Inside Inside Government

Sprint ending 25th June

Despite the best of intentions, we didn’t make as much progress on the transition tool last week as we hoped. Overspill from the previous sprint plus a couple of urgent things that came up during the week pushed the transition tool work down the list. 

So the dominant theme for this week’s sprint is, once again, transition tooling, plus there are a handful of stories we need to deliver to support HM Treasury’s use of the topical events format for the coming spending round. 

You can see all the stories we’ve prioritised for this sprint listed in the Backlog column on Pivotal Tracker.

During the sprint that’s just ended we also: 

• Fixed all links from detailed guides that still had /specialist-guides/ in their URL
• Enabled agencies and NDPBs to have organisation profiles for their high profile units  (aka “sub-orgs”). Previously the system only allowed these to be associated to a parent ministerial department. 
• Added opening hours and access details to the API for worldwide offices’ contact information. This API is used to surface the embassy and consular contact details from Inside Gov on other parts of GOV.UK, like the travel alerts service. Knowing when the office is open is usually helpful to people before they rock up there.
• Cleaned up a handful of dodgy URLs that had typos or bad slugs in response to requests from departments. Currently there’s a long wait for any such requests, for which we’re sorry. Longer term we hope to provide self-service tools for this so we are not a bottleneck. 

Sprint ending 18 June is all about transition

Yesterday was the start of a new sprint. (We plan our work in weekly sprints, which run from Wednesday to Tuesday). 

The theme of this week’s sprint is transition prep. Bar a handful of other stories (eg to fix a few bugs and to iterate the topical events design) this sprint’s stories are all about building out a new “transition tool”.  You can view the stories here. 

The transition tool will automate a lot of the work that was done manually for the 24 departments, by providing a clear view of a transitioning organisation’s DNS status and redirects, and providing self-service tools for fixing broken redirects. 

The tool will be vital to the next phase of the transition programme which will see nearly 300 agency and NDPB websites join us in the space of a year. It’s also something the live departments need now, to repair redirect mappings that are missing or broken. 

So that’s why it’s our top priority. 

As it stands, it looks like this: 

Currently this is just a view of the data. The work for this week includes beginning to get data into the tool automatically and enabling organisations to edit it. 

What happened when we changed the Inside Government nav

[This post is by Ashraf Chohan]

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.

A statement about statements

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

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. 

Working off the grid for the next two weeks

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!

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.

Style and publisher workshops: numbers and lessons

(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.

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

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.

Reporting a technical fault to GDS

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

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

• G8 presidency
• Somalia conference 
• Budget 2013 

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.

So what’s next?

The site is built. It tests well with users. The departments have all moved in. So what’s next?

In all the government web projects I’ve worked on before, this would be the moment we walk away. The budget and project team would be replaced with business-as-usual support arrangements, usually comprising a much too low number of monthly developer-hours. 

Not this time. Digital products are *never* finished, and the Inside Gov product team is in it for the long haul. We’ve a lot left to build, and we’ll be iterating constantly to make the product better for end users and publishers alike. 

I’m massively excited about what’s coming next. 

Here’s a flavour of what will be keeping us busy from here on in. 

Sprint Zero

In the week of 13th May we’ll step back from building stuff to take a long hard look at what we’ve learned, and what the priorities are for the coming month or two.

We need to clear up some technical debt, tidy some of the content and redirects, and spend time building tools to make the transition of the next wave of 280+ organisations possible. 

So we’ll spend a week planning that, and then a month or two doing it.

Improving search

There’s a separate team working on improving the site search for a fixed period of weeks, and 3 of the Inside Gov team are off doing that. It’s the number one priority for GOV.UK as a whole. 

That project will deliver some tangible improvements by early summer, and lay the foundations for ongoing improvements to search after that. 

Building new things

Right now the development backlog contains 440 tickets (a mix of bugs and new features). More than half of these are high priority things that we’ve had to put on hold in order to complete the transition of the 24 depts on time.

Those 440 tickets are far from being a complete list, either. There are many big pieces of work we plan to do, some of which are listed as epics in our public project tracker. They include things like:

• adding more controls over who can access what in the publishing tool
• redesigning the publishing interface and improving workflow
• integrating the blog platform with inside gov
• simplifying the publications model
• adding validation and reporting to help improve content quality

On top of all that, there is an unknown quantity of new features that will be needed for the agencies and ALBs coming our way. 

So, very obviously, many of those 440 existing tickets will never get done. New things will be added daily to the backlog. I’ll be prioritising ruthlessly, with the help of the team, to keep us focused on delivering the next most important thing at all times. 

Iterating all the things

As well as adding new features, now is the time that we can start really looking at how users are interacting with the site, and making improvements based on that. So we’ll be aiming to be a lot more responsive to user feedback and test findings, and will be doing more analysis to solve specific, real user problems and to shape our thinking about where to take the product as it continues to evolve. 

Coffee

I’m also going to come round for a coffee during May and June to each of the 24 departments, to hear first hand how things are going from your perspective. I’ll be in touch about that by email.

Neil

A quick Pivotal tip

We’re in the habit of sharing links to tickets in our public Pivotal Tracker project to let people see how we’ve translated their request into a user story, and so they can track where it is in the backlog. 

Pivotal’s interface is not exactly intuitive, so here’s a quick tip on how to see where the story is in the queue. 

When you click the link to a ticket, you’ll get a full screen view like this: 

To see where the ticket is in relation to all the others, look in the top right corner and click the diagonal arrow circled here: 

This will minimise the ticket but keep it open so you can see where it is, like this (you might have to scroll to find it):

Stories in green are done. They show in the ‘Backlog’ and ‘Done’ lists.

Stories in yellow are being worked on currently. They show in the ‘Current’ list. 

Stories in grey are queued to be worked on next/soon. They show in the ‘Current’ list (this sprint) and ‘Backlog’ list (next few sprints). The team works through them in order. 

Stories in blue are pending. They show in the ‘Icebox’ list. I’ve grouped them into approximate priority groups (P1 = high, P3 = low), but they are not necessarily prioritised within those groupings. You’re welcome to raise a support request via https://www.gov.uk/support/internal if you want to dispute the priority of a story you care about, but please do take a look at all the other tickets above it so you have a sense of the relative priorities overall.