Blog

  • The Digital Services Framework is not fit for purpose

    Among the government’s most important priorities is the delivery of a new breed of digital by default public services. This is vital work: it’s not just about making services simpler, clearer and faster. It’s also about making them cheaper, so that we can focus our spending on front-line resources. For some public services, it’s of…

  • Keeping traffic flowing to your WordPress site after a big restructuring

    Any website which is around for more than a couple of years will probably go through some kind of restructuring – perhaps as part of getting a new theme, or reorganising and refining content for clarity and usability. Often this sort of process involves changes to the urls (“permalinks”) used to access individual posts and…

  • How we do usability testing with sensitive personal data

    How many times a day do you figuratively throw your phone across the room or shake your computer’s monitor in outrage when a website forgets who you are or does something ‘stupid’? I bet it’s more than you think. For every good service that you use, there are 10 poor ones. What is the difference…

  • “Official data, new light” – another dxw project goes live

    After much hard work Visual.ONS has now launched! The website shows ONS statistics using a wide range of content: infographics, interactive visualisations and short studies. The purpose of the site is to “make data, statistics and analysis more accessible, engaging and easier to understand”. Stats that engage people The motto of the website “official data,…

  • Thames Valley Housing – Online Customer Service

    We’ve had an exciting start to the year at dxw. We’ve been working with Thames Valley Housing (TVH) to try and improve their online customer services and in December we switched on a new part of the service: online payments. TVH looks after over 14,500 homes for a really wide range of residents, from renters,…

  • Accountability Hack 2014 – A closer look at the data we used

    Last weekend dxw entered a team into the Accountability Hack run jointly by the National Audit Office, The Office for National Statistics and Parliament. Our hack – Right to Buy-Bye ended up winning both the ONS category and the Best in Show prize. We’ve already blogged about the process of building the hack, so in…