Mike Beaven talks about the Sprint Alpha conference where we welcomed the Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude, the Head of the Civil Service, Sir Bob Kerslake, and Permanent Secretaries of the transacting Departments to discuss progress to date of the 25 exemplar Transformation projects. GDS also launched a new dashboard with information about those projects and a Quarterly update on Digital Strategies in all government departments.Sir Jeremy Heywood visited GDS to launch the Civil Service Quarterly and Mike also mentions the monthly all staff meeting with visitors from the Office of the Public Guardian and the Department for International Development.

Full transcript below:

Matt: Hello again Mike

Mike: Hello there

Matt: How are you?

Mike: Very well thank you

Matt: What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Mike: It’s been a very busy week. So yesterday we held our Sprint Alpha event which is basically our second in a series of conferences. We had Francis Maude, the Minister, speaking there,we had David Gauke from HMRC, talking about the work they are doing there and we had the Permanent Secretaries from the transacting Departments there. And that whole event really was around talking about the 25 exemplar projects that make up the Transformation Programme. We published a new dashboard which is GOV.UK/Transformation where you can find out about those projects, how big they are and the progress they are making. So a very exciting day, very big day for GDS and all of the Departments we’ve been working with for the last 6 months on these projects.

Obviously a lot happened yesterday with all of the different workshops and sessions that went on so we’ll be getting some material out. I did a blog yesterday talking about the event , we’ll be putting together some videos summarising the event so we’ll see some more of that.

We also published the Quarterly Update on the Digital Strategies across all of the Departments so that information is now available online so you can search that and see what good progress we’re making across all of the Departments outside of just the 25 exemplars.

Matt: Excellent. We also had a couple of visitors into GDS this week.

Mike: Yes, we had Sir Jeremy Heywood who is the Cabinet Secretary and he was over launching the Civil Service Quarterly which is now an online blog not a paper publication or anything like that so that’s a really good part of Civil Service Reform, doing things differently, doing things online.

Matt: Excellent. Where can you read that?

Mike: You can get that at Quarterly.blog.gov.uk

Matt: And we’ve just finished up the all staff meeting?

Mike: Yes, we’ve had our monthly gathering with the whole team and we had a couple of really good visitors. We had the Office of the Public Guardian come over who on the 1st of July launched their Lasting Power of Attorney Service as a public beta and are progressing about 900 applications per week through that service. So we had Kit Collingwood, who’s the Service Manager and Chris Mitchell, from GDS, talking through how that went and we also had John Adam from DFID, which is the people who deal with overseas aid and development talking through some amazing work they are doing publishing data about where aid money goes and the difference it makes which is quite a humbling experience.

And we also had some new starters. We’ve had Mike joining the Performance Platform as a designer and we also had a chap called Dave Norris join the Transformation team who’s been working with the DVLA down in Swansea.

And above all of that, as I say, everything pales into signifigance that we managed to retain the 5 a side trophy in the  annual Civil Service Sports Day so well done to the team.

Matt: Excellent. Until next time.

Mike: Thank you very much

A few months ago Ben Terrett, Russell Davies and I were asked to give a brief to Goldsmiths BA Design course. Matt Ward, the programme leader, contacted us to give the students an opportunity to work on a ‘real life’ brief – something hugely valuable to both them and to us.

Four of the class presented their projects on digital by default and assisted digital to GDS a couple of weeks ago. We wanted to share the results so you can see three totally different takes on the subject.

This comes with a big disclaimer: these are the ideas of some talented design students, not the plans of the government. There are reasons why these ideas might not be appropriate in their current form. But the value for me was in hearing ideas from people who aren’t constrained by what might be pragmatic (or palatable) for government!

ELI studio

Izabela Witoszko represented the group ELI studio. They developed a digital alternative to the citizenship test which linked citizenship closely to what people did every day. Their project focused on using people’s everyday experiences to bridge the gap between people who are offline and online services.

Their exploratory work involved ideas like porridge that reminded you to pay your tax, community events that brought everyone together to use a service at once, and an X-Factor influenced mass citizenship test.

They settled on a black box (complete with prototype) which collected data on what prospective British citizens did on a daily basis, and compared it to a control group of British citizens.

Black box photo by Ben Terrett

Touch City

Mandy Wu and Tomomi Koseki represented the project Touch City, which used touch to link people who are offline (and indeed anyone) with digital services.

Their concept involved using existing public infrastructure like bus stops and phone booths, RFID and SMS to allow two-way communication between users and services. They – and many of the other groups – made great use of video to demonstrate the projects, and you can find these on Vimeo.

WALK.GOV

Finally, Mariana Prates Fabris spoke on behalf of the WALK.GOV group. They took inspiration from desire paths to map the paths through government services.

WALK.GOV linked the emotional content of the services of registering a birth and registering a still birth to desire paths and the idea of pilgrimage. The end result was the idea of having places people would walk to in public places to access services if they couldn’t do them online, complete with a prototype of the ‘booth’ they would use to access the service. Their preparatory work is well worth spending some time with.

Emotion and users

Something I will take away from these projects is the importance of the emotional content or tone of services and how that affects users’ needs. This chimes with how we’ve structured the Lasting Power of Attorney beta, encouraging users to think seriously about the big decisions they are making when they use the service. It was also a great reminder of the importance of thinking about services in the context of users’ everyday lives, rather than as separate things they do with government.

So a big thank you to Matt, Izebela, Mandy, Tomomi, Mariana and all the other students for their inspiring projects!

A few weeks ago, GDS and Land Registry teamed up to build an alpha of their property register service – one of the 25 services we’re transforming.

To demonstrate the pace of change in agile teams, we gave ourselves one day to rapidly prototype the service, working here and at offices in Plymouth and Leicester. 8 features were built and deployed on the day, iterated in response to testing with real users.

You can see a short film of the team working on it, already showcased on the Land Registry blog. A huge thanks to everyone involved, especially Coca Rivas and Richard Stobart for organising and facilitating the day.

Video transcript

Simon Cairns, digital service delivery lead at Land Registry:
The aim today is to bring some customers in and have them look at the system that we’re developing. We’ll be taking you through a set of scenarios. We’ll then take that feedback; we’ll make some changes.

