Hello - I’m Tom Guilbert and I work in the Data, Mapping, Modelling and Information team at the Environment Agency. I’ve been working over the last few months on updating and improving our bathing water quality open data services …
At Defra, we’ve been redesigning all our guidance on GOV.UK so it better meets user needs. We’re now starting to do ‘usability testing’ to see how people use our new content so we can see where we should make further …
We’re posting here on the Defra digital blog some of the stories about our data, data activities and data releases. On 25 June, our Secretary of State Elizabeth Truss set out her vision for the role of open data in the future of food and farming.
One of the dubious privileges of my suburban upbringing was watching my Dad assemble flat pack furniture on rainy Sunday afternoons. As the hours passed and the chair, barbecue or desk started to emerge with missing legs or extra arms, …
The Smarter Guidance team has been working to make content smarter -- make it more readable and clearer for users. But how do we measure if we've been successful? I've devised one way and while it'll take more than a …
This week saw the beta release of the Environment Agency's flood data APIs and 4 new open data products from Ordnance Survey including the detailed OS Open Map - Local and the new OS Open Rivers network data. Alex Coley's …
...api. Joining things up I’m looking forward to exploring the potential as to how this data can be used together. There are lots of opportunities to make interesting investigations into...
When we're writing for GOV.UK, we use the active voice, but a lot of the source content we're rewriting uses the passive voice. This is one of the most significant differences in style between Smarter Guidance content on GOV.UK and …
A few of us Defra content designers recently went to the government content design community's first conference, at Impact Hub Westminster. There were 150 of us. We swapped ideas and shared our gripes. We drank tea and ate biscuits (really …
You may be familiar with GOV.UK, the single government website. It’s now had over 1.2 billion visits. But it actually hasn’t been around very long, and it has only just now completed its initial development. At the end of December …
