Today we welcome the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and the Ministry of Justice to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK.

Progress

This takes the total number of ministerial departments that have moved their corporate information to GOV.UK up to 20, leaving just 4 more to go.

This is fantastic progress and we’d like to thank colleagues in these organisations for all their hard work over the last few months and weeks, especially David Pearson at Defra and Nick Cammell at MOJ.

Highlights

Preparing Inside Government for the transition of each organisation invariably involves new features and of course a significant increase in content.

Highlights amongst these recent transitions include the addition of 29 new policies, taking the total number of policies up to 189. For each policy, you can read about the desired outcomes and see all the related announcements, consultations and publications in a single list called ‘Latest’, making it easier to track what has changed or is happening as a result.

We have also released a new navigation bar for Inside Government and a section on opportunities to engage with government; Get involved.

For more regular updates on Inside Government releases, you can follow our Tumblr blog, Inside Inside Government.

Last leg

We began transition of ministerial departments to Inside Government in November last year and by the end of April this year the remaining 4 will have completed the move.

We’ll be posting more details on those launches and what ‘completion’ means soon.

Last month was a really important one for the Digital by Default Service Standard. We launched our beta for one thing. Just as importantly, the Digital Leaders network – the people responsible for driving the digital agenda across government – agreed to the standard and the governance process for assessing services against it.

Not just tick boxes

Mention the word ‘governance’ and you can guarantee that most people will switch off. And with good reason. It usually means tick boxes, bureaucracy and lots of meetings. Too often, these kinds of process are inflexible, incoherent and opaque.

But we mustn’t ignore governance, because there has to be a fair and consistent way of answering the question ‘Has my new or redesigned service achieved the standard, and can it go on GOV.UK?’

As part of the beta Government Service Design Manual we published a couple of weeks ago, we included a draft version of the standard. This was a list of all the things new and redesigned services processing over 100,000 transactions per year must do before launching. It will formally apply from April 2014, but is already being used to help improve services ahead of them going live. The agreed standard will be included in the updated manual we’re launching next week.

We’ll include more detail about how the standard will be awarded in the manual very soon, but for now here are the three things we’ll be keeping in mind as services are assessed.

Consistency

The same standard applies to every service in scope. People see government as one unified entity, so we need services to be consistent.

To make it workable for a huge variety of different services, we have struck a balance between being making the standard definitive (on exactly what we mean by certain performance measures) and flexible (such as what it means to be ‘agile’).

But if a service is being redesigned, it’s public facing, and it processes over 100,000 transactions, the standard applies.

Common sense

Secondly, it will be applied with common sense. The standard represents a big change to how government builds and runs services, and that’s not going to happen overnight.

Some services being launched next year will have started their redesign process before the standard existed. Some are working with lots of legacy systems or old contracts. It may not to possible to meet every requirement to the letter on day 1 of a service. But the point of the standard is to get great services on GOV.UK that can be iteratively improved very regularly. If a service proves it can do that, and constantly improve from a good basis after launch, then the standard has done it’s job.

Openness

Finally, progress should be made in the open. As part of meeting the standard, every service team in government will have to produce a public, regularly updated record of how they’ve have gone about meeting it throughout the lifetime of the service.

That’s really important, because it helps government share ideas and information and gives the public – the users of those services – the chance to see how we’re building them.

We’ll be publishing more detail about the specific process services will be going through as part of the manual soon, but we still welcome your comments on the beta.

Highlights this week – a great presentation to all our staff from Adam Bye of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, who’ve recently moved all their services to GOV.UK, and the completion of further departmental moves including Defra and the Ministry of Justice. The Student Loans Company, working with GDS, have just completed a major digital product release, including significant changes to their registration process. Several other large transactions at Defra, the Home Office, DWP and HMRC are also making progress.

Next week sees the full launch of our Service Standard manual – advising anyone who is working with us how we want to build public services online – and also the move of DWP’s corporate information to GOV.UK. Our other big news is that GOV.UK has won the Design Museum’s digital category for excellence in design this year.

(Full transcript below)

What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Today we’ve had our monthly all-staff meeting which has been really good. We had Adam Bye come along from FCO, who have just moved all their services onto GOV.UK. He gave a really great insight and a really good talk. So thanks to Adam for taking the time out and coming to talk to us. Also this week, significantly we’ve had a couple of big departments move across. So Defra have moved across, all their content is now on Inside Gov, David Pearson and Daniel De Cruz really helping us on that front, so thanks to those guys. Also MOJ, another pretty significant department moving all their corporate material across. Nick Camel and Mark Archibald there helping us out, and getting that moved over, so thanks to those guys.

Any news from the transformation team?

We have got some great news from Student Loans Company [SLC], who we have been working with since March last year, to help them build up their digital capability. They have done their second major release last weekend, which was the biggest release SLC have done in years. They have significantly changed the registration process which, anyone who has ever been a student will realise, was no fun. They have most significantly launched a new loan product for people doing further education over the age of 24, which they have launched a year ahead of schedule. They have launched it online instead of on paper. They are doing the real transformation piece out there, up in Glasgow, miles away from Whitehall. But really demonstrating how you can deliver different services quicker, and much cheaper.

In other departments, Defra are just concluding the inception for the CAP – the Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme – that finishes this week. So they will be pointed in the right direction to start delivering that product as an online service. We have got the Home Office starting inception on their Visit Visa process, we have got Carers’ Allowance starting inception on their process. We have also got HMRC’s unified tax approach going into alpha build this week, so a lot happening in that space.

What is coming up next week?

We have got the Service Standard coming out of beta, so this is our manual that tells anyone who is working with us how we want to build public services online. Also, we have got DWP’s corporate material moving onto GOV.UK which is a big chunk of work going on there as well.