Angela Jackson, head of product management at Land Registry:
[to a service user] If you imagine Land Registry has launched this service and you’re using it for the first time.

Simon Cairns:
We’re doing it in a day to push the boundaries and test to see exactly what can be achieved.

Paul Downey, technical architect at GDS:
You don’t really know how good your website is until you see ordinary people who’ve not seen it before trying to use it.

Hope Mason, service user:
I’m struggling to see the exact title number.

Kim Bird, scrum master at Land Registry:
One couldn’t read the title number, so we can certainly do something about making that title number more visible.

Paul Downey:
Yes, a more in-your-face title number would be… Yes, let’s do that. We need to make sure we deploy something in a couple of hours’ time. It’s quarter past 12 now. Let’s go; let’s do it.

Mark Kelly, senior developer at Land Registry:
I’ve been working on displaying the information on the screen; making it more readable for the users. I’ve made the font size bigger, but the other thing is I’ve added a halo round it, so it’s much easier to read.

Paul Downey:
One of the ideas suggested by the users this morning was going from a property on the map to seeing that in Google Streetmaps. Here’s the Land Registry map. I’ve managed to add a little popup which says “Here’s the download, the titles, plan of the titles”, and here’s, “View that page in Google Maps”.

Nick Breeze, user researcher at GDS:
There were problems with the colours. A lot of people mentioned about understanding what the different colours meant. The colour edition of the maps made everything a lot clearer.

Keith Hurst, senior responsible officer at Land Registry:
Agile. This is my first experience of working in this way. The team is really energised.

Simon Cairns:
We’d set out with the hope of being able to change, I think, one or two things was maybe the expectation. We I think finished eight story cards today, which has been beyond anybody’s expectations.

Hope Mason, service user:
I think for the timeframe that they had, an awful lot was achieved. The base product is really there; it does what you need it to do.

Jim Wilson, service user:
I thought it was a good service beforehand, but with the enhancements, it’s much more improved.

Ed Birrell, service user:
Yes, very impressive. The fact that they actually made changes whilst we were in the meeting as well.

Keith Hurst:
They like the features, they like the changes, the look and feel of it. They saw improvements.

Simon Cairns:
I think what we’ve learned is we can make changes quickly, but also, getting the value of having developers listen to what the customers are saying, watching them work with the system; I think it’s proved invaluable.

Today we release the latest version of the GOV.UK homepage.

A screenshot of the new homepage

Since the last major revision of the page (which Ben wrote about last year), dozens of ministerial departments and other government organisations have joined GOV.UK.

Our new homepage makes it easier for people to find information issued by these organisations. We’ve also made several other tweaks in response to user feedback since launch.

More prominent site search and new navigation

The focus of the homepage should still be fairly familiar. We’ve retained the directory-style list of links to the most popular services and information, as this tests well for helping users to find what they need. We’ve also kept the list of most visited content.

But around one in ten visitors to the GOV.UK homepage use the search box to navigate the site, and we’ve recently been spending time improving the performance of site search, so we’ve increased the prominence of the search box on the homepage.

A screenshot of the new search box

Easier to find information from government departments

The most significant change is the new area in the middle of the page called ‘departments and policy’. This replaces the old ‘Inside Government’ title – which we found didn’t really resonate with many users (we’ll be writing more about this soon).

In this section we’ve included prominent links to departments, topics, policies, publications and worldwide content. Testing on the previous homepage showed that users often found it confusing to move between these areas and the GOV.UK homepage – we think these new links better signpost different destinations.

We’ve also tried to help out less experienced visitors by including links to information about how government works, and how to get involved.

Next steps

These changes all helped users find the information they needed more effectively during testing, but of course we’ll keep watching the metrics and reading your feedback to make sure every aspect of the homepage is performing well.

One immediate priority is to look at how the GOV.UK homepage can help users find out how government transactions and content are performing. We’ll also be focusing on the category navigation (eg ‘citizenship and living in the UK’) to make sure this makes sense to users, and looking at how we can incorporate topical content about government activity (of the kind that’s making national news headlines).

With just over 8% of users to GOV.UK visiting the homepage it’s critical we keep monitoring and improving this page to make sure it makes things simpler, clearer and faster.

We are often asked to put content in Frequently Asked Question format (FAQs). They’re a popular convention on the web, but we don’t recommend them and here’s why:

They’re too slow

FAQs are convenient for writers – they put everything in a long list; it’s all neatly organised and the ‘Q’ does a lot of work for you. But they’re more work for readers – questions take longer to scan and understand than simple headings and you can’t take any meaning from them in a quick glance.

You could read the headings of this article and work out, basically, what we think about FAQs. You couldn’t do that if this was an FAQ.

We use ‘frontloading’ – this is when you put the term most people are looking for at the beginning of the sentence or paragraph. If you write all subheadings with how/what/when/why (and you have to if it is a question) you can’t frontload. This means users can’t scan the words as quickly, and they can’t understand as quickly. You may not save minutes for users but you will be saving them some time.

They lead to duplication

Usually, I see FAQs duplicating content. People tell me:

“users want them in this format; they can find information faster”

If that’s true, it probably means you need to structure your existing content differently.

If a question is frequently asked, it means you need that content on your site. Structure that content clearly so you won’t need another page repeating the same information in a different way.

That problem really shows in search, where you will end up with duplicate results competing for attention. You are fighting with your own content. That can’t be efficient for you or for users.

This is actually a problem GOV.UK is experiencing. The content in our support pages is now appearing in search, so we’re stripping away all of the support content we don’t need and making it easier for users to get straight to the things they’re looking for.

They’re tonally wrong

On GOV.UK, our remit is to get the information to the whole of the UK. We have to write for everyone. The best way to do that, is to write simply and clearly and remove all duplication and superfluous text.

