ONS Digital

Bore Da / Good Morning and welcome to this week’s round-up, which is also my penultimate week before heading off on maternity leave.

So what’s been happening?

We had a very busy week on social media with one of our statisticians Kate Davies tweeting some ONS retail statistics during the Channel 4 Dispatches programme on the price wars taking place between the nation’s supermarkets. This builds on the content syndication work we saw with One Born Every Minute, providing another good opportunity to engage with users of our statistics. #SupermarketWars, which was used in the ONS’ tweet and Kate’s tweet, became a trending topic in the UK for a short time during the programme. We also had some air time to explain the stats with BBC Radio Wales.

In Other News

In addition to Retail Sales, the social media team promoted some interesting stats on how changes in the economy affect where we go on holiday along with promoting the Q and A on internet statistics which takes place this Thursday 7 August. If you’re interested in learning more about how the UK internet usage compares across Europe or how many films we download then join the discussion..

Our web analytics manager Alison Davies, took part in a GovDelivery Webinar to share her experience of using the platform to increase traffic to the ONS website. Over 160 people registered and several tweets were posted during her webinar presentation.

Over the last few months we have been working with Richard Campbell and his CPI production team to investigate and test ways to improve the way we communicate some of the information that supports their statistics and help bust some common myths. In support of this work, our user insight team is planning some work to identify the key tasks in the CPI section of G&M. Participants will be given specific tasks to complete and we will evaluate the key issues, barriers, enablers in completing these. The findings will feed into work being undertaken as part of the Alpha project, so to get involved in ONS user research, subscribe for user alerts.

Our publishing operations team have completed the first wave of health check clinics and developed a new health check template as part of their internal campaign to ensure the editorial quality of statistical releases. This will help us to identify problem areas and provide the necessary training and support.

 

 

Our data visualisation experts shared some interesting discussions on visual storytelling, looking at the content for the upcoming Graphical Web conference and also the thinking behind using interactive techniques to tell a richer statistical story.

 

and finally..

You might not have heard about it but the ONS has been working on opening up access to our datasets for developers via an API for a while now. We’ve just deployed a new release which introduces a great new flavour to the API making things much easier to work with, You can read more about the developments and keep up to date on future plans via this blog.