You are currently browsing Jackie's articles.
Users of Hansard on the parliamentary website often comment on the need to improve its presentation. Recently the web team has been working with members of the Hansard team and PICT (Parliament’s ICT department) to improve our Hansard pages.
The fruits of our labour can be viewed on our Hansard Beta site.
What have we done?
Development work is being done in phases.
The first phase consists of:
- better layout, with improved content list, font size etc
- better chunking of content – so that you can view/print a whole debate and without having to click on the continue button
- better structure – while this won’t be visible to users, it will help Parliament make further improvements more easily
This release is just the first step. We want to be able to make better use of this content so that it can be repackaged throughout the website. To do this we are working with Hansard and Parliamentary ICT department to improve the code.
Lots more to do
A Hansard project is underway looking at all the tools used to create the paper copy of Hansard; we hope the improvements made to the production of Hansard will make it easier for the web team and other websites to reuse this amazingly rich content.
This is only the start; next we want to focus on Hansard by Member, so that each MP or Lords contributions can be easily found, followed and reused.
We would love to hear what you think about the new Hansard pages. Email webmaster@parliament.uk or comment on this post.
The House of Commons agreed on 30 March 2009 to a Report from the Procedure Committee recommending that there should be an experiment with the format of interleaving bills and Explanatory Notes in the case of a single bill in the current Session.
As recommended by the Procedure Committee, the House of Commons has today published the Equality Bill in a trial format as proposed by Chris Bryant MP, from the Deputy Leader of the House.
The Bill and Explanatory Notes are available as a:
- PDF with both texts side-by-side,
- an HTML with the texts side-by-side, and
- an interwoven web page (HTML)
All versions are available on the Equality Bill page
The Procedure Committee of the House of Commons is interested in feedback on this experiment, specifically:
- Do you find the interleaved document more helpful than the 2 separate documents?
- Which version of the interleaved document do you prefer? The PDF side-by-side, the HTML side-by-side, or the interwoven web page (HTML)?
The Web Centre would like to know your thoughts on this development, do you know of other sites that have this functionality, is there is a better way to present this information.
Let us know what you think on the blog comments or by email: webmaster@parliament.uk
Web team filming the christmas tree
The web team has acquired some new kit so that we can produce our own video content for the website. As Miranda and I are fairly new to filming the rest of the team suggested that we record the Christmas tree being put up in New Palace Yard.
Easy task you might think, not much movement to capture, you just set up the camera and film the workmen as they put up the tree; add the decorations and switch on the lights!
On Saturday from 7.30am until 5.30pm we stood in New Palace Yard and filmed the workmen putting up the Christmas tree. We battled the cold, the rain and a very wonky tripod – but we would not be defeated. Now if you can only bear with us we will attempt to edit said footage into a 2 minute film! It might be ready for next Christmas!
In the meantime visit our Christmas tree set on flickr – that should whet your appetite.
Today the prototypes for the parliamentary websites were being put through their paces (see images).
5 users tested prototype versions of a new homepage design, a News service, an enhanced calendar and a new current issues area for the site.
The sessions were really helpful – it’s amazing how you fail to spot the obvious when you have been working on a design/topic for so long. The user testing has thrown up a whole host of issues that we need to address before we go live with the products
Even before we get the reports from Optimum Web (the company running the test sessions) there are immediate improvements that we can make to the prototypes.
Watch this space for news of new releases.
The web team along with a group of usability and accessibility experts have undertaken heaps of user testing recently. Although the Bill pages received good feedback, testing showed that we hadn’t got it quite right – can you help us get it right?
Our testers didn’t understand the abbreviations and few spotted the key to the right of the bar. Also for complex Bills the list of debates got so long that the status bar took over the page.
For the next release of these pages we want to improve the progress bar so that it’s easier to understand how a Bill is progressing. However try as we might we can’t find a nice solution to our problems.
The current progress bar can be seen here:
http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2007-08/crossrailhybridbill.html
What we’ve done
- Our developers have come up with the following solution:
http://services.parliament.uk/bills/beta/ - We’ve added some tool tips which are supposed to address the confusion with the abbreviations.
- We’ve used JavaScript code to expand “more sittings” when the user rolls over the text is supposed to deal with the problem of how to display lots of sittings.
The bounce amused the web producers for all of 5 minutes and we liked the tool tips that appeared when you roll over the different stages (see for example 2R, Comm in the Lords) but alas neither of these solutions are accessible and are quite possibly annoying.
If anyone out there can think of a better, accessible solution we would love to hear from you. All suggestions are welcome.
