Improving 'Find' for the Find Property Information Service

Find Property Information is a GOV.UK service being developed by HM Land Registry which aims to provide a simple summary of property information. Recently we have improved our ‘postcode search’ functionality. Why did we do this? Our first iteration of searching was developed over a year ago, we knew the limitations of it, but it was ‘good enough’ for the early stages of the service. This allowed us to move onto developing other features....

January 31, 2018 · 8 min · Ian Ames

How Our Digital Team Works

I’m the Delivery Team Lead for a small multi-disciplinary team in government. We are developing the service in an agile way following the digital service standards developed by our colleagues at the Government Digital Service (GDS). We recently added the ability to keep a copy of the title summary (basic information about a property). It’s a great example of what this way of working looks like in practice. Because we can continually develop the service, we aim to deliver the features that deliver most value quickly, rather than waiting for the whole service to be finished....

October 6, 2017 · 5 min · Ian Ames

User Research Is the Most Frustrating Thing Ever

I’m the scrum master for a small team developing a new service for a government agency. The team has been working in an agile way for 20 months. I have been with them for 15 of those months. Our team is made up of user researchers, a designer, a BA, developers and testers. Dealing with users isn’t new to me, before joining my current team I worked in IT operations and service management, dealing with angry and frustrated users was a day to day part of the role....

August 16, 2016 · 4 min · Ian Ames