What else has been going on this week?

We have also had other big news for GBS this week – we have had a real major win. The Design Museum has run its annual competition to look at the best designs around, and GOV.UK has won the digital category, so that is a great reward and reflection on the design excellence that has gone into that system. Well done to all the design team on that, and obviously thank you to the Design Museum for displaying impeccable taste in selecting GOV.UK as their winner.

As one of the product analysts for GOV.UK, search is my main focus. Recently I built a handy tool to get an overview of Google search results, to help us review and optimise our content. I thought it was worth sharing as other people might find it useful, and my version was inspired by the work of others.

How to use the rank checker

If you just want to get on and use it, you don’t need to know much about how it all works. First, get your own copy of the spreadsheet:

• You’ll need to be logged in to a Google/Gmail account with access to Google Drive (formerly Google Docs)
• Open the view-only Google SEO rank checker spreadsheet
• Select File > Make a copy…
• Give the document a name and click OK

Now you’ll have an editable version, ready to customise with the keywords you want to check:

• Enter your website URL in the top left corner (eg http://www.gov.uk)
• Enter your keywords or phrases in the top row – one in each column
• (Optional) Enter the URLs you’re interested in (eg those of your competitors) in the first column, from cell A5 downwards – note that to get a match, the URL has to be exact and complete, ie including the “http…”
• (Optional) Highlight the search results section from row 17 to the bottom, select Format > Conditional formatting…, and enter your website URL next to ‘Text contains’

You should now see the top 50 Google UK results for each of your keywords, with any results for your website highlighted in yellow. At the top, you’ll see your current highest position for each keyword (or ‘Not in top 50’), followed by the position of any specific URLs you’ve entered.

You can insert as many extra rows as you want for specific URLs (copy the formulas from the row above), or delete rows if you don’t need them. And you can add more keyword columns, up to a limit of 50 per spreadsheet. To keep things simpler and faster, use several spreadsheets for different topics/sections rather than cramming all your keywords into one big file.

Bear in mind that the results will be reloaded every time you open the spreadsheet, so if you want to save a snapshot of a particular day, copy and paste the data to a new sheet using ‘Paste values only’ (or take screenshots).

Note: If you see #N/A or #VALUE! because the results haven’t loaded properly, try re-entering or changing the keyword, or just wait a while for the data to refresh. It’s been built as a working tool for the GOV.UK team, but it’s possible that you might see the odd glitch as it works currently.

How the spreadsheet works

The core function is a Google Spreadsheets feature called ImportXML, which ‘scrapes’ information from a web page or a file. In this case, it’s extracting the URLs from search results.

Credit must go to Nathan Grimm, a marketing manager from Seattle who shared a formula that works, which got me started. Lots of people have written useful guides to building SEO tools (for search engine optimisation) using ImportXML, but the older methods no longer work properly with Google’s current search result format.

After breaking down the formula to understand how it worked, with a bit of trial and error I adapted it to find the highest ranking for any URL beginning with ‘https://www.gov.uk/’. At first it was a simple vertical list of keywords, but I realised that to check several URLs it was using an ImportXML call each time and would soon hit the limit of 50 per spreadsheet.

It also seemed more useful to see the actual results at a glance, rather than just the ranking numbers. So I rejigged it to a horizontal layout with the keywords along the top, and split the formula into three parts:

• First, the ImportXML formula in row 17 fetches the top Google search results for the keyword in row 1, and shows them from row 17 downwards.
• The formula in row 2 looks at this list of results to see if it can find the website from cell A1, and if so, in what position. If there’s no match, it shows ‘Not in top 50’.
• The formula in rows 5-14 looks at the same list of results to see if it can find the specific URL in column A, and if so, in what position. If there’s no match, it shows a blank space.

This way, you can compare the results side by side for a set of related keywords, and each keyword only needs one ImportXML call, no matter how many URLs you check against its results.

The Google search URL in the ImportXML function includes several variables:

• &pws=0 gets the ‘standard’ results as seen by users who aren’t signed in to Google, rather than your personalised results
• &gl=UK gets results from Google UK – change it to another country code if you need to
• &num=50 gets the top 50 results – change the number if you want more or fewer

Annoyingly, the conditional formatting in Google Spreadsheets can’t automatically use the URL from the top left cell. I looked into doing this with a script but it seemed complicated, so for now the URL has to be entered separately in the conditional formatting settings. You could also highlight your main competitors or partners in different colours for an easy overview.

This is simply a spreadsheet so everything can be customised to suit you. If you make something better, why not share it?

Why GOV.UK cares about ranking

There’s debate among search analysts and marketers about how much rankings really matter. Studies have claimed that up to 53% of clicks go to the top result (or 36%, or 18%). Most people choose one of the first few results, and rarely look past the first page. But tracking your exact position is less meaningful now that search results are increasingly personalised for different users.

What matters most for GOV.UK is that people can quickly find accurate information about government services. That’s an essential part of our aim to be ‘simpler, clearer, faster’. If people can’t find what they need online, they may end up using more expensive telephone services or paper forms.

Some other sources might not be accurate, either because they’re out of date, or they’ve misunderstood something, or they’re slightly misleading – for example, charging for a service that’s available free, or charging a premium for checking an application. So we want to make sure that people can easily find the official, current government information near the top of their search results.

For more details about how we’re using search analytics, see Lana Gibson’s posts: The SEO war – fighting the good fight in search and SEO for GOV.UK.

We need to be sure that before any of the identity assurance framework suppliers begin providing services to departments, they are certified as being capable of delivering proof of identity as defined in the Government’s Good Practice Guides.

The Cabinet Office has joined a standards certification organisation (tScheme), who will be one of the initial certification bodies to provide the necessary independent assessment of the framework suppliers for compliance with the guides.