Twitter agrees

I saw this on Twitter from James Hupp and it perfectly shows our position:

@escmum "What are FAQs?" "FAQs are a way to show you've thought about what your users should know but haven't thought about your users."—
James Hupp (@jamestweeting) June 14, 2013

The New Zealand Government Online team has released a sneak preview of their new beta, designed to replace newzealand.govt.nz. Their design mockups look vaguely familiar:

Several GOV.UK makers have given the team advice, covering everything from department directory data to the entire GOV.UK scope (well done Ross Ferguson and Lisa Scott for summarising this in a couple of paragraphs!). The NZ team have also scoured our blog, the Government Digital Strategy, the Government Service Design Manual, and any other bits of guidance we could provide. They’ve researched the strategies behind government sites around the world, and GDS gets a special mention on their preview site.

The most obvious GOV.UK influence is on the design – and with GDS’s policy of coding in the open they were able to use our front-end code. Recycling our work has enabled them to save huge amounts of time, and a considerable amount of money. Initial user research revealed that 70% of people like the design or have a neutral opinion, which is a great result for a new release.

We’re looking forward to sharing more work and user-feedback in the future, so we can improve sites for citizens in New Zealand and in Britain.

Mike Beaven talks about the new version of the homepage for GOV.UK and the ongoing work to the performance platform as we move more government services onto it with six more Foreign and Commonwealth Office services now moved onto the platform. This week Mike went up to Scotland to meet the Student Loans Company, one of the 25 exemplar transformation projects, and took a look at their transformation business case. DVLA and Land Registry also went through the Digital by Default service standard assessment, with the results due in a week or so. On the visits front we welcomed Bryan Sivak over from Washington in the US. Bryan is the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) for their Department of Health and Human Services.

Full transcript below:

Interviewer:
Hello Mike. What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Mike Beaven:
Hi there. Another good week. I’ll start with GOV.UK; we’ve released a new version of the home page, which is pretty key, so I think everyone’s pretty happy with that. There are lots of new features to it, so well done to Stephen McCarthy and Edd Sowden and the rest of the GOV.UK team; really good work. I think the other main area is on the performance platform, which gradually we’re moving all the government services onto that, so we’ve got six more FCO – Foreign and Commonwealth Office services now moved onto that platform, so well done to Richard Sargeant and the whole team there.

Interviewer:
There’s been lots of work in the Transformation team as well.

Interviewer:
Yes, a couple of things, really. I’ve spent a few days up in Scotland with our colleagues in Student Loans, looking at their overall transformation business case, and working with the top team there. It’s really good that they’re really embracing using digital to change their business, and their CEO’s (Chief Operating Officer) very much behind them, so that was an interesting couple of days. On a more practical level, a couple of our exemplar services have gone through their Digital by Default service standard assessments, so DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) and the Land Registry service managers have been in with a panel of GDS experts for a fairly gruelling 4-hour panel assessment of how that service is shaping up, and we’ll get the results out in the next week or so as to how that’s looking.

Interviewer:
We also had a visitor to OCTO (Office of the Chief Technology Officer) and Transformation this week.

Mike:
Yes we did. We had Bryan Sivak over from Washington in the US, and he’s the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) for their Department of Health and Human Services. He visited the 6th and the 7th floors and had a look at how we’re doing things in GDS.

Interviewer:
Next week, you’ll be visiting other parts of the UK as well.

Mike:
Yes, yes, so next week I’m off to Wales, so off to Swansea, looking at a couple of things down there. Firstly we’ve got quite a lot of engagement with their Enterprise-type technology, so meeting their CTO down there and looking at the work we’re doing around the operational side of their technology, and also meeting the teams working on the exemplars. I’ll probably spend a good three or four hours going through that with the people down there. Back end of this week, early next week, we’re working on what sort of exemplar delivery looks like as well, so getting us to a point where we know a) what the scope of all of these 25 projects is, and what they’re going to cost, and what they’re going to save, and what they’re going to do for people; secondly, how we’re going to work with the departments to deliver those over the next sort of 18 months or so.

Interviewer:
Good news for the GDS cyclists.

Mike:
Yes, the guys were out last Sunday, and I think they did a pretty good time amongst them. I think they increased, remarkably, by about an hour on last year’s time, so they’ve all been training hard. I think we also won an another bike race as well last weekend, which is the Tour de France, which is good for the country as well. But I don’t think there were any GDS-ers involved in that.

Interviewer:
We’ve also had a few new starters this week.

Mike:
Yes. We’re doing really well, now. We’re getting a lot more people on board, and that’s testament to the guys in the recruitment team and all the good work they’re doing, so that’s great. Sadly we have one person leaving us, who’s Ross Ferguson, who’s moving way out west. We wish him all the best in his new venture.

Interviewer:
Until next time.

Mike:
Thank you.

There’s an adage in writing circles known as “kill your darlings”, based on a quote by William Faulkner (“In writing, you must kill all your darlings”). The theory goes that writers should be ruthless about cutting the bits of their work that they love the most, if that’s what the story demands. If you love it, you’re not being objective. If you’re not being objective, it’s likely you’re holding onto it for the wrong reasons and should let it go.

Dropping the words “Inside Government” from GOV.UK, which we quietly did in yesterday’s release, felt a lot like killing one of our darlings.

“Inside Government” has been the name for the government section of GOV.UK since the beta launched in Febuary 2011.  An original idea which hit the team’s delivery manager Pete Herlihy in a flash of inspiration (and absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with having recently seen a similar name on the BBC website), the name immediately struck a chord with me.

I felt it encapsulated our proposition (information about how government works and what it’s doing) perfectly. It had none of the stigmas of its alternatives. It’s been the name of our product, our blog and our team. I loved it at first sight, and love it still.

But it was not central to the story, and had to go.

In round after round of user testing, almost nobody has repeated the words “Inside Government” back to us. When asked what site they were using, people just said “GOV.UK”. “Inside Government” did not feature in their mental model of the site at all.

When we then drew users’ attention to the name and asked them what it meant, enough people thought it implied “internal to government” or “intranet” to have us worried.

So we’ve dropped it completely from the navigation banner and all other places on the site.

We will have to address the needs it was intended to meet in other ways:

• to signal the change of proposition when moving between sections of GOV.UK, we’re now using the words “Departments and policy” both on the search results page and on the new homepage. This label will no doubt evolve as more agencies and non-departmental bodies join the site.
• to help users landing directly on government pages when what they really want is mainstream services or information, we will continue to ensure the design gives as many clues as possible as to the kind of content you’re looking at. And, as always, GDS and department content designers need to take care at all times to include prominent calls to action on the any government pages which have related mainstream user needs.

