Week 29

At the start of the week, I worked on a spike investigating how we can show external links to information for users in devolved administration areas, such as Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Guy had already done some design work around this, so I was mainly picking up the technical aspects of the implementation. Some stories have come out of this which will find their way into the backlog for a future sprint.

On Tuesday, we had our monthly all staff meeting over at the Royal College of Surgeons. We followed it by a gigantic picnic in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which included picnic baskets and bunting on loan from the office. The mainstream team had an afternoon retrospective too, and we spent a while talking about the way in which we worked on the newly-launched child benefit tax calculator.

Later this week, I started another spike - this time into the transaction done pages. We’d like to add a simple satisfaction survey at the end of each service, to capture user feedback on their experience. There’s a few interesting questions about which part of our stack should capture that feedback and where it should live.

I also visited the Foreign and Commonwealth Office this week with Roo and Nick, to discuss the next steps about their imminent move to SmartPay for the online consular payment services. The work we’ll be doing will see an increase in the number of merchant accounts from three to over two hundred, as payments are now going to be captured at the particular embassy or consulate where the service is being provided.

Last but certainly not least, I also spent a bit of time with Guy working on a round of refinements to the celebratory bunting on the bank holidays page. Check it out on Monday :-)