ONS Digital

Prynhawn da/ Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s digital round-up

Apologies for the lack of update last week (I was on holiday), but I hope that the post, detailing our work to develop a user-friendly taxonomy was enough to keep you busy. To date, over 800 people have taken an interest in learning more about our approach, as well as view the final structure and we hope to bring you details of other developments in the not too distant future.

So what else has been happening?

Last Monday we closed the Web survey with approximately 400 completed responses, which are now being analysed. The survey was aimed at people with an interest in ONS statistics and who use the ONS website, to tell us about their experiences, so that we can make improvements which benefit our users. The findings will underpin some work being done by Pure Usability to start coming up with a new set of personas for us to use and also for us to get a clearer idea of some high level user stories.

In addition, as part of our User Insight work, we have been attending a range of meetings and focus groups to build up knowledge of and establish who in ONS manages stakeholder relationships and how any feedback is being recorded. This work includes carrying out a User Insight ‘mini’ audit and creating a User Insight database.

We also attended a demo of SortSite Accessibility tool used for web accessibility, browser compatibility and link checking. SortSite automatically scans entire websites for over 450 quality issues including: accessibility; browser compatibility; broken links; privacy standards; search optimisation; usability and web standards. This tool will be evaluated for use across development, test and support, primarily for use in Accessibility testing.

Other news…

Elsewhere, our publishing team have been reviewing guidance and protocols for the scheduling of ONS releases and hosted a ‘Writing for Broadcast’ seminar presented by Guy Meredith ‘the story guy’. The aim of the seminar was to introduce a new in-house training course covering how to write and present an engaging statistical story for a wide range of audiences, to encourage people to read our content and also understand it.

Our editorial team are coming to the end of a busy period. The last couple of weeks have been great, with some good examples of collaborative working that led to a better end product. The short story and graphic on childlessness prompted some debate, something that an emotive issue such as this always does, but on the whole it was well received. Another highlight was Family Spending, which too was a great example of collaboration. We released a great package of products: a short story, an infographic and our first video! Metrics from this release have been really promising, with the short story and infographic being some of the most popular content in the entire release and fantastic viewing times to match (122 seconds and 93 seconds respectively). The video has been well received with 750 views and 5 likes – although minor in the YouTube league, this feels like a major accomplishment for us.

Our social media team have signed up some more volunteers to be ‘hootsuiters’, empowering release owners to monitor the chatter around their data and respond where necessary. They are also analysing potential tools to replace Topsy and discussing how to present infographics on twitter in order to maximiise impact.

and finally….

Before the festive break, we have a short video on winter baby names being released and a great short story being published tomorrow on alcohol consumption. This story is the start of a whole new editorial format, which we hope to do more of in the new year. Let us know what you think.