Internally, we’re also starting to phase out the name and refer to the “government section” of GOV.UK.

By taking it away, we’ve taken away nothing. It was not achieving its goals and may even have been making things worse. We’ve killed one of our darlings to make the product stronger.

Back in June, I wrote about the content dashboard which I built to help editors improve content on GOV.UK. In this update, I’d like to give an example of how it has been used by the GDS team to detect a problem and ultimately help develop and validate the bug fix.

Smart Answers

The content on GOV.UK is divided into several different formats which allow us to communicate important information in the most appropriate way.

For complicated or transactional style questions that require specific input we have the Smart Answer category which guides the user through a series of questions that result in one of several possible answers. In this case, we describe an engaged user as someone who reaches any one of these outcomes as this means that they must have successfully interacted with the format (and not dropped out mid-flow).

Towards the end of April I noticed a drop in engagement across all of our 40+ Smart Answers which resulted in an alert on the Dashboard frontend. I’ve included a snapshot of the State Pension Calculator data for the period in question which was representative of the across-format drop.

What the data revealed

Looking at the time series data, two things are immediately obvious:

1. The drop was sudden and occurred over the course of two days
2. The engagement went from a reasonably stable value to one which displays strong weekday/weekend dependence.

In order to investigate the first point, I looked at the page update history which shows a roll-out on the 24th April for all Smart Answers. This gave our developers the starting point they needed to check whether any code issues were present in that particular release.

The reason behind the second point is a little more subtle. In general, the engagement should be independent of visitor numbers, providing you have a large enough sample to rule out unrepresentative data (e.g. 5-10 visits per day could easily result in a large spread of values). The pattern seen after the drop correlated directly with the number of visits to the page, implying that for a proportion of users their visits were logged but not their successful navigation to an answer. This assumption is confirmed by the fact that the visit data for the pages had not changed during this period.

It is important to point out that there was no indication we had any problems with the pages themselves, merely our ability to track whether users had completed their journey. The content had not changed between iterations, and there was no increase in feedback volume which would have indicated a more substantial technical or editorial issue.

Bug bashing

The developers here in GDS confirmed that this was the case as the update on the 24th contained a section of code that interfered with analytics tracking in certain browsers. Ultimately, this meant that we were collecting a combination of true engagement values with false negatives that stemmed from the inability to log when an answer was reached.

The fluctuation of traffic over the course of a week was harder to pinpoint, but we got there in the end; Internet Explorer wasn’t affected by the bug. That browser accounts for the majority of visits to smart answers during the week, but the margin shrinks somewhat during the weekend. This is why we started to see a pronounced weekly fluctuation in engagement where there wasn’t one before.

As can be seen in the graph, the bug was fixed on the 20th June which was confirmed by the recovery of both the engagement values and their behaviour over time. We prioritise bugs which affect users’ experience, which is why there was such a delay between discovering the problem and fixing it.

This case is one of several examples of how the dashboard has proved useful internally to help us monitor the performance of our content. Despite this bug not having any direct impact on users, it was important that we found the cause as without reliable and accurate data it is much harder for us to know with any certainty what constitutes abnormal behaviour.

This example also highlights the importance of daily updates in giving us the fine-grain detail necessary to develop informed hypotheses. A weekly aggregated value would have delayed investigation in this instance and averaged out the subtle day-by-day variations which helped us isolate potential sources of the bug.

Last week we released performance dashboards for six Foreign & Commonwealth Office services, including payment for registering births, marriages and deaths abroad.

In a modern office block in a midlands town is a magnificent cast iron piece of machinery. It weighs 35kg and takes physical effort to use, but someone does so up to 200 times a day: paper goes in, handles are turned, and the paper is stamped.

This machine is a “Registrar Desktop embossing machine” – or, as they are known in Milton Keynes, a “bonking machine” – and it performs the simple but essential task of ‘legalising’: embossing a stamp over the signature on your document which makes it difficult to forge.

For example, if you are emigrating and need to prove to a foreign government that the felt-tipped pen scrawls on your marriage certificate weren’t done by your 2-year old, you can get the document legalised. You send the Foreign & Commonwealth Office your certificate, pay a small fee, and someone does the bonking.

Getting your documents legalised is a very physical thing to do; but you can now make your payment digitally. And as with all services coming onto GOV.UK, there is a dashboard to help the service manager and their team see how well the service is performing.

The dashboards for three of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office services

Legalisation is one of six dashboards for Foreign & Commonwealth Office services which were released last week: you can see them all on www.gov.uk/performance/services. Now the people who own the services can see how their service is performing digitally: how many people paid last week? How many drop out when they see the cost? As with all our dashboards, they are available to interested members of the public too.

These FCO dashboards also help us to learn about different services. A few weeks ago I blogged about our first dashboard, for getting a licence, and commented that we didn’t really know if its completion rate for getting a licence was good or bad.

Completion rates for: Document Legalisation, Licensing, and Depositing a Foreign Marriage Certificate.

Well, now we have a little more evidence and know that it is somewhere in the middle. The legalisation services have a high completion rate – the public-facing service gets over 60% and the business-facing premium service can get over 80%. However, there are some services (such as Depositing a Foreign Marriage Certificate) which often have a lower rate; these services are mostly done offline with only a handful of people per week using the web, so these figures are highly volatile.

I’m delighted that we have the FCO services on board and I’d like to thank all the people in that department who have been so generous with their time on this. We hope to add some offline data to the legalisation dashboards soon and will be making dashboards for more and more services over the coming months. Do let us know if you have any feedback on these dashboards or if there is some extra functionality you would like to see.

Follow Phil on Twitter: @philbuckley5

Mike Beaven talks about how GDS has been helping Technology in Business fast streamers learn about coding and design, the beta release of the employment tribunal fee service and the ‘GIST’ spending tool, which provides data visualisations of government spending. Next week we’re hoping to publish performance data from the lasting power of attorney application.

