ONS Digital

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

So what’s been happening?

The much talked about Digital Festival came to a close today with the final session on writing for social media @ONS. Overall the festival has been well received, with at least 50% take-up of the workshops and seminars on the programme and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all our presenters for giving their time. I am now looking at the best way to evaluate the festival in terms of what it offered staff as well as give us the chance to formally benchmark the level and appetite for digital skills across the organisation.

In other news

On Monday, staff across Digital Publishing attended a learning and development event to promote in-house Digital training to the statistical areas. This was a good opportunity to raise our profile with our Titchfield office and demonstrated some of our most recent digital developments. Feedback on our presence was extremely positive and has helped us to identify new areas for collaboration.

It was a quiet week for us on the editorial front, with a release about child mortality and a couple of updates to our quarterly migration stats. Elsewhere, we’ve been busy editing a video guide to inflation and planning some exciting new releases in March around life expectancy, marital status and International Women’s Day, all of which hopefully building on past successes.

We are making headway with building our on-site user testing lab, which we hope to have fully functional in the next couple of months. We are also increasing awareness of user needs across the organisation through the production of bespoke analytical reports on how people are engaging with our website and our statistics. As well as the reports we have completed user journey testing exercises with economic students and are progressing the work on personas.

We are almost ready to launch a new metadata e-learning course to help save our search by improving the way we tag content so that users can find what they are looking for. Pilots are also underway on a ‘writing for broadcast’ course to help staff improve their scripting skills for audio-visual digital products.

We have been working with Government Digital Services (GDS) to find a new solution to replace the statistical release calendar with an aim to develop a prototype by early April.

and finally…..

We have started a project to revamp the Guidance and Methodology pages on our website. As with the restructure of About ONS, this will be a phased approach, starting with a study of what content has been viewed over the last year. We will then use that analysis to decide, policy permitting, what content can be removed.