ONS Digital

I must write more blog posts. I must write more blog posts. I must write more blog posts

As our product manager is on paternity leave at the moment (congratulations Rob!) I am stepping in and putting together our sprint notes for what is behind the 11 shaped window

Sprint 11

We’ve achieved a lot in the last two weeks, but we have more user testing to do so we haven’t released it to our live website quite yet.

Delete content functionality

In this sprint we focused on building delete functionality for our CMS. Until now the ability to remove content from the site has been limited to the development team, and required manual tasks to remove the content, make it available to be previewed in our publishing tool, and to actually publish the changes to our live website.

We’d hoped to also look at functionality to move content, which requires similar manual tasks to the deletion process, but summer holidays and annual leave means we’ve had to push this back slightly.

At the start of the sprint we discussed the requirements and some of the issues we might face implementing them. We uncovered a lot we hadn’t thought about, so we decided to treat the work as a spike to make sure we fully understood the deletion process.

By the end of the sprint the delete functionality was working mostly end to end, so we’re now treating it as a ‘beta’ which we’ll put in front of our internal users to get feedback before we attempt to make it production ready.

PDF downloads for compendium

We’ve also been working on support for downloading a PDF of a full compendium, which is now going through final testing before it’s released. This builds on the ability to print the full compendium, and makes PDF download support more consistent across our site.

Personas get personal

Over in User Research corner we have been doing a range of work to check that our personas still hold. We did some work a little while back to produce some really helpful personas. They are never used to make direct choices, but are used to help us identify which type of user we want to test different functionality with. We have been reviewing the ones we have ahead of big set if changes we will be making around the use of geography and a more complex set of tools for querying data. I will be nagging our User Research team to put together a post about this work soon, as it is a really interesting area for us.

Open is good

In addition to this we were part of an ‘open day’ here in the Newport Stats Palace to allow people to drop in and chat to the team about a whole range of vacancies we have (include the amazing product owner role Matt posted about the other day). It was really good fun talking to a wide range of people and I found myself talking very positively about pretty much everything at the ONS. Have I become and ONS’er…?