ONS Digital

Welcome to week one of the ONS Digital Publishing blog. It is actually about week eight for myself here at the ONS and week 12 for the Digital Publishing Division (DPD) itself as it only officially came in to being at the start of April this year.

The web publishing and business as usual aspect of the division is well established but the area which I have been brought in to oversee is very new. My team has a wide remit – analytics, design, editorial, social media and stakeholder communications as well as some upcoming ONS open data activity.

The ONS website has a somewhat troubled history and very recently has come in for some more very public criticism. My team is a part of a wider initiative to try answer those criticisms by providing improved digital products that are genuinely user focused and get things out in to the wild much quicker than the organisation has managed in the past.

The ONS exist outside the embrace of Government Digital Service but while we might not be working directly with them it is absolutely our intention to learn from them going forward. The Government Service Design Manual will be our blueprint and hopefully we can live up to the lofty goal of that publication and “build services so good that people prefer to use them.”

This blog is hopefully a small demonstration of this new direction. We will regularly share what we are working on and thinking about. Wherever possible we will use this blog to give readers previews of products and to elicit feedback as early as possible.

Comments are being moderated but I will endeavour to answer anything that isn’t obvious spam and in the spirit of openess you can also contact me at matt.jukes@ons.gov.uk or find me on Twitter where I am @jukesie.

Matt Jukes
Head of Digital Content