ONS Digital

Prynhawn da / Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s round-up of activities from the Digital Publishing team

So what’s been happening?

Our Design and Editorial teams have had a busy couple of weeks with some interesting statistical releases. This included one on Healthcare spend, supported by an infographic showing how the UK compares to other countries. We published a short story and trialled two different types of data visualisations as part of the annual Travel Trends release which generated a lot of online discussion.  Visitors to the UK and how much they spend  generated the most chatter on social media, with some media agencies using it on their sites.

As part of our plan to do more content syndication to extend the reach of our data, we met with teams at the Guardian, to understand more about their technical and user needs, as well as get some constructive feedback on our own products. Interestingly they decided to use the Travel Trends infographic on Tourism in London  on the Guardian Datablog due to it being more mobile friendly giving us food for thought on future appraoched

In other news

The Open Data Institute has been sharing some of the work they have been doing for us on publishing open statistical data. and as the recent research by the World Bank starts a debate on PDFs by the Washington Post  and  Guardian, the ONS are looking at how accessible and fit for purpose they really are.

In social media. the latest AO recruitment campaign was posted on Facebook and received very good feedback. The post had a potential reach of over 13,000 people, far above any of our previous posts, including the highly successful Factoids. It was also shared over 100 times and received 66 total likes and 40 total comments.

We have been working closely with GDS to develop an Editorial Standards for Statistical Publishing, with first draft submitted for feedback and two of our Senior Management Team have qualified as GDS’ digital by default service standard assessors after completing the necessary training last week..

and finally..

We are looking for volunteers to take part in user testing to explore ways of measuring personal well-being and help create something that the general public will find useful and appealing. If you can spare an hour on 21/22 May and are willing to travel to our user lab in Newport then email us at userinsight@ons.gsi.gov.uk