Week 69

Regular service resumes this week.

We started a new sprint on Tuesday. Our goals for this sprint are to get the Services and Information page finished, release the new mainstream browse design, and start building a workflow for tags.

To help with the former, I changed Panopticon to include specialist sectors (eg. oil and gas) in the search index, so that we can show full details of each sector on the Services and Information page for each organisation. For the latter, I’ve added a ‘state’ field to the Tag document. At the moment, every tag will be 'live’ by default. We’ll change this once workflow exists to publish a tag.

Ben and Will have been looking into removing detailed guide categories, so I’ve been pulling some statistics out of the Whitehall database to help assess how many categories we have, and the amount of guides in them. We’ve found some surprises - there’s a couple of categories which each have a huge amount of detailed guides.

I set up more tablets outside meeting rooms this week. There are now tablets outside the User Research Viewing Room, and two rooms on the 6th Floor. We now have ten tablets installed. The remaining three are all a bit special case, so they’re going to take a little bit longer to get ready.

I spent some time working on two hacks this week. From last week, I showed the GDS Missions app to a few people and they really liked it, so I’ve been iterating on it. Also, after Richard had a woeful experience trying to notify reception of a visitor, I made a tiny tool to automatically fill out the visitor form.

I recounted my return journey from Los Angeles in an email to British Airways on Wednesday. My suitcase finally turned up, but there’s lots of expenses I need to claim back from the airline, and I’m loath to spend any more time on hold to their call centre. This is the worst customer service I have ever experienced.