Week 58

This week has been busy. It’s also been a week of counting down the remaining days of being a teenager, as I turned 20 on Saturday.

On Monday this week, I helped Dom deploy all the Environment Agency category changes. We had a last-minute go/no-go decision so we had to be prepared to abort the deploy and roll back the changes.

I went along to the user research sessions on Tuesday, over in Shoreditch. Unfortunately, I didn’t find them as useful this time around, mainly because the users I observed didn’t get far enough into the tasks to use the specialist navigation or scoped search prototypes. I’m told that other users did, though, so I look forward to seeing the overall conclusions from this round of testing next week.

On Wednesday, I finished up a story I’ve been working on to create an interface to manage tags in Panopticon. I’m quite pleased with it - it will reduce the amount of work we need to do to add each new specialist sector in the future.

Later this week, I started a story to split the specialist browse functionality out of the Frontend app into a new app, which we’re calling Collections. The main reason for doing this is to simplify routing specialist browse pages - as we currently have to maintain a hardcoded list of slugs in Frontend. In the long-run, regular browse and search will move across to the Collections app too.