This week at Digital Land

Team

Natalie and Jess have been working out plans for a PropTech event with the Minister of State for Housing, Esther McVey. We're looking forward to discussing opportunities for greater efficiency and transparency in the housing market, some of the barriers to PropTech adoption and growth, and how central government can best support the sector.

Helena, Emily and Jake attended a brilliant service assessor training run by the GDS assessment team. They are now able to run internal service assessments, and also have developed a good understanding of what external assessors look for.

Compulsory purchase orders

Lorna ran some really interesting usability testing of the CPO (compulsory purchase order) explorer prototype. We're part way through the analysis at the moment but already we've identified a number of areas where we can improve. The results have also highlighted some assumptions that we need to revisit with planning policy colleagues.

Emily talking through user research post-it notes.

Helena has also completed the mammoth task of redacting CPO documents!

Brownfield sites

Emily, Michael and Paul worked on a draft of improved guidance for publishing brownfield land data. Paul and Jake worked on an information architecture for pages to see the data we're collecting. They decided to follow the DCAT standard, as used by data.gov.uk.

Paul's sketch of collector information flow and architecture

Developer contributions

Helena completed screening calls with the local authorities that have signed up for our for developer contributions private beta. The purpose of the calls was to understand the way authorities hold their data and their processes for reporting on developer contributions ahead of booking visits to each individual authority.