What does certification mean?

When a provider is certified it means they have demonstrated that they have met standards for providing a trusted, reliable and secure service. Those standards are defined and published by the Cabinet Office and the National Technical Authority (CESG).

Certification will also mean that standards are consistently applied and the identities they prove are reusable across national and local government.

tScheme

tScheme is an independent, industry-led, self-regulatory scheme. It was set up to create strict assessment criteria, based on industry best practice, for Trust Services (professional assurance and advisory services that address the risks and opportunities of digital technology) such as Identity Assurance.

It’s similar to the US Kantara Initiative, and we are working with both to try and ensure that their certifications are globally interoperable and mutually recognised.

Membership of tScheme is available to all interested sectors of industry, and a broad range of organisations are already represented and contributing to its development.

tScheme particularly welcome the contributions from representatives of end users – people who need to rely on Trust Services.

What does this mean for suppliers?

Certification provides suppliers with a consistent benchmark for their services, and gives them confidence that their services are robust and reliable. It is how government, and users, will know that the suppliers can be trusted.

Organisations who play a part in a process like Identity Assurance must be trusted to protect and manage user data, and users must remain in control of the data they disclose and how it is used.

In the Open Standards Principles we said that we’d set up an Open Standards Board to help us to decide which open standards to use in government IT.

Now that we’ve published the first 8 challenges on the Standards Hub, it’s time to set up the Board and start making those decisions.

The Board will focus on making sure that our open standards meet users’ needs and achieve a level playing field for open source and proprietary software. They will consider the ideas and proposals that users put forward through the Hub and will advise us on which open standards to implement.

We’ll be sharing their discussions and recommendations through the Standards Hub.

Who’s on the Board and why?

We ran an advertisement early in 2012 for volunteers outside government to join the Board. At that stage we weren’t clear on the exact role of the Board so we waited until the Open Standards Principles were set before we made a decision on who should be invited to join.

The volunteers we’ve selected have fantastic track records in using, implementing and developing open standards. They will join me and other experts who we’ve invited to contribute.

The full line up is:

• Liam Maxwell, Government Digital Service (Chair)
• John Atherton, Surevine
• Adam Cooper, Bolton University
• Matthew Dovey, Joint Information Systems Committee
• Paul Downey, Government Digital Service
• Lee Edwards, London Borough of Redbridge
• Tim Kelsey, NHS Commissioning Board
• John Sheridan, The National Archives
• Jeni Tennison, Open Data Institute
• Chris Ulliott, CESG

You can find out more about each of the Board members on the Standards Hub. We’re waiting to hear back from one other applicant and will update the Standards Hub if there are any changes.

How you can get involved

We want how we select our open standards to be a completely transparent process and we’re keen to draw in ideas from all of our users. I encourage you to register on the Standards Hub and to get involved in the debate.

When you register, you’ll notice that we ask you to tick a box if you’d be willing to get involved more directly – for example as a volunteer through working groups or panels set up to investigate detailed proposals.

Anyone who registers and ticks this box could be invited to join us in groups such as these, particularly if you’ve put forward ideas through the Hub that we need to investigate further.

The work of these groups will be transparent too so it’s entirely up to you if you want to accept an invitation to work with us in this way. If not, you can continue providing your thoughts or follow the discussion through the Standards Hub.

If you’d like to apply to be a volunteer member of the Open Standards Board in the future, we’ll be keeping the recruitment process open so you can send in your application at any time. If a vacancy becomes available and you have a particular area of expertise that we’re missing, we’ll be in touch.

We very much look forward to getting the debate started so we can set the right open standards that deliver better, more connected digital services.

Today we launched the Government Service Design Manual. It sets out the agreed Digital by Default Service Standard, and provides tools, guidance and code to help teams across government achieve it.

It meets one of our 14 commitments in the Government Digital Strategy. And it demonstrates the future of collaboration and governance in government digital and technology: browser-based, iterative, owned by many, and with a strong bias towards action.

Laying the foundations

GOV.UK was created as a high quality platform for publishing information. It works because it was built on a strong foundation – the Design Principles and the Style Guide – and produced by a group of people across government with the knowledge, imagination and skills to follow and adapt them.

The service design manual is now doing the same job for the next big challenge – transforming public services. Government now has a clear set of guidelines for building services that are simple and intuitive enough for users to succeed first time and unaided. It provides a shared understanding about what good looks like, and a way of ensuring that every new or redesigned service that is launched on GOV.UK is of a consistent and high quality.

Supporting not imposing

The manual provides support for many types of people across government, recognising that it takes many skills and roles to deliver outstanding public services. Digital services depend on deep specialist subject matter, understanding of user needs, strong feedback loops with the ability to make responsive changes, and technology that’s suitably agile to deliver those changes rapidly.

The manual is for all involved in that process. Service managers, analysts, designers, developers, finance team members and suppliers all have a part to play. Digital services can no longer be seen as the domain of the ‘tech lead’ anymore, although the CIO/CTO community have a vital part to play.

Over time, it will be a reference point for teams to learn from. And increasingly it will become something they own, improve and contribute to themselves as they blog about their progress.

A new governance model?

‘Governance’ is a top-down term. Monthly meetings, forests of paper, dozens of steering boards and the natural exclusivity, which comes with managers of large budgets making decisions for all – these are all indicators of a hierarchical approach. The centre of government’s digital estate needs to free up departments and agencies to deliver; it needs to provide support, link up a sometimes divided community and help bottom-up, user-focused services to develop. Setting standards and managing them have their place, but this manual is designed to free up government from the dead hand of bureaucratic overkill. This browser-based service will accelerate decision making and remove the need for many boards and unwieldy processes. As our digital services become primarily digital, the tools and governance we use should reflect that.

