Sprint 50

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:

Make written questions and answers easy to find, easy to comprehend and a trusted source for re-use.

What we’ve done

Been working on written questions and answers. Discovering new challenges and overcoming them day by day. Also, we are moving, yesterday we said goodbye to our home of 7 Millbank to set up shop in new digs on Monday. Farewell pic -

What we have achieved:

• Been building the Q&A pages
• lots of discussions with colleagues - about our approach and trying to tackle the hurdles we are facing
• Bryony been a real trooper of chasing people and raising issues but also cracking on with dev tasks
• Retro by the fantastic Bryony outside on the grass on a sweltering day
• Sprint review and planning inside Westminster hall
• Headings/Titles discussions with the team
• Thoughts about journeys and Government department/answering body pages
• front-end tweaks
• think about tables that are often used in answers to questions
• team questions for future written q & a user research
• really fascinating measures of success afternoons - watching remote testing with 90+ participants across current and beta site on mobile and desktop. Some interesting insights! Possible video to be made to share research
• hunting down people that know more about attachments to written q’s
• write up and sharing of some research done prior to joining the team. Nice quote on some of the purpose of written q’s: “Written Q’s put a staggering amount of official information into the public domain, even though some feel that their increasing use has devalued the currency” - Robert Rogers (How Parliament Works)
• customer service stuff: photo updates and additions, updating pages for deceased members and social media updates for a MP.
• we set up A/B testing on beta with our banner and seeing the effects of having it at the top or bottom of the page. more to follow when the results roll in

Update on how our recent releases are doing:

• Nearly 6000 clicks on the banner on the current website to beta, an increase of 17% compared to the previous couple weeks.
• This has helped us have over 5000 users on beta (an 18% increase) and 50 feedback clicks (up 56.3%).
• In the past couple weeks, we are receiving more traffic to the Lord’s member pages after releasing first batch of portraits, with a 5% increase in users visiting and an 8% increase in sessions. However, there were 12% less page views in this time.
• The most popular Lord remains Lord Aberdare, and the list contains Lords whose names are towards the top of the alphabetically sorted list. As we gain more data, it will be interesting to see whether this trend continues.
• There has been a 37% decrease in clicks to the media pages, and a 43% decrease in images being downloaded. This was to be expected after the initial launch which likely inflated our figures, so in the following 2 week period it will be interesting to see what the trend is here.
• The most popular crop size, with over 40% of all photo downloads, is the 1500 x 2000 size (this is 2nd in the sizes list).
• There has been an increase of 640% (to 74 total clicks) in users clicking on the email a Lord link. Would be interesting to see whether Lord’s are feeling in an increase in emails here.
• Most of the users (88%) are coming direct to the site, which is what we have been seeing previously. There has been a 100% increase in referral traffic during the past two weeks.

Wider team work:

• Naz and I did a show and tell. He smashed it out of the park. All about measuring how well we are doing with the new banner on the current site linking to beta member pages
• blog 1: Victor wrote about some of the excellent design sessions he has ran
• blog 2 Marttiina followed up with a delve into user research with the team during members activity work
• blog 3: I chat about improving these sprintnotes
• Gemma came to shadow the team - great to have her around asked smart questions!
• Service standards chat with Ed White
• roadmap meetings with colleagues

Random things we’ve learned or have been reading:

• V&A Without Walls: Disability and Innovation in Building Design event. Looks really interesting. Should always think about accessibility needs when designing.
• DfT playing with how the questions produced in Parliament get routed to the right place. Can we help?
• Optimising journalism for trust - not just people trusting the sources that re-confirm what they already believe but building a news source that has high standards in checking if stories are true in the first place and then are they worth sharing.
• Interesting history into the world’s first $100 laptop and how it failed to help tackle the digital divide
• AI in the UK report - some good suggestions
• Open data in the UK is good for journalists but we need to improve FOI’s. Scrutiny is good.
• Good post on AI and inclusive design from Google Design
• Digital Attitudes Report from DotEveryOne. Some interesting recommendations.
• Hackathons are exploitative and used as a veneer of innovation? Article suggests “institutions use the allure of hackathons, with sponsors, prizes, snacks, and potential for career advancement, to get people to work for free… Participants are combining self-investment with self-exploitation”
• Really interesting to see what becomes of this new feature seeing the questions and the answer from MP correspondence in South Africa. As a team we are trying to improve the dialogue between members and those that contact them.
• What Service design gives you that business analysis won’t
• Spotify has a retro 101 kit to get teams started.

Congrats & Goodbyes

Alan got a promotion! WOOP WOOP!

All of PDS is sad to wave goodbye to Caroline. She’s one of the foundational pillars of beta.parliament.uk getting off the ground but more importantly a fantastic person to have around. Always optimistic and willing to get involved in the problem! You’ll be missed but happy for your future adventures!