A project that to this day defines me professionally (it is definitely part of the reason I got my current role) and left its mark on me physically and mentally (my subsequent burnout seems to have been at least partially responsible for my diabetes and anxiety issues).

If you are reading this and know me you have probably heard this story (more than once) but one last time for the cheap seats.

I joined the ONS in 2013 and had already been working in the public service internet space for quite some time – by then I’d already done some interesting work for Jisc, the Medical Research Council and a start-up (Beanbag Learning), been blogging (and weeknoting) for a while, been involved with BarCamps & unconferences and volunteered for Mozilla.

…but AlphaGov and then GDS had happened and while I wasn’t willing to move to London I wanted to be a part of Martha’s ‘revolution not evolution’ and ONS offered me a chance to do that I hoped.

Be careful what you wish for.

Anyway, long story, slightly shorter. 

The ONS website as it stood was roundly derided by stakeholders and users.

Here are some real quotes – 

“..it [the ONS website] is also the world’s worst website.” Simon Rogers – The Guardian

“the ONS website is a national embarrassment.” Tim Harford – BBC Radio 4’s ‘More or Less’

Oh and;

“the ONS website — aaaargh” Chris Giles – Chief Economist at the Financial Times

Then in January 2014 the site crashed and was unavailable for several hours.

This led to my somewhat infamous spell running the ONS Twitter account that ended up getting coverage in the national press. It was a different time. I would definitely be fired these days.

Anyway the Board called in reinforcements in the shape of Tom Loosemore from GDS. They had more than enough on their plate though so Tom convinced the powers that be that Laura (my friend/boss – who I remain trauma bonded with to this day) should be trusted and empowered to fix things.

…and thusly she empowered me to make it happen.

Looking back there is no way you would do it the way we did.

A really small group of us (mainly me, Rob and Jonathan) did something vaguely resembling a Discovery with help from version 1.0 of the Open Data Institute and CX Partners.

I remember us being particularly inspired by John Sheridan’s work on legislation.gov.uk – which remains an exemplar to this day.

That evolved into a well received Alpha where we had a supplier team (most of whom lived together Big Brother style in an AirBnB in Newport – again it was a different time!) building out our ideas and testing some bets we had come up with. This was when it was the most fun.

We operated a little like an AlphaGov tribute act in the early days – I set up a blog which was on my credit card, an @onsdigital Twitter account, set up Github, got us on Slack, bought the team Macs.

We were radically open. I was testing my ideas about these ways of working at scale on the fly with an audience of senior folks extremely interested at every stage. I will say the support and encouragement that we got from the National Statistician John Pullinger and Chair of the UK Statistics Authority Andrew Dilnot – was fantastic and extremely reassuring throughout. I suspect we made a lot of people very nervous with how transparent we were but nobody ever let us know that.

The Alpha led into the Beta and to be honest the Beta was brutal. Compared to what you see today the team was tiny – heck I see Discovery teams with more people now. We/I bought in a bit too much to that lean start-up model for a ‘squad’ and while it definitely created a tight-knit, high performing team it also piled on the pressure and the stress to meet our (again with hindsight) ambitious time lines and budgets!

We were trying to do a lot with a little – specifically though we were focused on this mantra of ‘data intense, design simple’. Edward Tutfe was a big influence – we wanted the site to radiate information visually as well as via the reports. So we need charts that worked online (and on mobile). The same for tables. We benefited from having people like Alan Smith (now at the FT) and Rob Fry – who were guardians of good practice for data visualisation.

We wanted APIs and bulk downloads (and I was a bit fixated on JSON-LD and Microformats).

Honestly it was too ambitious for one small team…but it was fun to think about. I am still trying to land some of the ideas all this time later!

We ground it out though. Stayed open, stayed agile, remained user focused with constant user research right to the last minute.

I’m not sure I’d build a CMS from scratch again (too influenced by GOV.UK I fear) and we definitely did not engage with security early or deeply enough which led to a bunch of wasted time and delays when we could afford them least. These days we’d definitely have more Content Design expertise in the room as well.

Oh and somehow despite all the openness we didn’t entirely convince many (many) of our actual ONS colleagues to believe in the direction of travel. We did a better job with external critics than internal ones – a big regret.

Anyway despite a crisis (or two) towards the end and with a slight delay that meant I was actually in New Zealand (on a boat trip in Queenstown to be precise) when it happened, the site launched.

I’ve never been prouder professionally – before or since. I then pretty much fell apart and took a couple of years to put myself back together! 

Was it worth it? Yes – just about. I learned an enormous amount – about technology, agile ways of working, user research, leadership, comms and in the end about well-being. I have taken those lessons with me on everything I have done since and definitely became a better, more rounded, more empathetic product/digital leader off the back of it. Probably easier ways to learn those lessons though!

The ONS are in the process of building a new site to replace ‘ours’. 10 years is a good innings all things considered – Florence (the name of our CMS project) has earned a rest!