It’s here! Essex.gov.uk arrived just before midnight on Monday 24 June. It was a tricky delivery, but we’re all doing well. The champagne corks have been popped and the cigars handed round, but as all parents know, now the hard work really begins.
As we watch our fledgling site take its first tentative steps in the world, we’ll be monitoring feedback from the contact centre, site users and Google analytics. We're super proud of this site, and we're going to make sure it fulfils its early promise.
User research
Ben and Georgiana have both been working on the ‘check something’ service pattern work, in particular how it touches on some of the content design work we’ve already done on essex.gov.uk. Sheila and I will be chatting with them next week about this, hopefully over some of Ben’s unfathomably light grapefruit cake.
The user research team, as well as quite a few other team members, sat in on the Shaw Trust’s presentation on their accessibility report findings. I overheard some of this, and it was fascinating to get an expert view on a topic that everyone’s going to be talking about come September.
Devs
Martin took lots away from the presentation, and has also been thinking about DevOps and team collaboration.
I’ve not heard from Purvi, but I hope she’s having a well-earned rest after working wonders for go-live.
Service design
Bhupinder’s been thinking about how the wider Service Design team can collaborate on the service patterns project. For a lot of us it’s really exciting to get the chance to work on something new.
She’s also started to delve into a service pattern: apply for something.
Product
Helen has been an utter blur this week, racing between meetings, resolving issues and generally being very busy making sure everything is shipshape. She’s been an utter force of nature in the last few weeks, ensuring this website made it, and is now off on holiday (hopefully somewhere hot, with cool negronis).
Content
We’ve all been busy in content this week. Feverishly checking everything is as it should be on essex.gov.uk, as well as watching real-time user feedback come in.
Sheila and I have been working on a digital content workshop, which we’ll be testing out in the next couple of weeks.
Hannah’s been finessing some Trading Standards pages.
Collette’s been making sure go-live went without a hitch, keeping an eye on short urls and redirects. She’s also been preparing to handover the site to our BAU Content team.
Team highlight
It’s been an amazing effort by the whole team, and a huge relief to get essex.gov.uk across the finish line, but there’s no time to bask in glory. This is just the first lap.
We’ve built up a top team around a new way of working. We iterate, review and iterate again. Don’t let the sprints fool you, we’re in this for the long haul.
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