The Parliamentary Digital Service came into being on the 1st of April, and behind the name change it is still very much two teams: Parliamentary Information Communication Technology (PICT) and the Web and Intranet Service (WIS).
Last week we held the first seminar in our Exploring Digital series. The idea behind these sessions is to build knowledge, awareness and expertise inside Parliament about digital technology and innovation.
Last weekend saw Parliament joining forces with the National Audit Office (NAO) and The Office for National Statistics (ONS) at Accountability Hack #AccHack14, as part of Parliament Week, working in partnership with Rewired State.
It’s that time of the year when we start to think about Parliament Week and our annual Parliament hackathon. This year we’re partnering with the National Audit Office (NAO) and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to bring you Accountability Hack.
Within the Web and Intranet Service we are dedicated to improving the experience of users visiting the parliamentary website. As such, we carry out a continuous cycle of improvements in order to deliver changes, which we hope will make it easier for users to find information and better understand the work of Parliament.
On Thursday 15 May, web assistants from Parliament’s web and intranet service had the pleasure of attending a Bunnyfoot training course, “Designing for the Human mind/brain”.
One of the top tasks for people using Parliament's website is finding out who their MP is. A recent report by the Hansard Society found that only 22% of people questioned could correctly name their MP, so a simple service to help give people a way to find out about their member of Parliament is useful and necessary.
Following on from my post yesterday about user data, and thanks to a timely suggestion from Roo Reynolds at GDS, here's some more data to try and better understand how people are accessing the parliament website.
We collect both quantitative (Google analytics) and qualitative (user survey) data on a regular basis about and from users of the Parliament website. This helps inform our plans and ideas so that we can develop information and services in line with user needs.
You may know that a couple of weeks ago Parliament published a report by mySociety as the culmination of several months of work to review Parliament’s online services. The review looked at how we plan, deliver and make decisions about digital and mySociety spoke to more than 100 people, looked at a lot of data and talked to many users and other organisations.