ONS Digital

Our Alpha ended on 7th December; and it’s been an amazing 12 weeks. It feels like only yesterday that we started and produced that thin slice of a system, things have certainly moved on a lot since then.

The major areas we covered in the Alpha were:

• Author sign-in and user accounts support
• Different types of question (e.g. text, checkboxes, numbers, dates etc.)
• Splitting a questionnaire into separate sections (groups of questions)
• Validation rules, including warnings and errors and number range checks.
• Basic navigation and routing between sections based on previous answers
• A quick preview mode for authors
• A simple workflow for locking, reviewing, previewing and publishing questionnaires
• Persisting respondent answers between sessions
• Storing submitted respondent answers
• Feedback and live support chat proof of concept for authors
• Building and testing a scalable respondent infrastructure

Rather than try and write a detailed explanation of these I feel its easier just to show you, so without further ado here is a demonstration video of the final build of the eQ Alpha:

[vimeo 149920824 w=750 h=421]

eQ Alpha Final Demo from eQ Team on Vimeo.

Without a doubt we have learned a lot, both about our users and how to actually deliver an online questionnaire system, the Discovery and Alpha has set us up to progress into Beta with confidence; reassuringly GDS also agree, having undertaken a Alpha Service Assessment with them and received very positive feedback.

That’s all for now, I’ll post some of the key lessons and outcomes from the Alpha in a separate post.