ONS Digital

Prynhawn Da / Good Afternoon, and welcome to another weekly update on the activities of the Digital Publishing Division here at ONS.

Technically, this should be week 15 as we unfortunately missed last week’s round-up, but hopefully the posts on our infographic guidance and Measurefest were interesting enough to keep you coming back to the blog for today’s post.

So what’s been happening?

Last week, I attended the Open Government Partnership Summit, where London played host to over 60 countries to discuss ways to make their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. There were a number of talks from a range of organisations including GDS which gave a masterclass on performance platforms for transactions and Guardian’s Digital Agency which talked through the art of data visualisation.

ONS took part in the festival exhibition area and provided a demonstration of the ONS Data Explorer tool (BETA), which launched that week. Visitors to the stand were very positive and we look forward to feedback from all our users as they start to use it.

Subscribers to the email alert service has reached 7000, that’s an increase of 500% over 5 months, exceeding all expectations. Since June we have been using GovDelivery to increase the number of subscribers to this service which provides people with information about releases they are interested in. GovDelivery maximises direct connections with the public through digital communications and the networking opportunities with other Government Departments have helped us to quickly increase audience reach. Read more at GovDelivery Success Stories.

Other news

Work is underway to build our very own user testing lab, ensuring that the work we do to improve the ONS website is user driven and that we can react quickly to their feedback. We are also working on a project to identify and develop personas so that we fully understand who are users are and what they need.

Our social media team saw an almost record high of retweets relating to a story on how the population of certain areas change in a working day. Take a look at the data visualisation.

Guest Presenter Robin Christopherson, Head of Digital Inclusion at Abilitynet, delivered a facinating session on the good and bad of accessibility across websites and mobile platforms.

and finally

We are off to the Government Statistical Service (GSS) annual conference later today where we will deliver a panel discussion on the communication and dissemination of our statistics, watch this space for how it went.