Inside Inside Government

What happened when we changed the Inside Government nav

raferguson — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:29:00 +0100

On 9th April we made major changes to the Inside Government navigation bar by 1) exposing the sections rather than nesting them and 2) moving the search query field to the left.

This was in response to user testing that suggested users were having difficulty finding some content, such as consultations which had been in a drop down under publications.

I’ve done some analysis of the impact that this had on pageviews to the different sections. I’ve looked at the data two weeks prior to the change and two weeks after the change, avoiding the Easter holiday period (“Get involved” and “Worldwide” were omitted as they were not live through the entire period)

With more departments being converged there was an increase of 78% of IG pages in the second period. IG in total had an increase of 144% in pageviews, the pages being measured had a total increase of 66%.
There is a great distribution in the percentage change of the pages featured in the header. The “Statistics” link has benefited the most with an almost 500% increase in pageviews.

Views of the “Topics” page has actually decreased by 30% but there may have been other factors involved. It may have been that topics was being utilised by users who were trying to find their way to sections now exposed by the new nav.

Because the new nav bar also meant a change in the position of the search query field and I asked my colleague, Tara, to look at the impact that had.

Tara found that searches for publications and consultations dropped most visibly, suggesting that those nav links have made a difference.

The exact terms ‘policy’ and ‘policies’ decreased slightly, but numbers were low so not very significant, whereas longer terms containing ‘policy’ or ‘policies’ increased by 22% and 24%. Some other terms also increased, but by less than the total Inside Government searches (about 25%), so really they all still dropped slightly.

Only searches containing ‘statistic’ definitely increased, by 28%.

Other good news is that changing the design of the search box has reduced the number of users clicking the search button without entering a search term.

In summary, I think that this analysis points toward the changes to the nav being positively received by users. But we’ll keep an eye on it and keep tuning it as we go.

Some upgrades to HTML publications

nojwilliams — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:40:03 +0100

HTML publications are now labelled with their sub-type, so it’s clearer what you’re looking at if you land there from Google/directly
The link text that takes you to the parent publication page on GOV.UK is a bit clearer (it reads “See more information about this publication” instead of repeating the title as the link text)
Consultations now also support HTML versions

A statement about statements

nojwilliams — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:16:00 +0100

We were asked this:

Hello,

Re: WMS + commentary

Aware there’s a content type for WMS and GOV.UK search under ‘speeches’ results in a lot of WMS’, however as these are published in PDF form on parliament.uk, are there guidelines on deciding when they should be published on GOV.UK?

Current DH motto is not to publish things twice in public domain. Recent example was the Care Bill, where we linked to the publication in a news article.

So when do we/do we not publish?

Many thanks as always!

The honest answer is that we haven’t given a great deal of thought to this. We’ve created a format to support the existing behaviours of departments, which is (as I understand it) to publish *selected* written/oral statements to parliament, on the basis that they need to be findable from the relevant policies, and so that they go out in relevant email alerts etc.

I also vaguely recall that there used to be a bit of a delay between statements being made in Parliament and Hansard coming out. Not sure if that’s still the case.

I have in mind that in future we should hook up with Parliament to make a join between Hansard and GOV.UK, but haven’t got as far as planning the details of that.

I’d like to know what others think about this. I agree that duplication of published content is to be avoided, and that it’s probably a bit opaque as to why some statements are published and others are not.

Killing the name of

nojwilliams — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:30:00 +0100

We’re planning to drop the name “Inside Government” from the front end of the site in about mid June.

There’s mounting evidence that the label hinders more than it helps. Most users barely notice it, and those who do tend to think it implies “internal to government” rather than “workings of government”.

Mid June feels like the right time to drop the name and bring the sections of GOV.UK closer together, because:

we’ve completed transition of the ministerial departments and are now a fully operational ‘single domain’ proposition
we’ll be moving to a more unified search experience
we’ll be rolling out a more unified homepage
many of the arms-length bodies joining us in the coming year are, as the name says, operating at arms length from government and the Inside Gov name is a bit at odds with that

The propositions of mainstream and everything under “/government” are still very different beasts, and we need to be careful to help users avoid mistaking the policy for the service.