Mike also welcomes new starters, and congratulates James Taylor on completing the Trailwalker 2013 challenge.

Full transcript below:

Interviewer:
Hello, Mike, what have we been up to this week?

Mike Beaven:
Hi there. Last Friday we ran a ‘Digital Learning Day’ in Manchester. That’s really aimed at getting fast streamers – sometimes known as ‘TiBs’, who are Technology in Business fast streamers – and getting them familiar with coding and design principles, and actually letting them get their hands on it. Andy (Brown), Amy (Whitney) and Tom (Byers), plus a few others went up there last week and did a session with them.

Also, on Monday we had another one of our exemplars move into a public-facing beta. The employment tribunal fee service was launched as a result of some new legislation. That actually went live on Monday, the website went live on Monday, so you can now apply to initiate a tribunal hearing online using that website. If you want to know more about the project behind it, then if you look on the dashboard then you’ll find all the data about what we’re doing there.

Interviewer:
Excellent. We’ve also been working with colleagues elsewhere in government this week.

Mike:
Yes, so Carl Meweezen and his team over in ERG (Efficiency and Reform Group), who look at all things spending in government and look at where we’re saving money. Mark O’Neill and Gill (Elderfield) worked with their team over there, to help them build a thing called the ‘Government Interrogation Spending Tool’, or ‘GIST’, as it’s known. That went live and there’s been some really good feedback from Stephen Kelly, Carl and his team, and the Minister (Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude), saying, “Thanks for creating something that’s very easy to use and intelligent.” So well done to those guys.

Interviewer:
What have we got coming up next week?

Mike:
Richard Sargeant’s team are actually now connecting the performance dashboard to the transaction for Lasting Power of Attorney, and pulling all the data from the analytics out of that into that platform. That will be available for analysis and viewing.

Interviewer:
Excellent. Have we had more people joining GDS?

Mike:
Yes, we’ve had a couple of new starters this week. One of them interestingly is an individual called Malcolm Glennie. He’s come in via the Civil Service Whitehall internship scheme, so he’s just joined us.

We’ve also had a chap called Richard Grove, who’s just joined the Transformation team as a transformation manager. He’s been here two days and he’s off to Scotland tomorrow to Student Loans, so he’s had a brief site of Aviation House before he’s been sent out to the frontline.

Interviewer:
Is there anything else that the team have been up to?

Mike:
Yes, very impressively James Taylor completed a 100 km trail walk, which is no mean feat. That’s in support of the Oxfam and Gurkha Welfare Trust. So well done to him.

Interviewer:
Excellent, until next time.

Mike:
Thank you.

‘What about people who aren’t online?’ is a question we’re often asked on the assisted digital team. So we decided to run a workshop at GDS’ Sprint Alpha event on 17th July to answer it.

Assisted digital workshop at Sprint Alpha

Rebecca Kemp and Richard Smith kicked off the workshop by outlining the two projects GDS and departments are working on together to ensure that people who aren’t online can use digital government services: assisted digital and digital inclusion.

Digital by default includes people who aren’t online: ‘By digital by default, we mean digital services that are so straightforward and convenient that all those who can use them will choose to do so whilst those who can’t are not excluded.’

Assisted digital

Assisted digital and digital inclusion are both focused on the 18% of UK adults who are offline. Assisted digital is the help that will be provided to these people so that they can use digital government services. As set out in the Government Approach to Assisted Digital, there will be a core set of ways that assisted digital will be provided across services to make sure that people get consistent support and can navigate the places they can get the support from.

All new or redesigned digital services must have assisted digital provision in place to meet the Digital by Default Service Standard. GDS is working with departments, using the assisted digital action plan, to help them meet this requirement for each of the 25 exemplar services. We have also started talking to potential providers of assisted digital support from the commercial, voluntary and wider public sectors.

Digital inclusion

In June, the Government launched the Information Economy Strategy that confirmed a new cross-government digital inclusion team was to be established, sitting in the Government Digital Service. The team, which is headed by Anna-Maren Ashford, will co-ordinate government’s work on digital inclusion for citizens, businesses and charities. It will work closely alongside Martha Lane Fox, Go ON UK and its partners, and will focus on three areas of work:

• developing a strategy for digital inclusion;
• providing leadership by acting as a central point for collaboration with partners to take forward digital inclusion projects, and by working with departments to build digital inclusion into their policy development;
• developing the evidence base on ‘what works’ in digital inclusion, and using this to plan future activity.

Departmental perspectives

Workshop discussion

After GDS had given an overview of the assisted digital and digital inclusion projects, colleagues from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the Department for Transport (DfT) and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) talked about the work they’re doing to develop assisted digital support for their exemplar services. This started a discussion with the workshop attendees – people from a range of government departments and agencies interested in how offline users will be able to use digital services – about the shared challenges and insights faced in reaching people who aren’t online.

There were two main themes that emerged from this discussion. The first was the role of customer insight in getting to grips with users. Offline users have different needs when accessing digital services (including lack of access, confidence and ability), which have differing implications for assisted digital provision. Attendees emphasised the need to pull together the common issues users experience across services. The assisted digital team has made a start on looking at user needs across the whole of government through our work with departments, and this is definitely something we want to do more of.

The second theme was exploring the links between assisted digital, digital inclusion and increasing digital take-up of a service. Attendees agreed that it was important to communicate assisted digital support effectively, but also pointed out the need to balance this with incentivising take-up of digital services. We think that an important way to address this is through our work on digital inclusion. We will also explore how we can train people through the use of assisted digital services, and so encourage them to self-serve in future.

It was really interesting to hear perspectives from so many different departments at the Sprint Alpha workshop. The discussion was an important reminder of the connections between the two projects GDS and departments are working on that are focused on people who aren’t online. Although assisted digital and digital inclusion are separate, we know that they are focused on the same users. The teams will be working very closely together to make sure that people who aren’t online aren’t left behind in the move to digital by default services.

A couple of weeks ago, at Manchester TechHub, we held our first digital learning day for the Technology in Business (TiB) Fast Stream; one of the fast stream schemes helping to create digital leaders of the future. The day was the brainchild of Andy Brown, himself a TiB fast streamer, who wanted to share the skills he’d seen in use at GDS.

