Learning to swim at Parliament
Gemma Rogers joined PDS a couple of months ago and blogs about working in Parliament and how she's coping working in such a large organisation.
Experts in what we do
Beyond ‘start with user needs’
“Start with user needs” is a phrase we hear a lot. Steve Bromley has blogged previously about what it means and everyone agrees that it sounds like the sort of thing we should be doing. In this post he shares his thoughts about what happens after ‘starting with user needs’.
MPs portraits - designing for great content
It’s been a huge team effort to get to this stage. Data, content, front and back end development, user research and design all working towards one goal. Victor Hwang is a designer and he talks about how we’re putting the portraits to work on our beta site.
Getting ruthless with unnecessary words
Elisabeth Ward has written about the importance of editing and why using fewer words can improve your writing.
Guest post: user research meets PhD research
Jack is a PhD researcher at the University of Southampton and he recently took a break from his studies for a two week placement with the user research team at PDS. He wanted to learn more about the profession so here’s what he found.
From man on the moon to an MBE
Loraine talks about her career in Parliament, what it feels like to find out you're being given an MBE, and why her careers advisor was right all along.
What Parliament can learn from #oneteamgov
Some of PDS went to the first ever One Team Government event. It was a chance to talk about how to make government better by working together and many of the topics applied to Parliament. Laurence and Rebecca talk about what they learned at the event.
Three cyber security mistakes I never knew I was making
Hannah Ufland talks about the recent cyber security event and how it never crossed her mind that it would be her that would be learning something.
Mapping the territory
Ben Woodhams has been seconded to PDS to help design the data models that will underpin Parliament’s new website. He explains what this all means and why there should only be one John Prescott in data terms.
Responding to the cyber security incident in Parliament
Rob Greig explains what happened during the cyber security incident that affected the Parliamentary network and how PDS responded.