It’s likely that we wil try out some other forms of words that signal the difference more explicitly than the Inside Gov name, for example ”departments, policies and announcements”. We’ve not worked out the details yet. Your views are extremely welcome.

We know where you live

nojwilliams — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:03:00 +0100

If you’ve published any new content since yesterday late afternoon you will probably have noticed that we are now pre-filling the “lead organisation” field with your organisation. Given that the app already knows where you live, it’s a no brainer that we should infer that the document is led by your org.

It’s just a small thing, but hopefully will speed up your workflow a little; and it’s an example fo the ways in which we will gradually be making the admin smarter.

Working off the grid for the next two weeks

nojwilliams — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:55:32 +0100

For 2 weeks starting today, we are switching mode to give the team some space to breathe.

It’s been an intense 9 or so months, with prioritisation mostly driven by transition deadlines.

So this past week we’ve been taking a step back, talking as a team about the things we’d most like to prioritise to make our own product better, and have written them up as cards on the window by our desks, Kanban style, which we’ll be working through for the next fortnight.

The cards on the window include many things that you’ll care about too, like faster performance of the admin interface, the beginnings of some major improvements to the publishing experience, and figuring out how to implement a better model of publications and document collections.

We’ll also make some headway on stuff that matters more to us, like repaying technical debt and building tools to automate some of the manual transition work we did for the departments, to make ALB transition achievable.

So things will look a bit quiet on our public project backlog for a fortnight. We’ll only be putting a trickle of your most urgent support requests through there. Thanks in advance for your patience if this means you have to wait a bit longer for something to get done.

The stuff on the window that we don’t get through in these 2 weeks will most likely feed back into the online backlog afterwards.

Please use the support form!

nojwilliams — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:37:21 +0100

With 24 depts and 31 other orgs now live on the site, it won’t surprise you to hear that we get a lot of support requests, questions and suggestions.

It’s not sustainable to deal with these requests directly by phone and email, especially with the hundreds of ALBs soon to join the site.

From now on, if you call or email us directly about something that the support form is intended to deal with, we will ask you to resubmit it via the form.

Sorry if this feels cold and bureaucratic. That’s not the intention. It’s so we can help you better. As it stands, lots of important things are being missed because they are lost in busy people’s inboxes, and we need to be able to see the trends in the kinds of things people are asking about frequently. The appropriate team members get alerted when support requests come in, and we are trialling an SLA for response times for different types of request.

The form is here: https://www.gov.uk/support/internal (internal to government only)

You should use it for all of the following things:

telling us about new user needs
requesting new features
reporting bugs or issues
requesting analytics reports
requesting short URLs (guidance coming soon on this)
requesting redirects
general feedback

Basically, anything which you think requires an action on our part should be raised through that form.

Should you need to escalate or chase progress on a support ticket (*only* once the expected resolution time has elapsed), you can do that by emailing Jenni Moss. Jenni is the single point of contact at GDS for this purpose.

Please use multi-lingual publishing features for translated content

raferguson — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:17:00 +0100

In February we added features that enable you to publish translated editions of documents (how to do this is explained in http://inside-inside-gov.tumblr.com/post/44215691162/worldwide and http://inside-inside-gov.tumblr.com/post/45412650932/ability-to-translate-into-welsh).

Our implementation of multi-lingual publishing provides effective visual cues to users, paths for search engines and workflows for publishers. But recently we’ve come across instances where publishers have overlooked these features when publishing translated content.

When translation features are not used, it introduces a number of problems that can only be undone by unpublishing the content and starting again from scratch:

using English language ‘templates’ for non-English content means users and the web might well regard the page as no better than gibberish
users who find the English or translated documents aren’t notified that alternative language versions are available
no locale is provided in the url to verify the language (e.g. .es for Spanish or .cy for Welsh)
translated content is not indexed properly in search
it means unnecessary steps for publishers when creating the document(s)
it puts the responsibility on you (rather than the app) when making updates to remember that there are parallel documents that also need to be located and updated

This mainly concerns FCO and Wales Office at the moment, but I raise it here because other orgs have expressed an interest in beginning to publish translated editions of documents.

Imminent stories on our backlog will expand on the translation features by allowing translation of additional format types (eg. detailed guidance) and the publication of documents without there having to be a canonical English edition.

