ONS Digital

Prynhawn da / Good Afternoon and welcome to this week’s round-up of activities from the ONS digital publishing team.

For most of us it was a fairly quiet week as we eased back into work after the Christmas break. However for the committed few, it proved to be quite intensive as they got to grips with Open Data, through a training session provided by various people from the Open Data Institute. Take a look at what they covered

Other news
Following the website user survey we ran at the end of last year, we have had been busy analysing the 400+ responses to understand more about our users. We have an early indication of who our users are and their needs,  but to ensure more qualitative analysis we are carrying out interviews with some of the respondents, The interviews will follow a loose structure based around the core issues which users are interested in with regard to using the ONS website and data. Outputs from this activity will further refine the data analysis and the creation of data driven persona groups which we hope to share the results of soon.

On the editorial side, we have been busy working on proposals to communicate our statistics using more creative formats, including a possible video guide to inflation and building on the positive feedback we had to the listical story on drinking habits, but this time looking at divorce.

We have started a project to review our web editorial standards to ensure consistency across the office and compliance with best practice and have also put together an action plan following a recent visit to ShawTrust to improve our accessibility standards

and finally…..

We are now using hootsuite enterprise which will allow us to work more collaboratively across the office and encorage more statistical specialists to get involved in social media commentary. The new tool will enable us to respond to users more quickly and measure user engagement more effectively, identifying which messages and content drive the most traffic to our website.