ONS Digital

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

So what’s been happening?

This week got off to a great start as we kicked off a new, and important, piece of work with the help of CX Partners in Bristol to produce a ‘pattern library’ for the ONS website.  We were also winners at the ONS excellence awards for the work we did on improving communication of Divorce Statistics and engaging employees in a more digital culture with our first Digital Festival. The awards signify the ground we have made in encouraging the organisation to think digital first and to consider different ways of presenting our statistics to engage with a wider audience.

In other news

The final version of the replacement for the release calendar, which has been developed in collaboration with GDS, has been given the seal of approval. Work is now underway to migrate the existing content and communicate with users to ensure they understand the new processes.

Our design and editorial team produced infographics and short stories to support statistics on the 10 most common cancers,  European comparisons of well-being and employment rates by qualification. These more accessible formats are proving extremely popular with a wide variety of users, improving engagement, particularly on social media.

There was a lot of topical chatter on social media as our tweeting statistician Kate Davies discussed Retail Sales and the World Cup. We also communicated the increase in China’s investment in the UK  and promoted summer workshops for people who use Census data.

The first phase of our project to review the content and structure of the Guidance and Methodology section of the ONS website is almost complete. This has been a huge undertaking, with over 2000 pages needing to be looked at by our in-house user- experience architect, to understand what content has been viewed in the last year. We are currently working on a plan to do some user-testing on how the new pages and content should look, so if you are interested in taking part, subscribe to the user-testing alerts.

and finally…

The UK population is changing. Previously published statistics showed our population rising by more than any other EU country, with the highest level of births in 40 years. If you’re interested in learning more about these statistics then join our Q&A on Facebook at 1pm on 26 June where our expert Pete Large will be on hand to discuss the numbers.