Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Performance’ Category

May 17

Latest update to the Transactions Explorer

Today we released our third major update to the Transactions Explorer tool.

The complete list shows the breadth of transactional services provided by the government, from tax-based transactions with volumes in the millions per year, to applications to burn heather and grass, for which only one licence was issued last year.

We’re collecting data every quarter for a rolling 12-month period, and the latest release covers January to December 2012. As this is the second major release of data, we’ve started to present a clear view of changes in services over time.

Transactions explorer screenshot
Read more

May 16

Licensing dashboards launch on the Performance Platform

Phil Buckley, Product Manager of the Performance Platform, writes:

I’m very proud to announce the latest release of the Performance Platform. Building on the performance statistics we have for GOV.UK, this release powers the dashboards for all the different Licences, Notices, Registrations applications you can make. David Williams blogged about these in March.

The Licensing dashboards are the first of many; the Performance Platform is built to allow any government service to input data from any source, to see how that data changes over time, and in the future to compare their service’s performance with that of similar ones. The aim of the platform is to allow the owners to make data-driven decisions to improve their services.

Although the primary audience for this information is the person who owns the service, all this information is also publicly available – you can see it yourself at https://www.gov.uk/performance/licensing; and in the future you will be able to download the data too.

Read more

May 10

Analysing the format of Inside Government’s Policies

I’ve recently been embedded with the Inside Government team to work on understanding user behaviour through data analysis. One of my first tasks was to investigate the way that policies are being used and to identify any interesting or notable conclusions. Here’s an example of the format of a policy:

Example policy page

The content explorer provides a very useful snapshot of how the policy content is performing. But I wanted to dig further down into the data.

Read more

Apr 30

1 Comment

GOV.UK at 6 months old

Launched on 17 October 2012, GOV.UK has just celebrated 6 months of being live. In that time it’s received 188 million visits and 546 million pageviews; and over 9 million searches have been made on the site.

But what was the busiest day in those 6 months? Well, it depends on what you measure.

Read more

Apr 12

5 Comments

Search rankings with Google Spreadsheets

As one of the product analysts for GOV.UK, search is my main focus. Recently I built a handy tool to get an overview of Google search results, to help us review and optimise our content. I thought it was worth sharing as other people might find it useful, and my version was inspired by the work of others.

How to use the rank checker

If you just want to get on and use it, you don’t need to know much about how it all works. First, get your own copy of the spreadsheet:

  • You’ll need to be logged in to a Google/Gmail account with access to Google Drive (formerly Google Docs)
  • Open the view-only Google SEO rank checker spreadsheet
  • Select File > Make a copy…
  • Give the document a name and click OK

Read more

Mar 11

17 Comments

Interesting browser stats

One of the GDS design principles is ‘design with data’. Front end developers need to know what the current browser landscape looks like and in which browsers they should be regularly testing new features.

To help us do that, I created a tool, which extracts statistics from analytics and displays them as a nice line graph or as a data table.

When I used the tool I expected to see a collection of straight lines. What I actually saw had me scratching my head and wanting to delve further into the data. I thought I’d share some of the more interesting trends. Read more

Mar 1

5 Comments

Introducing the Content Explorer

Today we released a new module on the Performance Platform that enables exploration of how the individual components of GOV.UK and Inside Government are being used.

For each piece of content, we show the number of views it had in the past week along with measures of how users engaged with it. Read more

Feb 18

1 Comment

The Performance Platform is recruiting

Last summer we built a prototype of a tool designed to help departments make better use of their data to improve public services. In October that prototype became the first GOV.UK dashboard and by December a second dashboard had been created for the Inside Government section of GOV.UK.

Now, we need your help to take it even further. Read more

Jan 23

11 Comments

Cold comfort farm

It’s been cold and snowy. The weather has impacted on people’s lives across the UK, but has it affected people’s interaction with GOV.UK? Tara Stockford and I did some quick analysis of traffic and trends over the last couple of weeks. Read more

Jan 17

6 Comments

Government transaction costs – the story behind the data

Last July, GDS published a full list of all the transactional services that the Government offers to citizens and business, along with their annual volume of activity. It was the first time the Government had ever done this. Read more

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,316 other followers