The Digital Development team in PDS has rapidly expanded, and there are a lot of new faces. Feedback from our last away day showed that staff wanted to get to know colleagues. With this purpose in mind we decided to get everyone together to do some user research.
At PDS we like to push ourselves and aim big. After our visit to GDS at the end of November we felt inspired to get our user testing lab set up. Our Christmas wish was to do user testing on mobile devices by January.
Our user research team spent a day with GDS observing how they run their user research sessions. It was an interesting opportunity to see the processes and methods used by an established research team and we learned a lot that could help the development of our own team.
Last week the Parliamentary Digital Service had the pleasure of hosting codebar.
Samuel Kasadha, a work experience student, spent a week shadowing various people at PDS. He wrote about how we helped him understand the work that gets done in parliament, what goes on behind the scenes and the difference between parliament and government.
Matthew Bwye Lera, an 18 year old student spent 3 weeks on work experience at PDS. He talks about what he learnt during his time in Parliament.
Well, this is the first time I’ve written a blog post so I hope you like it! I’m Matthew Bwye Lera, a Spanish guy who has come to do some work experience here.
To everyone reading this I am Alexander Fedotov and I am 15 years old, from Fleet, Hampshire. This week I’ve been working with the Website Alpha team and I have greatly enjoyed it!
Towards the end of May we went to see Matt Jukes at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in Newport to learn from his experience as Product Lead building the new ONS website.