ONS Digital

Prynhawn Da / Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s round-up from the Digital Publishing team at ONS

So what’s been happening?

We made headlines again, following criticism about the website in an independent review of the National Accounts. The review, undertaken by Dame Kate Barker (former MPC member) and Art Ridgeway (former Assistant Chief Statistician at Statistics Canada), highlighted the wide ranging problems faced by users and stakeholders when interacting with the ONS website.

We are well aware of the issues faced by our users and continue to make efforts to improve it, the details of which can be found in our recently published report on the ONS Website and Digital Publishing we produced for PASC.  In recent weeks we have started to share more about our plans for the future including a platform for sharing our data storytelling content and our pattern library for the website front-end. In relation to one of the specific complaints made in the Barker report we have also developed a specific tool for searching the CDIDs that are used by our experts to identify specific datasets. We have been testing this internally and it is going well.

In other news..

Our social media had a busy week monitoring discussions and coverage of our key releases including Output in the Construction and Overseas Travel and Tourism. We also supported the second Economic Forum where we explain, take questions on and discuss a range of issues and developments relating to ONS economic statistics. View the presentations and discussions from the event and keep up to date on Economic Forum news via the ONS events page.

Our publishing team have been working with the National Accounts team on the latest batch of Guidance and Methodology articles (of which there were nine) and are continuing to test our approach to carrying out the publishing model pilots scheduled for later this year.  We are also creating a coding tool which checks whether sticky content on the theme pages are up to date, allowing us to maintain it in a timelier manner.

Our design team created some visual products containing interesting facts and figures on UK population to support #WorldPopulationDay (last Friday) and on the Aerospace industry to mark the start of the Farnborough International Airshow #FIA14.

We welcome any feedback from our users and frequently carry out user research work to test new products and processes. If you are interested in getting involved then email us or sign up to receive user insight alerts.

and finally..

A few of the senior management team are heading off to the Open Knowledge Festival which gathers together the open movement makers, thinkers, activists and researchers who will enable the shift towards open minds and open action. The festivities kick off tomorrow, with open data and open knowledge enthusiasts from around the world descending on Berlin for the largest open knowledge gathering the world has ever seen. Watch this space to find out how it went and what Digital Publishing was able to learn from the experience.