In this update, we'll be talking about the work that we've done to improve the search results on parliament.uk and how we created a unified search.
Some readers might know who we are, but I’m sure that many still don’t know. So, this post aims to answer a few existential questions about the (Corporate) Data team that you may have.
This week we’ve been continuing to explore how to present the work of Parliament through topics to the public.
As you know, here at PDS we’re busy building a new website. As part of the discovery work the content team are doing, we recently carried out a couple of short workshops about the content management system (CMS).
Last week the Parliamentary Digital Service had the pleasure of hosting codebar.
The Data & Search team are following the lead of the Website Alpha team by publishing a short update on activity on a regular basis.
This week we have been spending time looking at topics and conducting research with various groups.
Back in March, I was part of the House of Lords contingent at the Rapid Start event. The key theme was ‘Unlocking democracy for all’ and, in a small but significant way, our prototype delivered that aim by making it as easy for anyone to follow statutory instruments (Parliament considers around 1,000 per year) as for bills (around 20 per year).
This week was split between the end of sprint 7, and the accompanying show and tell, and the kick-off for sprint 8.
This week we have been focusing on what we have learned so far. The whole team was involved in sessions to sum up what we have learnt about product approach, usability testing and guerrilla testing and the prototypes we made.
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.