The goal of the day was not to turn these civil servants into programmers, but to introduce them to the principles and building blocks which will make government digital by default.

Along with five of our developers and designers, Andy introduced the fast streamers to some of the basics of building digital services.

Participants learnt a few coding skills before creating a website, adding some interactivity to it and launching an app in the cloud that made use of the GOV.UK search API.

Even since these fast streamers joined government there have been dramatic changes to the digital capability landscape; there are now plans for all school children to learn to code in the new national curriculum.

We hoped the day would help plug that gap for this group of fast streamers. They were encouraged to get a feel for what is possible in a short space of time, and to get a better understanding of the roles of developers and designers.

In true GDS spirit we ran the event as an alpha, and even had a quick retrospective at the end to see what improvements we could make to future iterations.

A big thank you to everyone who came along, and to Tom, Jordan, Nick, Amy, Andy and Dave for taking the time to teach us.

Follow Sana on Twitter: @sanakb

Some user needs are easier to meet than others. It doesn’t take much research to confirm that most people searching for ‘bank holiday‘ care most about when they can next enjoy a long weekend.

But what if a user needed an organ transplant? Amongst many other priorities, they’d want as many people as possible to register with the NHS Organ Donor Register. How might GOV.UK help meet this highly-sensitive user need?

Since Christmas GDS has been working with colleagues from the NHS, Department for Transport, Department for Health and the Cabinet Office’s own Behaviour Insights team to run experiments to learn how GOV.UK might increase the numbers of people choosing to register as organ donors.

Testing different prompts

We started by adding a very basic text link to the organ register from the final ‘You’re done!’ page at the end of all successful motoring transactions on GOV.UK (e.g. renewing your tax disc).

The GOV.UK publishing team then took the opportunity to develop a basic A/B testing capability. This allows us to trial several different messages simultaneously to see which is most effective.

We’re conducting this as a formal experiment with colleagues from other departments, and so I won’t give away too much detail. But suffice it to say initial indications are exciting.

One small change to this one page on GOV.UK has lead to around 10,000 additional people joining the organ donor register each month. This one page is now the third biggest source of new registrations, behind doctors surgeries and the DVLA.

Given each additional donor might save or transform up to 9 lives, it’s an experiment we’re keen to continue, and I must thank my colleagues from across government and the NHS for the opportunity to participate.

We’ve learnt a lot about assessing services over the last few months. James Kemp, acting Service Manager for passport appointment booking at HM Passport Office, attended one of the early assessments and we asked him to write about the experience.

As one of the very first services to go through the assessment process it wasn’t entirely clear what I needed to provide in the way of evidence, or how strongly we would be held to the published criteria.

So, in the run-up to the panel, I read through the Government Service Design Manual (which I strongly recommend) and the 26 service standards making notes against each one on how well I thought we met them and what would demonstrate that. I thought that we managed to meet the vast majority or had action in hand to meet them within a week or two. There were about five that I thought we might struggle with; I hoped that would be sufficient for the service assessment.

The Service Assessment

The service assessment was relatively informal, with three GDS people and myself. I was initially asked to give a brief overview of the online appointment booking service and to confirm the details I’d given in the updated GDS Proposition.

Screen shot of the current appointment booking page

Once I had done that we went through each of the standards. There was a particular emphasis on user needs and showing that we’d built the service to meet them.

While we’d decided to provide online appointment booking in response to our customer insight material, we’d tested the service on a wide range of people within HM Passport Office and our suppliers. We hadn’t actually tested it on ‘external’ customers.

This, it turned out, wasn’t quite what was expected of us. While we’re all passport customers outside of work, our own staff aren’t entirely typical of members of the public. They tended to understand what was needed to complete the appointment booking.

I was then asked to demonstrate our service for the panel. I hadn’t been expecting this and so had nothing prepared, however I was able to access the version our SME had set up for testing. This walk through picked up some usability issues that we hadn’t previously encountered, but it was done in a friendly and helpful manner.

After the panel finished I was introduced to a designer, Ed Horsford, who spent a couple of hours showing me some examples of recent work, going through our service, and giving me some very constructive comments on how we could improve it. I got some very useful pointers on how to do user testing, delivering continuous improvement post-launch and on using the performance platform to get information about how our service was being used.

The appointment bookings backlog

Lessons Learnt

The experience was valuable both for myself and for GDS.

Since the meeting they’ve created email templates giving clearer information about what is required and how the assessment process will be run. They now also provide assessment materials such as prompts and blank checklists in advance of the panel, so services can self-assess before meeting the GDS team. My colleagues working on other digital services have found these materials and updated guidance to be very useful.

For my part, I took a few things away from the assessment:

• don’t underestimate the focus on users
• engage early and often with GDS, they are friendly and want to help
• GDS service assessments come when you are ready to move to the next step and cannot be done in parallel with other approvals
• design good services that work digitally (not a web front end)

This week Mike talks about the recruitment hub, the digital services framework, and G-Cloud 4. He also talks about Young Rewired State and welcomes several new starters to government.

Full transcript below:

Interviewer:
Hello Mike. What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Mike:
A lot. But the first thing I really want to talk about is recruitment. One of the big things this week, the big milestones, is getting the recruitment hub working to bring new digital talent into government. We’re recruiting all over the place, and building up teams with departments; HMRC (HM Revenue and Customs), DWP (Department for Work and Pensions), MoJ (Ministry of Justice) and elsewhere. But the biggest thing this week is we’ve now got 40 major senior digital roles to attract right across government; these are director generals, they are change agents, senior civil servants who are coming into government with senior positions to affect the digital change that’s in our digital strategy. They’re going to come into many places, but I guess the first one I’d like to welcome to government is Mark Dearnley. He was until recently the CIO (Chief Information Officer) at Vodafone, and he’s going to be coming and joining us as the Chief Digital Officer in HMRC. I’m delighted we’re getting this calibre of people coming through, and he’s the first of many, I hope.

Interviewer:
Excellent. We’ve also had big releases within GDS as well.