Style and publisher workshops: numbers and lessons

nojwilliams — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:29:50 +0100

(This post is by Simon Kaplan).

By then end of May over 390 of you - departmental and agency web editors, statisticians and press officers - will have attended 1 of the 16 different GOV.UK style and Publisher workshops held over the last 5 months.

After each workshop, we’ve usually mailed out slide packs and written answers to questions you’ve asked. We’ve also made sure you all have access to the style guide, Publisher instructions and a guide to Inside Government content formats.

Why did we say attendance was obligatory to get Publisher accounts? Why should web editors with a fair amount of experience on departmental websites need workshops on style and web publishing?

GOV.UK is ground–breaking because 24 departments are publishing information on the same or similar subjects to one domain – that means a change in the way we work.

Also, we wanted to make it clear that we’re really committed to opening government up to all those who want to know about it. That means writing in plain English, having a consistent style and using the right content formats for the job. We also outlined why and how we’re going to do spot checks of newly published content put up there by departments.

It’s been a hugely useful experience for us on Inside Government. You asked questions and gave feedback on the style guide (why aren’t FAQs allowed, how can you write detailed guides about technical subjects in plain English) and proposed for improving Inside Government (an asset library please, improvements to publications). We really want this interchange to continue.

We hope those who attended found it just as useful. There’s been some really good constructive feedback. We’ve fed this in to plans for training that’s been planned for the agencies and arms length bodies, including ideas like:

a training suite with laptops so that people can try out the publisher tool as part of training
more regular workshop sessions so that as many people as possible can make them
practical sessions for writing to style as part of the training
videos showing people how to use Publisher

We want to implement as many of these as possible – resource permitting. We’ll also be talking to departments about devolving the training function to web teams now all of you have made the transition to GOV.UK.

A big thanks to all the presenters and the GDS secretariat team who helped organise many of the workshops (and persuaded us recently to start using Eventbrite to book places on the workshops rather than a fairly cumbersome spreadsheet).

And of course to all of you who attended.

Please don't create news stories which only promote other content

nojwilliams — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:45:34 +0100

We see a surprising amount of this sort of thing, which we guess is down to old habits (imposed by legacy CMS software) dying hard.

This news story https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dbs-news-publication-april merely states the fact that this publication https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dbs-news-may-2013 has been published, and adds no value. The news story has then been featured on the organisation’s homepage at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/disclosure-and-barring-service

Please don’t do this.

All the information in the news story could have been included as detail on the publication itself, and the publication could have been featured. It’s senseless creating two URLs for a single piece of content like this.

Flag your FOI contact today

nojwilliams — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:32:32 +0100

The changes to FOI information on organisation pages we told you about last week have been live since early this week. But most departments are yet to update their contacts. Please go and do that today.

It only takes a second. Just edit the relevant contact and change its type to “Freedom of Information contact” as shown here:

Here’s the before and after to show what it will do on the frontend:

Before

After

Shout if you have any problems.

Search by slug in the admin interface

nojwilliams — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:34:05 +0100

In the admin interface, where you can filter documents by title, you can now also enter a slug.

The slug is the bit of the URL after the last slash, eg all of the bold bit in https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/access-to-work-official-statistics-january-2011

A small thing, but a useful one.

Bug with document series

nojwilliams — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:17:50 +0100

There’s a bug right now which prevents you adding documents to a series, unless the series’s summary field has been populated.

We introduced the bug when we added the summary field to series and made it mandatory. Oops, our bad. We’ll ship a fix on Monday.

In the meantime, if you go in and edit the series and add a summary the error will go away.

Contacts, contacts, contacts

nojwilliams — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:53:00 +0100

We’ve been doing a lot to improve the handling of contact data lately Here’s some new information about the stuff we haven’t yet told you about, and a re-cap of what we have.

1. All contact information should now be added as ‘contacts’ under the relevant organisation’s profile.

This is so that:

a) editors can manage the data in one place and insert it wherever users need it around the site (see this previous post for instructions on inserting contacts into other pages with a simple markdown command)

b) we can build services within GOV.UK which use the data, such as a single form for FOI enquiries (which is on the product roadmap)

c) we can later provide an API for others to use

To be clear: from now on, please do not write contact information into pages as text. You should always create the contact under the organisation, and then insert it into the page using the markdown command.

