staff and others. Feedback is always good.
Wider team work:
- I spoke at a show and tell
- We spoke with two researchers from TheyWorkForYou. Great chat and very useful, hope more chats follow. Shout out to Alan for setting up and being a top host.
- Colleague Michael setup a great chat with Tony Ageh who is the chief digital officer for New York Public libraries. Interesting comments about leadership and vision. Interesting insights into PeerPortraits also available on their fantastic weeknotes.
- new identity in the spotlight
- My excellent colleague Fred is also getting on the sprint notes train!
Random things we’ve learned or have been reading:
- Zuckerberg to come give evidence?
- Start-up that lets you upload your brain for a version of you to “live” again in the future
- YouTube going to try tackle misinformation by adding Wikipedia info to dispel rumours
- Interesting demographics of Stack Overflow
- The reputation age - we need to assess where the information comes from and ask ourselves why we believe and why do the authors.
- Interesting comparison between city design and other networks - basically badly designed networks can rule instead of well-intended beautifully designed networks
- Mapping, the need of more female cartographers and learning about the ‘Starbucks test’ > Google supposedly will only map the area if it’s close to a coffee shop, for everywhere else we rely on volunteers
- How to access the info Facebook has on you
- Amazon as a form of digital brutalism?
- How federated learning could help healthcare
- 3D edible-sushi > maybe I can get a stottie printed
- UK Parliament design review
- Be a wolf
- India’s waste mountains
- Facebook’s problems in Asia
- Tencent trying to improve the experience of the Chinese healthcare system
- Future gazing if we have general AIs to look after us
- Amnesty Int report on Twitter being toxic for women
- Fact checking collaboration by groups before the upcoming Mexican election
- Google News Initiative launched: “specific goals… highlight accurate journalism while fighting misinformation, particularly during breaking news events; help news sites continue to grow from a business perspective; and create new tools to help journalists do their jobs.”
- For those wanting to beef up their privacy settings on Facebook here is how
- User research war stories author - sounds like an interesting read