ONS Digital

A lot of the last two sprints have been about fixing things and getting things stable before we start looking at some bigger enhancements to the site. With that said we have been also been focussed on addressing many of the issues raised via the feedback button on the site and have also been back on the road in Birmingham conducting our latest usability testing.

The focus of the testing this time being the release calendar, a to z and user requested data. This highlighted a number of issues and potential enhancement, many of which we have made and some which we will be looking at in upcoming sprints. We will be working to address many of these issues in upcoming springs, but the following changes have been made so far;

As a direct result of user testing:

• On the dataset page the first file will be shown by default, previously the show/hide on this page was closed for all items
• The a to z now includes the edition field to help navigation through census content, previously these were all displayed as just ‘2011 Census’
• The release calendar will retain keywords, entered into the filters, between tabs to help users search for upcoming/published releases
• Our email alerts service is now available from the release calendar as users expected it to be available from here
• The ‘previous versions’ link on statistical bulletins has been changed to be more discreet.

From feedback:

Allow larger tables. We have increased the width available to inline tables so that larger tables are presented more clearly in our statistical bulletins and articles

Table on time series page. Data in the table on time series pages is now right aligned and displaying the correct number of decimal places for all values.

Replaced the logo so it is clearer on high resolution screens.

Made the hover over consistent on all chart types.

On the internal side of things we have been working to address a number of issues, including;

Fix for time series publishing issue. We have had a problem on several occasion where the individual time series for some of the taxonomy pages have failed to update. This was caused by the zip file we generate to transfer these to the website becoming corrupt. To resolve this  we now validate the zip is correct before publication and regenerate if required.

Audit history in Florence (our publishing tool). Additional functionality has been added to Florence to allow members of our publishing team to track the history of all the items in the system. This is currently at an early stage but will be developed and enhanced to match their requirements

If you have any thoughts or comments on these changes or any other part of the site  please do let us know by email, the comments on this blogpost or on Twitter to @ONSdigital.