3. Editors can now have complete control over which contacts will and will not show on their organisation’s homepage.

There’s a button next to each contact, which looks like this (it says “remove from home page” or “add to home page”, depending):

4. We will imminently be killing the “+ others” link on organisation homepages.

All the contacts that the editor has selected to show on their organisation’s homepage will now show, so that none of them are hidden.

5. Editors can also now control the order in which contacts are displayed on their organisation homepage.

Do that by dragging and dropping under this tab:

6. We will imminently be pulling out FOI contact information into its own block on organisation homepages.

As per this previous post.

7. There is a corporate information page called “media enquiries” which you can use to list all your press office contacts on a single page.

Create the page, add text and insert the contacts using the markdown command.

(You may have noticed that this last feature has existed for about a fortnight, but we needed to give editors control over which contacts appear on their org home pages before it was possible for them to put each press desk in as a separate contact, hence only telling you about it now).

Why don't policies appear as a tag on statistics publications?

nojwilliams — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:50:46 +0100

We were asked this:

Hello

Statistics items have a ‘policy’ field in the back-end, but the selected policy does not display in the front.

We think this is a bug, especially as stats items tagged with a policy appear in the ‘latest’ tab of the policy in question.

For example, this item does not appear to have a policy in the front: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/outcomes-for-children-looked-after-by-local-authorities-in-england-31-march-2012

But it is appearing in this latest tab: https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/improving-the-adoption-system-and-services-for-looked-after-children/activity

Can this issue be fixed so that the names of tagged policies display in live statistics items?

The answer is that this is a feature not a bug.

On instruction from the UK Statistics Authority and Government Statistical Service, in accordance with the law and code of practice which govern the presentation of stats, we make sure that stats content will never bear any direct links to ministers or policies. There must be no perception that statistics are influenced by ministers or their policy goals.

However, it is right and proper to link in the opposite direction, from the policy to the stats, to show the latest empirical data that relates to the policy area, and to alert any subscribers to its existence.

Scheduled publishing now works for updated editions of published documents

nojwilliams — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:13:19 +0100

The scheduled publishing feature does two things:

1. Publishes the document at the specified time

2. Sets the cache expiry time on all the index pages where the document will appear to the specified time, so that the document appears in relevant places across the site at that time

It works well. Bar a few early hiccups, the scheduled publishing function has been reliably publishing new documents at their exact preset times for the past 5 months.

However, we recently discovered that departments also need to schedule updates to existing documents.

Version 1 of the scheduled publishing tool was not designed with that in mind.

Newly published documents are not cached - they appear instantly when they are first published. However, existing documents are cashed for up to 30 mins.

So to make this work, the scheduled publishing robot now also:

3. Sets the expiry time on the document itself if it is not a first edition

That change went live on 23 April. So you can now schedule updates to new things or existing things, and it will all work.

(A slight note of warning: you should continue to avoid trying to visit the URL of a new document that has not yet been published, because that will cause a 404 to be cached for up to 30 mins. We wrote about that before here, and there’s a ticket on the backlog to make the problem go away).

Featuring without tagging

nojwilliams — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:09:59 +0100

We made a change recently so that it is now possible to feature any document on an organisation or world location page without it being necessary to tag the document to that org/world location.

We did this because we saw a few examples where it was misleading to show a tag - for example this speech about immigration was tagged to one world location (because they wanted to feature it). We’ve removed the tag since.

You should, obviously, continue to tag documents thoughtfully to the orgs, policies and world locations they relate to, so users can follow the threads of how everything joins up.

Related to this, we also made a big change to the admin interface for featuring, so it is now easier to filter and search for the document(s) you want to feature using the familiar documents list layout:

A clearer FOI journey

nojwilliams — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:01:22 +0100

We’re working on making the journey easier for users seeking to request information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Here’s a mock up of how FOI information will appear on org pages from later this week:

The 2 FOI links that were previously under the ‘corporate information’ heading (‘How to make an FOI request’ and ‘Our FOI releases’) have been moved to sit above the FOI contact details, as clear step-by-step instructions.