Mike:
Yes. The Digital Services Framework closed, and I’d like to firstly thank the team who’ve been working on that, Louis (Hyde) and Josh (Russell), everybody else who’s been working on getting new suppliers into government. This is a framework that’s aimed at getting companies with those skills that we need, those digital skills, to be more accessible to government. For too long, we’ve relied on too small a number of companies. We’re widening that up now. We’ve had a huge amount of interest; 280 suppliers for interest. The first 50 of those will come on in the first tranche of this, but we’ll renew it every six months. We’re delighted now that framework is coming on-stream and we can get these companies to work with government.

Interviewer:
We’ve also had a release from the G-Cloud team as well.

Mike:
We have; the G-Cloud team; yes. We took this on a little while ago. Big improvements to the tender process. Again, the framework means that the tender gets issued every six months. Well done Tony (Singleton) and Peter Middleton particularly. We’ve got new product management in there, and we’re simplifying this all the time for suppliers. I always say this: it’s not perfect, but it gets better with every release. Signalling the start of G-Cloud 4 is a big win this week.

Interviewer:
Lots of things going on outside of government as well, this week.

Mike:
Loads as usual. Biggest one for me was up in Birmingham at the Custard Factory. We helped Young Rewired State. It’s an organisation that does tremendous work. Emma (Mulqueeny) and the team there do a great deal in bringing young coders to get them to look at government and how to improve government services. We’ve actually recruited from that pool as a result over the years. So Jordan Hatch, who’s featured prominently in the press this week, he was there along with Linda (Humphries) and Mark – Mark O’Neil did some of the judging up in Birmingham. It’s a sort of UK-wide festival of code, and I’m delighted that we could help in some way.

Interviewer:
We’ve also had several new starters here at GDS.

Mike:
Yes, we’ve had six. We’re recruiting about one a day at the moment, both for us and across government. But if I can pick one out it’s Lee Longmore, who joined the GOV.UK team on the development side, so welcome to him and several other people.

Interviewer:
One goodbye as well.

Mike:
Yes, Sara. Sara Bowley has left us for a little while, while she goes away on maternity leave, so good luck to her. She’s a GOV.UK Delivery Manager, and we look to see her soon.

Interviewer:
Well, until next time.

Mike:
Onwards.

We’ve started a project with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design about how assisted digital support can meet the needs of older people. Peter Ziegler is leading the project and is a specialist in design research in older people and technology. The concepts he develops will inform the wider work we are doing on assisted digital, including our work with the 25 exemplar services.

My name is Peter Ziegler. I am a design researcher from the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design (HHCD), part of the Royal College of Art, working with GDS on a project on assisted digital. As part of the project, I will design assisted digital interactions and interfaces to get digital by default services to the 18% of the population that are not online. I’ll do this through intensive research and testing with older people. By focusing on this group, I hope to develop design outputs that address the needs of a broad range of assisted digital users.

Where I come from

The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design (HHCD) undertakes design research and projects with industry that contribute to improving people’s lives. Our approach is inclusive and interdisciplinary, with our work organised in three research labs:

• Age & Ability: design for a more inclusive society irrespective of age and ability

• Health & Patient Safety: creating safer and better health services

• Work & City: research into changing patterns of work and urban life

Observing how older people new to web technology interact with a computer.

I work in the Age & Ability Research Lab at HHCD. A really important aspect of what we do in this lab is to consider people as equals in the design process, with an emphasis on working closely with diverse groups of older, younger and differently-abled people. My work over the past few years has focused on a rapidly ageing population, and I’ll be working in the spirit of the lab for my research with GDS.

What I’m doing on the assisted digital project

I’ve been working on the assisted digital project for a month so far, and have been conducting research with users at the Age UK Hackney computer centre. The centre’s users are aged between 50 and 64 and represent a range of ethnicities, income brackets and digital competencies. The centre specialises in two services:

• providing computer and internet access to people who do not have it;

• making classes and tutoring available to people on using computers and navigating the Internet.

My research has been a very fruitful introduction to the problems older people may face when accessing digital products and services. There have been two key early observations that keep coming up:

1. People who do not have much confidence in their digital skills are more comfortable conducting a one-way search query than a two-way personal information transaction.  For example, people may very well be confident with searching the Internet for a shop’s location, but they would not feel comfortable going to that shop’s website to make a purchase to be delivered to their home.

2. Older people who do not have access to computers or who lack the skills to confidently navigate the Internet are concerned about where they will get help to access the services they need. As services are increasingly administered online, there is a requirement for assisted digital provision to be in place and be adequately publicised to ensure these people know where to go for help.

Next steps

Next, I’ll be developing ideas and use cases that address the above observations and also tackle some of the more idiosyncratic issues raised through my research. I’ll communicate these ideas to users at a follow-up session at the Hackney computer centre, and use the feedback and discussion from this session to refine my ideas and develop them into final design concepts. In this way, I can make sure that the final concepts are created in collaboration with the people they’re being designed for. I’ll be conducting the project in an agile way through this process of initial research, ideas generation, testing, and refinement, which I’ll repeat several times throughout the course of the project.

It’s a real honour to be part of such a transformative effort and new standard in the way that government presents itself to citizens. It’s enormously promising and hopefully a trend in how governments can use good design as a principle, going beyond design as process or methodology in the future. I must add that it’s a great opportunity to be able to use design to have such a direct impact on people’s lives.

Please feel free to comment below with any thoughts or curiosities about myself or the goals of this project.

We introduced a new version of the GOV.UK homepage a few weeks ago, and since then we’ve collected lots of data about what’s working and what improvements we can make.

We thought we’d share some of the headlines here. You can find the full analysis over on the Inside GOV.UK blog, the best place to follow what’s going on behind the scenes of GOV.UK.

Screenshot of the GOV.UK homepage

Use of search has climbed

We wanted to increase the number of people using our improved search, and the redesign has been successful on that front.

Comparing the full week after the new homepage design release with the week before, we saw 40% more searches from the homepage, with weekly searches rising from 82,000 to 115,000. Some 19% of visits to the homepage led to a site search from there after the redesign, compared to 13% in the week before.

