Dan Barrett talks about building a new data service for Parliament. One of the things he's learned over the past year is that it’s really hard to talk about Parliamentary data in a way that’s accessible to all. That’s what this blog post is trying to do.
During the general election campaign, Parliament's strategy is to encourage young voters to engage in politics. We've done some work on social media and the website to support this ambition so here's what we've done so far.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been looking at the Committees pages using Google Analytics data. We wanted to understand how users interacted with these pages and measure performance so that we can make improvements.
Here's what we've learned about our users, general elections and working with teams across Parliament.
With so much work going on at PDS, it can be easy to take our live services for granted. The work to build our new website is challenging our whole way of thinking, especially our approach to content management. In the meantime though, we've been doing plenty of work on parliament.uk.
We can help to deliver high-quality, strategic outcomes by using clear, simple processes.
Today we made beta.parliament.uk publicly available for the first time. This is our first public step towards a new website for Parliament and the beginning of a long series of frequent releases.
PDS is working on a new website and we're starting with MPs’ pages. What better place to start than analysing data for the existing website? So the Analytics Team did exactly that.
One of the audiences for the Members pages are Members themselves. We recently spent time doing research on the design of these pages to identify their needs. We used affinity mapping to analyse the findings of 7 semi-structured interviews with Members of both the House of Commons and Lords.
MPs can submit questions to the Table Office electronically but the current system has many issues. One of the projects that PDS is currently working on is to improve this submission system. We developed a new interface for submitting questions, to help give MPs feedback about their questions and help them prepare before they ask their question.