Get involved

The beta version we released last month has been updated with more content, improved navigation and cleaner design. We wanted to add search but fell just short of time – this is coming very soon in our next iteration. We’ve had hundreds of feedback suggestions, and some very positive comments from supporters here and overseas. Today’s launch is just the start of the process, and we are always looking for feedback to improve what’s there. You can get in touch with the team by using the ‘Feedback’ link in the manual.

Guidance and standards mean little without delivery, and that has begun in earnest across the first of the ‘exemplar’ services that are undergoing radical transformation by government departments. What we’ve published today provides a foundation for making them a success, and a high bar for all of government to achieve and be held accountable to.

Last night we were surprised and proud to win the Design Museum’s Design of the Year award.

That picture sums up what I want to say. This is not just a win for GDS, this is a win for everyone across government.

In that picture there is a fraction of the team who have worked on this at GDS: designers, content editors, developers, product managers, operations, strategy, engagement, and project management people. There’s the Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd, and Rohan Silva, Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister. Pippa Norris from Ministry of Defence, Roger Oldham from Ministry of Justice and Adam Bye from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. There’s also Margaret Calvert (who designed the UK road signage system in the ’60s) and our little award.

You can’t design in isolation and you can’t build a site like GOV.UK without working in truly multi-disciplinary teams across all of government. Thank you to everyone who has worked on this.

Last night lots of people were asking, “what does this mean”. It means two things: firstly, that the civil service can deliver ambitious, world-class digital projects at scale. Secondly, it will us help recruit the design and digital talent we need to start building digital capability right across government.

Six months ago today GOV.UK moved out of beta, yesterday we released the Government Service Design Manual and today DWP became the 21st ministerial department to move over to GOV.UK. There’s lots more work still to do and we continue to be focused on designing services so good that people prefer to use them.

Read more about reactions to the award on Storify.

Today we welcome the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to GOV.UK.

DWP is the 21st department to move to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK. It has joined Inside Government with almost 900 publications, 9 new policies, a host of case studies, and detailed guidance on Universal Credit and workplace pensions.

I know firsthand what it takes for a department to move onto GOV.UK because I helped manage the process for DECC prior to joining GDS. Since joining GDS in February 2013 I have been the transition manager for the DFID and DWP transitions.

The transition manager is responsible for supporting departments through the process, tracking progress and ensuring open, clear communication between the department and the Inside Government team. Having experienced transition from both perspectives, I know that an effective transition manager needs to be supportive and organised but also unafraid to challenge assumptions and conventional ways of thinking and doing.

This role has been an important part of the process that’s now seen almost all of the ministerial departments moving to Inside Government (with the rest to follow very soon). Congratulations to Liz Curbison and her team in Leeds for making it happen for DWP.

The Government Digital Service started out as a small group of people with experience building and running large online services. Since then we’ve grown the team, added lots of smart people, and talked to even more experts from other organisations. The Government Service Design Manual is an attempt to bottle that collective wisdom, with the aim of improving public services and making sure they meet the Digital by Default Service Standard.

So how did we write and review more than 286 (at the time of writing) items of guidance?

Writing

Most of the content was authored by people who do what they wrote about. So members of our user research team wrote about card sorting and ethnographic research, designers and developers wrote about accessibility, testing and APIs and product and delivery managers wrote about agile. There is content from analytics specialists, content editors, web operations experts, procurement professionals and more.

For me, this meant writing on lots of topics I’m passionate about, from hosting and configuration management to monitoring and releasing software. I’m particularly proud of the guide on what is devops as it’s an emerging area I’ve been actively involved in.

Passion

What makes a strong piece of guidance is passion. Anyone in GDS was able to get involved in creating content for the manual if they wanted, all it took was to start writing. Hopefully this same passion for the individual topics will keep the content up-to-date.

With that interest and expertise for a given topic also comes access to a wider community of other experts, and we’ve used this to get as many eyes on specialist topics as possible.

Curation

Even with all that writing going on we wouldn’t have a coherent manual without the efforts of a central team. The Digital by Default Standard team took on the job of curating the deluge of incoming content, making sure links between documents existed and that we weren’t contradicting each other or government policy. The content also needed to fit into an understandable hierarchy and the Digital by Default team managed this, evolving it based on feedback and more active user testing.

Having so many different (and different types of) people writing content should have led to a huge number of typos and crimes against grammar. While the Digital by Default Standard team did some of the work here, the open and collaborative approach really helped too. Many eyes really did make light work, with a collaborative spirit around finding and fixing problems as content was written. We even got some grammar and spelling corrections submitted by people from outside GDS, so a big thank you to anyone who helped out in that way.

Over to you

The service design manual content is available on GitHub and includes advice on contributing. This can’t be a static document. Language can always be made clearer, new topics added or old ones amended. We’re all still learning, and keeping the manual up-to-date is critical. If you have experience building services, especially inside government, and you want to share then please help by writing new content or commenting on suggested changes.

Highlights – this week marks 6 months of GOV.UK, with some great statistics including 187 million visits to the site and 546 million page views since launch. We were really pleased this week to be chosen by the Design Museum as their Design of the Year 2013 – not just for the team in GDS, but for all the departments who’ve been supporting work on GOV.UK. The Digital by Default Service Manual was also launched this week; we’d love your feedback – get in touch through the site. And another big departmental move to Inside Government, with DWP’s corporate content coming over.

Next week sees two more departments moving over: Treasury and Education, and we’re also holding the monthly meeting of departmental Digital Leaders. On the agenda are a presentation from Tim Brooks, from our Digital Advisory Board, and a look at training for service managers. We’ve also got some international visitors, including ministers from Indonesia and South Africa.

