ONS Digital

The start of this sprint led to some quick re-planning following some publishing issues on the 22 and 23 July for the Investment by insurance companies, pension funds and trusts and Internal Migration releases respectively. These releases, one of a number of releases on each day, failed to publish due to a connection failure although all the others on those days published successfully.

We changed things around so that we could investigating the issues and prioritise developing a fix. We identified a couple of possible causes and made some changes, but were unable to replicate the issue to test conclusively. We have also developed the functionality to retry publication if this happens but as this issue has not happened again we are holding this to one side for now. We will be watching this closely going forward.

Font

Up until this sprint we have not been setting a font specifically on the site, instead relying on the browser default serif font. The plan has always been to use Open Sans, but given this is a narrow font we wanted to take our time to ensure we did not make the accessibility of the site worse. We have worked closely with our design team to identify appropriate font weights and have used this as an opportunity to review padding and spacing and look at how we are decreasing title size on mobile screens.

Time series

The main focus of this sprint outside of investigating the publishing issues has been reviewing the way we currently publish time series to better support our statistical publishers. The new functionality will allow us to hold consistent variations of each series linked with the dataset that they were populated from. Functionality around being able being able to search by ID will be retained and the current API will continue to show the latest version we have published. There is a significant piece to test and migrate content to this structure which will be looked at in the next sprint.

User requested data routes

Following on from our recent usability testing and feedback we have updated the template for our individual user requested data pages so that they have links back to the complete list and details of how to make a request. We have also boosted common terms related to these in search so that these pages appear more highly.

Continuous deployment and sandpit environment

Internally we have been reviewing and rebuilding our continuous deployment pipeline to streamline our development process and have created a new ‘sandpit’ environment for our publisher to try out new ideas and improvements to content.

Number of bug fixes

• Correction note not showing in in PDF
• Pie chart tooltip styling not consistent with new designs
• Problems caused in Florence if related links were not a valid URL

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.