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By By Ian Howe, working in the land registry  When you’re developing a product it’s really important to get a good understanding of your users and the problem you’re trying to solve. It’s really easy to get caught up in all the cool features that your product could have one day, but once you think you’re on the right track, there’s nothing better than actually trying to build something small to test your theory and discover new stuff. Since the start of the year, the team working on the Digital Mortgage have focused on just that. First we were ruthless and identified the absolute bare minimum that we felt we could build and still produce something that worked – in our case, something that created an online mortgage and something that let someone else look at it. Nothing more than that to start with and definitely the first versions of both, not the finished article. You may already know that agile teams work in short, focused “sprints” and in Land Registry we tend to run each...

Around half of British households expect the Bank of England to hike interest rates in the next six months, up sharply since July even though they have become more downbeat about their finances, a survey showed on Wednesday. Markit's monthly Household Finance Index showed 48 percent of households predict the BoE will raise interest rates over the next six months, the highest figure since July 2014 and up from 34 percent last month. Economists polled by Reuters expect a first interest hike early next year as Britain's economy shows little sign of slowing much. However, households were the gloomiest about their finances so far in 2015, across a majority of job sectors. They were slightly less downbeat about the prospects over the next 12 months than they were in July. Data company Markit said the survey suggested the boost in consumer morale from falling inflation has started to ease off. "Improving economic fundamentals and gradually rising income from emplo...