(Full transcript below)

What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Well this week we had 6 months of GOV.UK having gone live. We had some great statistics. There were 187 million visits to the site; huge numbers and of that, 546 million page views. It is fantastic that so many people are accessing the site.

What has been even more fantastic this week is that the Design Museum kindly chose us to be their ‘Design of the Year’. We were against some fantastic competition, not just in the digital space, but also things like the Shard and the Olympic Cauldron, so we were thrilled to receive that. Not just for people here in GDS, but actually for all the people in departments who have supported us, not just over the last 6 months, but for years now, in building GOV.UK. So great credit to everybody for that.

The other thing that we have built, again with lots of input from many people across Government, was released on Tuesday and that was our Digital By Default Service Manual. That was a commitment in the Government Digital Strategy and that has now gone live, as Version 1. We would really welcome people’s feedback and there are links on the site to do that, so please do get in touch.

On Wednesday, we had our next move onto the Inside Government bit of GOV.UK. So DWP [the Department for Work & Pensions] moved over to become the next department, and again great thanks to Liz Curbison and Kevin Adams who did so much work in DWP to make that happen.

That sounds like a busy week. What do we have coming up next week?

Well some more departments moving onto GOV.UK, so next week we have the Treasury and the Department for Education. We are looking forward to welcoming them; lots of work going on behind the scenes to make that a seamless and smooth transition.

We have also got our next Digital Leaders Monthly Meeting. Two of the things to flag on there; the first one is our regular presentation from a member of the Digital Advisory Board. We have got Tim Brooks coming on Wednesday, which will be fantastic.

We are also considering a paper about training for service managers. Again, having service managers for each service is a commitment in the Government Digital Strategy. This is about how we are actually going to start their induction training. Digital leaders will consider, and make sure we have got everything we need in that training package.

We have also got lots of international visitors next week. This week, looking back, we had the Deputy Chief Secretary from St Helena who came over and spoke to us. Next week, we have got the whole of the Open Government Partnership, so countries from across the world who are coming to visit us in London and share their experiences. Particularly we have got some ministers from Indonesia and South Africa who will be coming into GOV.UK to find out more about what we are doing and also share their learnings. So we are really looking forward to that.

The first thing you see when you walk into GDS is the 7 main messages which guided the build of the GOV.UK alpha. Visitors to GDS often scribble them down, and like our Design Principles they help provide a shared language for people inside and outside government.

They’re also really useful points to keep in mind as we build a community around the exemplar services and the new service manual.

Digital by default

In November 2012 the Government Digital Strategy stated that from April 2014 all new and redesigned services processing over 100,000 transactions a year would have to meet the digital by default standard if they were to be launched and linked to from GOV.UK. It also stated that GDS would be responsible for defining that standard. In promoting an agile approach, the standard and guidance are a radical departure from what’s gone before.

Putting users first

People who use the standard are service managers. Service managers develop and deliver all the changes necessary to provide effective digital services. Because the role of service manager is relatively new it’s been a challenge to find them in government departments and to engage them in our development process. Other users of the standard are digital leaders, service teams (including designers and developers) and our own transformation team. By talking to these users we created profiles and user journeys to map out how each user might use the guidance. We then structured the guidance accordingly for our alpha release.

Learning from the journey

We wanted to expose our users to the standard and the service design manual as often as possible. We started with a simple email group, sending out weekly updates about the development of the standard and requesting feedback on its content, structure, guidance and governance. We kept close ties with our transformation team to make sure we added new service managers to the group as they joined GDS. The feedback became a foundation for the beta version of the standard, released last month.

Building a network of trust

When iterating the alpha version, we were determined to include as much user feedback as possible. In January 2013 we held a workshop for colleagues across government to air their concerns and expectations. This session was invaluable and we collated feedback into a directory, identifying the most significant areas of concern. We told our users what actions we were going to take in time for the beta release; by doing this our users could see that we were focusing on the areas they cared about most.

Moving barriers aside

At the workshop service managers asked for more opportunities to meet up to share ideas and discuss similarities about service transformation across government. We proposed a service managers’ ‘show and tell’.

Creating an environment for technology leaders to flourish

The first event went ahead on 11 April and brought together service managers from the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the Department for Transport (DfT) and the Cabinet Office. The format proved to be a success, with service managers identifying and sharing problems and proposing solutions.

The service manager show and tell will now be a regular event, but our approach to building the community is still very much driven by what our users are telling us. We will continue to work with service managers to identify needs and help make the connections that will ultimately lead to more information sharing and better services being built.

Last Friday Rebecca Kemp, Joshua Marshall and I visited the opening of the ‘Design that Makes a Difference’ exhibition at the Royal College of Art. Josh is our accessibility lead and Rebecca leads the Assisted Digital programme. Organised as a collaboration between the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and the Norwegian government, the exhibition is about “inclusive design” and “showcases 20 leading projects from the UK and Norway that demonstrate the benefits of people-centred design thinking”.

GOV.UK is featured alongside Fixperts, The Amazings and an incredible redesigned Norwegian voting booth.

At the event I gave a short talk about GOV.UK and our approach to inclusive design which can be summed up in our sixth design principle: “Accessible design is good design. We should build a product that’s as inclusive, legible and readable as possible.”

There’s a lot of slightly confusing jargon in this area – phrases like inclusive design, accessibility and assisted digital. They are not the same thing but there is a significant amount of overlap because they are all about making sure that products and services meet the needs of different types of users.

‘Assisted digital’ is about how we will make sure that people who are offline can access digital by default services. As we say in the Government Digital Strategy, “Everyone who can use digital services independently will be encouraged to do so (Action 8 of the Government Digital Strategy), and the 18% of people who are offline will use assisted digital support (Action 9 of the Government Digital Strategy).”

