ONS Digital

Bore Da / Good Morning and welcome to another weekly round-up from Digital Publishing @ONS

So what’s been happening?

It has been a busy week for us as we reached the peak of activity for our Digital Festival. @Tim Lloyd started at our Titchfield office with an insight into Digital Engagement at BIS. It was interesting to hear about the challenges faced by their digital team by internal audeinces to working in a different, more digital way and to see the tools being used to do more ‘listening’ to what is being said externally. We were then joined by @Manuel Timita as he took us through how ONS census data contributed to the creation of illustreets, a beautiful website designed to help people find the best places to live in England. He discussed the advantages of downloadable data over using API, and the challenges that they encountered in reconciling data belonging to dissimilar geographies. @Helreynolds opened up a frank and enlightening discussion on empowering your expert workforce to use social media to talk to your external stakeholders and build trusted relationships. We have started doing this with our tweeting statisticians and hope to build on it further so watch this space. @Zak Mensah introduced the dos and do nots of using pictures and videos that you find on the web, particularly topical given some of the, shall we say it, ‘interesting’ design requests we have been receiving. Our very own @theboysmithy session on dataviz was a full house, covering the latest developments in interactive data visualisation for the web. As well as demonstrating some of the latest visualisation templates from the Data Visualisation Centre, the also discussed the latest technology and formats, emerging trends in content and how to ensure maximum impact through media syndication. We ended the week on a simpler note with @gilescolborne author of “Simple and Useable” who led an interactive session on making stuff simpler. As a usability expert, he posed questions such as “How do we know when we’re dumbing down and when we’re achieving the kind of simplicity that feels like genius along with insights and tools for making anything feel genuinely simple to use.

In other news…

.Our social media team have had an extremely busy week capitalising on opportunities for engagement..Our involvement Radio 2’s factoids feature created a social media whirlwind and our Head of Retail Sales Kate Davies held a Q&A, the detail of which was captured in a storify which we then shared with staff.

As well as supporting social media with the factoids feature, our design team produced an infographic to support a story on Health perception showing relationship between ‘good’ health and disability in England and Wales.

and finally…..

Head of User Insight and Innovation, Alison Saunders has been introducing the concept of ‘personas’ with staff that have a responsibility for the analysis and dissemination of our statistics. The project, which began with a survey of our website users in November last year, was commissioned to help inform the work we are doing in Digital Publishing, to improve the way we communicate and present our statistics to a wider audience. It is still work in progress at this stage, but we hope to share it with you soon.