ONS Digital

Our latest sprint has been focused around our publishing platform, Florence.

During the website build we spent a lot of time testing Florence with our publishers, using the same approaches to give them a product that meets their needs as we used on the site itself. Whilst we have made a lot of changes to the system since we went live, to enhance functionality or fix issues, we have not reviewed its usability more generally now Florence has been in production for a while.

With this in mind I felt it was important to take a sprint out to look at some of the issues that, whilst they maybe don’t affect our ability to publish, made life more difficult or frustrating for our publishers. It was also a chance to refresh ourselves about how it all fits together and start to look at how things might need to change as the system develops to support changes planned in the roadmap.

We worked closely with the publishing team to identify some of the pain points of the system with a view to fixing as many as we could in a single sprint. As part of this we reviewed all previous requests and had a mini workshop to discuss additional ideas and possible solutions. This was then prioritised by the publishers to give an idea of what caused the most problems.

The changes we have made are varied and range from incorporating the manually clearing of the homepage cache into our publishing process, to bug fixes, and streamlining of navigation round the system.

We were obviously unable to fix or change everything asked for, but were able to cross a lot of things off the list and also have a much better idea of where some of the difficulties are likely to occur as we make improvements to the main website.

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