There is a big mainstream need for more straightforward and convenient digital services. More people are shopping, banking and paying bills online than using government services. But that’s not where our ambition ends. Making services digital by default should make them better for everybody and the projects in ‘Design that Makes a Difference’ showed us that that is possible.

If we’re aiming to provide services digitally to as many people as we can, then we owe it to everyone to have our products be as accessible as we can make them. That’s the aim of the accessibility work we’ve done so far on GOV.UK, to ensure that no user is excluded from accessing any of the information or tools that we publish.

It was hugely gratifying to be included in an exhibition that focused on products that are designed around ease of use and usability. We’ve worked hard on the accessibility of GOV.UK and continue to make the products we build as inclusive to as many people as we can. We welcome your feedback if you think there’s an area of the site that can be improved upon.

One of the updates we’ve made to the Government Service Design Manual is to add video case studies. Video has been one of the best methods we’ve found for quickly and candidly sharing what it’s like to work on a digital service.

Most of them take the form of short interviews with staff from GDS (and beyond) about what it is they do, like this one from Sarah Richards about the purpose of an Alpha…

Why use video?

We’ve been experimenting with video for some time now, from the regular week notes to these talks captured at SPRINT13.

Initially, it proved to be a great way of sharing what’s going on within a growing team – especially as development on GOV.UK ramped up and GDS expanded. But we soon got feedback from colleagues throughout the civil service that they liked seeing how other teams talk about their work.

In the case of the manual, videos are a great way of giving a personal perspective to the huge amount of information and guidance we’ve published. People learn in different ways, and having someone talk about their experience of working on digital services can be a really valuable way of sharing information.

The staff’s the star

Recently, we visited some staff at a DWP centre in Sheffield to find out more about their experiences with video. They told us that short pieces, in which people doing the work spoke directly about it, were the best way of finding out about new initiatives or techniques for working. No need for snazzy animation or scripting; just simple, candid conversation.

There are technical benefits to making videos like that: it means we don’t have to spend too long on post-production, and also means we don’t need to spend lots of money on high-end equipment or locations.

But, most importantly, it means the focus is entirely on the interviewee. Lots of people, when asked to talk about what they do, do a brilliant job of explaining it quickly and clearly. The interviewer just needs to find the right question to ‘unlock’ their insight and enthusiasm.

Making things open

As well as publishing these videos in the manual, they’re also on our YouTube channel. We want to make sure that videos can be shared far and wide by anyone who finds them useful, whether those people are in government or not.

We also know that while video is a great tool for a lot of people, there are still plenty of people who can’t access them. So we’re making sure that each video is accompanied by either a transcript or a passage of text covering the same ground. We’re still exploring new ways of doing that, and new options for embedding transcripts that cater better to those with accessibility needs.

We’ll be adding more videos to the manual as users begin to request them, so if there are any topics you think could benefit from some first-hand insight, let us know.

This week we welcome the Department for Education and HM Treasury to GOV.UK.

Launch of Department for Education

DfE is the 22nd department to move to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK. The department joins Inside Government with 1,546 publications, 579 news articles, 120 speeches and 15 policies.

With DfE, we have released a new document type, called ‘authored articles’. These are articles published by ministers or officials in the media (for example, Michael Gove’s article in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ about reading). Although this was released to coincide with DfE’s transition, it is something we have long been intending to do and we expect most departments to use it.

Launch of HM Treasury

HM Treasury is the 23rd department to move its content to GOV.UK. The Treasury joins us with 418 news articles, 330 publications, 207 speeches and 8 policies (they lead on 8 and are involved in another 3 that have already been published).

HM Treasury also has a rich history and has come across with an account of the history of 11 Downing St and 1 Horseguards, which both sit in the new history section of GOV.UK.

One to go

We are on track to have completed the transition of the 24 ministerial departments along with Number 10 and the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office by the end of April. This will bring to end an exciting 5 months and we will be celebrating this milestone here on the blog, so watch this space.

Highlights: This week we visited the DVLA in Swansea, went to their executive board and met the team working on 1 of the 23 exemplar transactions which are being redesigned to meet the digital by default service standard. DfE (Department for Education) and HMT (Her Majesty’s Treasury) became numbers 22 and 23 out of the 24 central government departments moving to GOV.UK. We also visited the House of Lords to explain the changes to the identity scheme. Next week we move the 24th and final department site to GOV.UK, and there will be a special announcement mid week so keep your eyes on this blog…

What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Yesterday, we went to Swansea to see the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) where we go regularly, we have a team down there. We went to the executive board at DVLA to see their progress in terms of their digital agenda. It’s a big organisation; there are 6000 people down there providing all the motoring services for drivers and the insurance industry in this country.

We saw a project down there that the team have been doing; it’s 1 of the exemplars (23 exemplar transactions to be redesigned to meet the new digital by default service standard).

It will, very simply, allow drivers to see their points, their entitlements, and more details about the data held about them. It’s early days yet, but it looks really good. We expect to see something probably more in public beta later in the year, maybe in the autumn time. It was great to go down there, to meet the team, to see a lot of new skills, and post-its on the wall.

I should take a moment to say thanks to David Hancock, Carolyn Williams, Dai Vaughan, Rohan Gye and all the team down there; they’ve done a terrific job. It was good to go and we’re going back there again soon.

What else has been at happening at GDS this week?

We’re closing in on getting all the major departments onto GOV.UK. Two big wins this week: DFE (Department for Education) and HMT (Her Majesty’s Treasury) moved to GOV.UK. Two big departments, number 22 and 23 out of the 24 departments. Next week we move some more assets over and we can celebrate moving central government onto GOV.UK. A big week for the team.