And we’re making sure that the FOI information for each organisation is not hidden behind an “+others” link.

For this to work, editors in departments will need to tell the app which of their org’s contacts is the one for FOI requests (or to add one, if there isn’t one already). The admin for doing that doesn’t exist yet but you can expect it later this week. Keep an eye out for it, and please make sure the you do this for your organisation and any agencies and sub-orgs.

Reporting a technical fault to GDS

raferguson — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:21:00 +0100

The support form has been operational for a while now. We’ve had some feedback, which we’ve acted on as a result.

Here’s a note of a couple of changes made to the internal [government-only] support form, which can be found at https://www.gov.uk/support/internal.

New way to report to technical problems

GOV.UK has extensive monitoring in place, so that for most technical problems it’s the machines that give us the heads up before the humans notice. But sometimes, you will be the first to encounter a bug or fault in the course of publishing material and you need away to alert us.

To improve reporting of technical faults, we have added a ‘Report a technical fault to GDS’ section to the existing support form.

The form provides fields to help you structure your report, the detail of which helps us identify and resolve problems faster.

Up to now there hasn’t been a specific route for reporting technical issues affecting the availability or display of your content. Some people have used the generic feedback email, while others used the ‘general’ section of the Support form. Those weren’t wrong but they were imprecise and convoluted routes to the Inside Government team.

Hopefully this first iteration makes reporting technical faults simpler, faster and clearer. But you’ll let us know if it doesn’t.

Reducing noise in the support form

Through the support form it has been possible to submit recurring reports and requests, including content changes, new features, user accounts, campaigns, analytics, general points and now also technical faults.

That’s quite a lot of choose from, and in some cases it is only SPOCs who can formally submit these requests, such as campaigns.

To make the form simpler to use, we are limiting the options you can see based on the permissions that you were assigned when you were registered on the Whitehall app.

SPOCs can see all options including those to request data and account management, while everyone else is limited to seeing the options related to changes and faults.

As ever, this is a ‘trial’ and if you experience problems or if it could work better for you, let us know.

A totally topical taste

nojwilliams — Fri, 03 May 2013 11:52:00 +0100

Next Wednesday, the Queen’s Speech will set out the government’s legislative agenda for the coming session of the House of Commons.

It’s a high-profile set-piece event which will bring together news items and other publications from a number of departments.

On GOV.UK, we’ll be providing users with a point of entry to all of this content through a new ‘topical event’ landing page.

So this is probably as good time as any to share a little bit more about our thinking about these topical event pages, and to flag when you might consider setting one up.

What do topical event pages do?

Topical event pages are designed to support a particular event, taking place at a particular moment in time. Like standard topics, they exist to meet a user’s need to know ‘what is the government doing about this?’

These pages provide a curated, coherent view of all government policies, announcements and publications around the event. They can be given short, marketable, URLs which can be used in promotion.

Examples of topical event pages we’ve already set up include

We probably would’ve set one up for the Olympics too.

Unlike standard topics, topical event pages have a short shelf-life, a time beyond which they are no longer relevant. So when you create the page, you’ll also need to set the date on which it should be archived.

What sort of event should they be used for?

Topical event pages are still quite a new format and we’re still learning about what they should and shouldn’t be used for.

As a rule of thumb, however, they should be used for events which:

are of significance to the majority of Inside Government’s users, including the general public (eg the event is featured on the Today programme and other major news media)
are the responsibility of central government
involve activity by a number of government agencies
are likely to generate a high volume of content (eg, not just one or two news stories)

We will usually not use the format:

For issues on which the government position can be covered by Inside Government topic or policy pages, and/or document series (eg, Scottish devolution, or changes to the healthcare system)
To issue emergency guidance to the general public and businesses - if there’s a need for such guidance, it should be covered by a mainstream or emergency content page
For events which are smaller in scale, or which can be reasonably covered via a lead news story on a department site
As a means of bringing about behaviour change - this is the role of campaign pages
For stuff on which the response is not led by central government

If you’re thinking of setting up a topical events page, just give us a shout, and we’ll discuss whether it’s the right thing for you.

Posted by Graham Francis.