ONS Digital

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

So what’s been happening?

It was a busy week for our Data Visualisation experts who started the week with How Well Do You Know Your Area?.a very popular interactive quiz using census statistics. Our Twitter post alone had nearly 600 engagements in just a few hours of posting with the Guardian Datablog also embedding the interactive on their website, resulting in a large spike in traffic to the site. In addition we released interactive data exploration tools on Commuting Patterns in the UK, which shows how far people travel to work and also how children are dividing their time between secondary addresses due to parents not living together, both of which got considerable interest.

In other news..

The new statistical release calendar went live, bringing to a close a large piece of collaborative working between our Publishing Operations team and GDS. Moving the calendar to GOV.UK offers a number of benefits, including a simpler announcement process, higher profile for statistical outputs, better oversight of release scheduling, and more importantly an improved user journey.

The first sprint of the platform for storytelling, recently discussed on this blog has been completed and is now undergoing testing.

The Telegraph published an article called “Will Generation Y ever tie the knot?” which used 2 infographics from the recent “9 Facts About Marriages” listicle, and another from January’s “Young adults living with parents in the UK” release. Additionally the article embedded the Singles interactive, first published at the end of March.

Our social media team generated further interest in our UK compendia as they marked the opening of the Commonwealth Games and also called for users of Trade statistics to take part in a short survey. They also shared a number of infographics, created by our Design team relating to GDP and Well-being and invited people with an interest in analytics to sign-up for a webinar on the ONS’s journey with Govdelivery.

We have completed our presentations to Guidance and Methodology page owners to launch the G&M project officially. The first changes should be visible on the website in early August

and finally

We started presenting to ONS staff on the work we are doing to build a new website. Led by Head of Digital Transformation Matt Jukes, the briefing introduced the approach we are taking, (starting with an Alpha) and the specialists we are working with to ensure that the website and indeed its content meets user needs. A broad representation of the organisation attended, with much of the feedback being fairly positive. We plan to share the presentation with you on this blog, so watch this space