The other big event this week was our first visit to the House of Lords as a team. Chris Ferguson (Deputy Director Identity Assurance) and I accompanied Francis Maude (Minister for Cabinet Office) and Nick Hurd (Minister for Civil Society) to meet a bunch of Lords, to explain the changes to the identity scheme and the whole market-making ethos behind it. Very interesting, not least because one of the Lords we met was a previous Home Secretary in the year of the ID card.

It was a very good debate; we were in there for some time. We got lost of course, as you do in those buildings, but it was great to go there. We bumped into Martha (Lane Fox), who was on day 3 in the Lords. It was a really exciting week for the team to go and be able to present to the Lords. We got a great response and many of them are coming back into the GDS to see how we’re going on with identity. So a good win and it’s getting us on the radar.

What is happening next week?

UK Export Finance moves onto GOV.UK, the 24th of our major central government departmental sites to move onto GOV.UK. It moves early next week. After that there will be a special announcement in the middle of next week to show 1 or 2 other assets moving in quite a high profile way. I can’t talk about that right now, but keep your eye on this blog in the middle of next week. Let’s celebrate GOV.UK being a central asset.

Then we reset and we’ve got 300 plus agencies to go in the next year. Next week let’s celebrate getting the major parts of central government onto one domain, something people said would “Never happen in a federated system.” It’s happened only, what, five months since GOV.UK launched? It’s a tremendous effort by every member of teams right across government.

And which direction are we going?

Onwards, I would say.

Today marks the return of our occasional series of videos introducing GDS teams. So far, we’ve introduced the Transformation team, the Finance team and the Hosting and Infrastructure team, and shone the Spotlight on procurement. Now we’d like to give you a quick look at the work of the GDS User research team.

Meet the User research team – video transcript

Jo Inskip (Customer insight manager, Government Digital Service):

One of our key roles is to support colleagues to make decisions that are founded in research and in insight.

Angela Collins-Rees (User research specialist, Government Digital Service):

Understanding the behaviour of the user and understanding what they might want from a product.

Nick Breeze (Customer insight manager, Government Digital Service):

The job is all about the user, but I guess, all our jobs are all about the user.

Kate Cook (User research specialist, Government Digital Service):

It’s this end-to-end cycle about understanding what people need through to measuring success.

Where does user research come in the product cycle?

Angela Collins-Rees:

User research is very important throughout the whole product life cycle.

Kate Cook:

The GOV.UK mainstream site launched in October. We tested different areas of the site and as a result of that there were a significant amount of changes that were made. The homepage changed quite significantly; there was a lot more browse experience rather than just search.

Jo Inskip:

There’s a lot of early stage research that can happen to understand your audience group before you jump into designing or building anything.

Quantity or quality?

Angela Collins-Rees:

The quantitative is really looking at a much wider piece of research, it’s actually targeting very big numbers.

Nick Breeze:

What that doesn’t give you is the depth of information that you get from a one-to-one interview.

Angela Collins-Rees:

With the qualitative type of research, it’s more about the insight; it’s more about people’s behaviour, how they’re using something.

Jo Inskip:

Something that we’ve been doing recently is about measuring people’s journey through a transaction. People booking their driving test, about four or five pages into the actual transaction, everyone was dropping out. What we then understood through the work that we did was that nothing was technically going wrong. Everyone was going so far into the journey because they wanted to know how much it was going to cost. All we needed to do was to put the cost earlier in the journey.

What is guerilla testing?

Kate Cook:

Guerilla testing is really about low-cost rapid user testing. It’s literally just asking people if you can have 10 minutes of their time.

Angela Collins-Rees:

Most people are very familiar with the lab-based testing sort of scenarios, but what we tend to do here is kind of go out and meet people.

Nick Breeze:

It has its advantages because it’s really quick and you can go in and you can take a designer with you and you can feed it back into the teams really quickly.

Depth, insight and understanding

Jo Inskip:

Other objectives might be about depth, and about insight and about understanding. And if you need to do some work for Rural Payments [the Rural Payments Agency, RPA], and you need to understand farmers and you really need to get to know, what is a day like for a farmer? You’re talking about taking a small sample of people and understanding them really, really well, getting to grips with their life. And understanding how that then links into your product.

Martha said we needed a revolution.

As of this moment, 10 Downing Street, the Deputy PM’s office, all 24 of the UK’s central government departments and its embassies around the world are now sharing a single, joined-up presence on the web at www.gov.uk/government.

Today marks the end of a 6-month transition led by GDS and involving many talented digital teams, policy experts, project managers and content editors across Whitehall to merge these 26 domains (and a few more besides) into one. Together, we have published over 50,000 pages of web content, weeded out 116,000 pages and files, and redirected 275,000 URLs from old sites to their new home on GOV.UK.

It was a herculean task, and everyone who has worked on it deserves to feel immensely proud of themselves.

As well as reaching the end of that journey, today is the beginning of a new era in the relationship between government and the public.

If we’ve done our job right, most people won’t notice quite how big a change has just occurred. But those of us who are close to the project know just how profound it is.

From now on, citizens (and the professionals and intermediaries who operate between them and the state) can easily see the entirety of what this and any future government is doing, on all issues at home and around the world, in one place and in consistent, structured, easily comprehensible formats. Some of the content is also available in one or more other languages (49 languages in total).

Users can see when things change, and precisely what has been changed, in the form of a note that we make visible on the page.

They can get alerted by feed or email when anything is newly published or updated about any of the things they care about, and find all government consultations and other ways to get involved listed in one place.

They can find out how government works, explore the connections between government organisations and see who is working with who, on what, and how that work is progressing.

In these ways and more, the Inside Government section of GOV.UK will bring greater levels of transparency about what government is doing.

And this change is something departments have willingly done. The site and its content have been built by civil servants in GDS and departments, reforming the civil service from within, disrupting old models and assumptions, and forging new collaborative ways of working in the interests of better meeting citizens’ needs.

That, after all, is what we are here for, not just in GDS but in the civil service as a whole.

Another journey begins

While we celebrate the major milestone of bringing all the ministerial departments onto GOV.UK, we’re acutely aware of how much there is left to do.

Central government in the UK is made up of much more than 24 ministerial departments. There are over 300 other agencies and public bodies, some of whom are bigger than their parent departments in size and scope. 29 have already moved across, including corporate content from HMRC.

We are due to kick off the next wave of transition which will see most of the rest of these organisations make GOV.UK their new home between now and summer 2014, as well as bringing across the remaining detailed guidance content on some of the departments’ sites.

But before we really get going with the next stage, we’ll be taking stock, making sure we’ve learned as much as we can from the first phase of the project and refining our approach. We’ll also be looking at the evidence and user feedback to help us plan what we need to develop next.

GOV.UK remains a work in progress, and there is plenty of room for improvement. We’ll continue iterating, and our focus right now is on improving the site search.

The story so far in numbers

• GOV.UK is now the main home on the web for No 10 and DPM, 24 ministerial departments, HMRC and 28 agencies and other public bodies
• 50,000 documents have been published
• 222 subdomains have been closed
• 2,250 user stories have been delivered
• 223 policies have been written to a new, clear style
• 5.8 million people have visited Inside Government pages, making 29 million page views

Today, the offices of the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister join every ministerial department on the Inside Government section of GOV.UK. Anthony Simon, Downing Street’s head of digital communications explains more.

If you’re familiar with the format of ministerial departments in their new online home on Inside Government, then you’ll probably notice some differences in the way that content for the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister is presented.

Number 10 performs a vital role in communicating news and information about the activity of the Prime Minister, which needs to be reflected online. But it must also acknowledge the rich history of 10 Downing Street, which boasts 275 years as the official residence of each of the UK’s 53 Prime Ministers.

The black door of 10 Downing Street, famous the world over, is perhaps one of the most iconic images of government. It was incorporated into the design for the outgoing Number 10 website and gave users instant recognition that they were entering the official website of the Prime Minister. You’ll notice that this has been retained on GOV.UK, giving the user the same degree of recognition and gravitas.

As before, the user can still go behind the famous black door for a virtual tour of 10 Downing Street, or read historical articles and biographies about every Prime Minister in history. The recent death of Baroness Thatcher has served as a reminder, if one was needed, about the intense public interest into how our Prime Ministers have shaped the way the United Kingdom exists today and its place in the wider world.

The new web presence for the office of the Deputy Prime Minister continues to reflect its main priorities. These include City Deals, Childcare, Tax cuts and jobs. All this information is easy to access alongside details of the ongoing activities and announcements from the Deputy Prime Minister.

Even though the new content areas for the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister do look somewhat different to other areas of Inside Government, you will notice a consistency with the GDS philosophy of putting the user’s need at the centre of everything they do. This means there are simple links from news stories to relevant topical and policy information from other government departments; designed to avoid confusing duplication. Content will also display correctly across a wide variety of devices, from smart phones to full-sized desktop computers.

Launched on 17 October 2012, GOV.UK has just celebrated 6 months of being live. In that time it’s received 188 million visits and 546 million pageviews; and over 9 million searches have been made on the site.

But what was the busiest day in those 6 months? Well, it depends on what you measure.

Pageviews

Let’s start with pageviews. A pageview is counted, well…every time a page is viewed. So, if a visitor clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

On 14 January, GOV.UK had the most pageviews in a day in its first six months. There were 5.88 million pageviews and 1.70 million visits. Why was this? On that date the government announced changes to state pensions and so there was a spike in traffic to GOV.UK’s State Pension calculator page.

Now this is a Quick Answer calculator. To get an answer, people need to anonymously respond to a series of questions and each stage of doing this counts as a new pageview. So there were about 6 pageviews for each of this type of visit, boosting the total pageview count for the day.

Visits

A visit is an interaction by an individual with a website where their browser requests one or more pageviews. If an individual has not taken any other action on the site within a specified time period (30 minutes in GOV.UK’s case), that visit is considered as completed.

On 28 January GOV.UK had the most visits in a day in its first six months. There were 1.89 million visits and 5.41 million pageviews. On this day, the Department for Transport announced the High Speed Rail 2 route and this was the second most viewed page after Find a job with Universal Jobmatch. However, there were only about 2.3 pageviews per visit. People were coming in, reading what they were looking for, and leaving.

I then used two other metrics to correlate this data:

Visitors
Unique visitors is the best count provided by our analytics package of the number of individuals who visit a site. All activity from a visit within a timeframe (30 minutes in GOV.UK’s case), is counted as belonging to 1 unique visitor.

Unique pageviews
This measure combines all the pageviews that were generated by the same visitor, during the same visit.

Result? 14 January had 1.38m visitors and 3.71m unique pageviews.
28 January had 1.54m visitors and 3.82m unique pageviews.

Some conclusions

On most measures, 28 January was the busiest day in GOV.UK’s first 6 months. It’s interesting to see that the content on the High Speed Rail 2 route was so much more popular than other content belonging to departments, which had moved to GOV.UK in the same period. It shows the power of a big story with lots of media interest. Its also shows the success of the Department for Transport’s approach of promoting the policy. They focussed on providing the data and making sure all the information and links were live on time.

But from an analyst’s point of view, the big lesson to share is to be aware of what data you are choosing to look at before jumping to conclusions. Do some cross-checking so you have additional information and context to inform your interpretations.