More people are looking at departments and policy

The most significant design change is the new area in the middle of the page called ‘departments and policy’. We wanted to increase the number of visitors to more specialist – but still important – parts of the site.

While visitors to the homepage generally follow popular links to Services and information (what we used to refer to as ‘mainstream’ content), the 21st to 40th most visited links from the homepage show more interesting trends:

Most visited pages from GOV.UK homepage
(Key: green = Up, red = Down, Yellow = No change)

The links promoted in the new Departments and policies box (what we used to call Inside Government) are now gaining more pageviews from the homepage, especially policies, worldwide and topics.

Of course, the number of visits to and from the homepage is impacted by many more variables than the design of the homepage, but on this first benchmark it looks like the redesign has been a success – leading to greater use of site search and more visits to important sections.

We’ll keep iterating

We’ll continue to monitor the overall visits trend to the homepage and the popularity of links from the page. And we will be using analytics data to help inform work on improving category navigation.

If you want to stay up to date with that analysis – and the improvements – head over to the Inside GOV.UK blog at insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk

Last year, we established our definition of an open standard for software interoperability, data and document formats, and the Open Standards Principles that explain our rationale for putting them into government IT.

Now we are working on identifying the specific open standards that will most benefit users of government technology and services. That process depends on suggestions and recommendations from experts on the field — many of whom are outside of government. We need your help.

On the evening of 5th September 2013, GDS will host an Open Standards show and tell event in London to talk through how you can get involved as we identify and select open standards for software interoperability, data and document formats through the Standards Hub.

How the open standards process works

Selecting each open standard for government creates specialist conversations. As examples, the current areas we’re looking at range from data exchange in emergency response to formats for spending data through to network protocols — and for each we need experts in those and related fields to help us make the best decisions for government and for our users.

As Liam Maxwell’s blog post described back in March, the open standards process is built on the Standards Hub. This website is the most scalable way we can engage with the expertise of each community, while also making sure that we are completely transparent in how we select and implement our open standards.

On the Hub, you can suggest challenges for the Government that open standards could help to solve. You can also help guide the choices we make: you can let us know which open standards we should be using and help us to focus on the right challenges.

We need many of you to be involved to make the process effective. This event will focus on how you can get involved, and we will be interested in your feedback and input as we go.

Get involved

We are asking you to get involved in how we choose open standards by:

• suggesting issues that we need to tackle – we call these ‘challenges’
• responding to the challenges we take forward with ideas about how to solve them — which open standards should we use?
• commenting on proposals and whether we’re heading in the right direction
• discussing ideas with other users
• letting us know that you’re happy to join us for working groups that will help to shape the proposals from the suggestions posted
• volunteering to be an expert on one of the standards panels which evaluates the proposals and advises the Open Standards Board

At the show and tell we’ll go through each of these activities and explain what will happen with your input, ideas and suggestions at each phase.

The evening will include an informal panel discussion where you can ask us any questions you have about how we select open standards.

We look forward to talking with you on the 5th.

Follow Hadley on Twitter: @hadleybeeman

This week Kathy talks about Assisted Digital, a visit from Kazakhstan and a look forward to next week’s Digital Leaders meeting. Along with welcoming our new starters, Kathy also talks about next week’s meeting to look at  the remit of the Digital Inclusion team, which we are starting to recruit for.

Full transcript below:
Matt:
Hello Kathy.

Kathy Settle: 
Hello Matt.

Matt: 
What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Kathy Settle: 
Well, we’ve been carrying on our work on exemplars, and on the transition on GOV.UK, moving all those agencies and arm’s length body sites over. But probably one of the things that’s worth just focusing on is our work on Assisted Digital, because we’ve been doing a lot there over the last few weeks, and this week in particular. On Wednesday, we had an event with some potential suppliers, as part of our market engagement exercise, and that was a really great event, trying to work through with them what sort of needs we have for Assisted Digital, and how they might help us provide those in future.

Also speaking again with departments on Assisted Digital, just to make sure we really understand the requirements, particularly of the exemplar exercises. Actually, as part of that, we did a workshop looking at one of the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) exemplars, and bringing in people like UK Online Centres, like the libraries, Citizens Advice Bureau, and we worked through what the user needs were for that DVLA example, and how those suppliers might help us; what Assisted Digital might look like for those people.

Also on Assisted Digital, we’ve been doing some work with the Helen Hamlyn Centre (for Design), and Peter Ziegler, who’s come to work part-time with us from the Helen Hamlyn Centre, wrote a blog, actually, the other day, which is really worth reading, about the work that he’s doing, thinking about the needs particularly of older people and Assisted Digital.

Matt:
We’ve also had some visitors in this week?

Kathy:  
We have. We had another foreign government come in, which was great; they were from Kazakhstan. They were particularly interested in open policy-making, and how you can use digital tools to help with that; particularly social media. They had a good look round the office and spoke to many people, particularly in our Digital Engagement team.

Matt: 
What do we have coming up next week?

Kathy: 
Two big events. On Tuesday we’ve got our regular monthly all-staff meeting, so everybody from GDS getting together, finding out what everyone’s been up to over the last month, and what things they’re going to focus on next month, so it’s a really good catch-up. On Wednesday we’ve got our regular monthly Digital Leaders meeting. Two things I’ll just pick out from the agenda: one is the DFID (Department for International Development) Digital Leader, Richard Calvert. He’s going to come and talk to us about the DFID digital strategy, and how they’re progressing with delivery, particularly focusing on things like the aid platform that they’ve been working on.

The other one that’s again worth mentioning is the Digital Inclusion item. In June, as part of the Information Economy strategy, the government announced that it was setting up a cross-government team to look at Digital Inclusion, which will be based in GDS. We’re just starting to recruit that team now, and the meeting on Wednesday is looking at what the remit of that team is and the scope of its work, and what sort of things particularly it will be focusing on for the next six months. That will be a good, useful discussion to get that team’s work underway.

Matt: 
Finally, have we had any new starters this week?

Kathy:   
We have, we’ve got four, two that I’ll probably just pick out, who are both coming into the user research team. One of them is Teresa Randall; she currently works at DECC, actually; our Department of Energy and Climate Change. The other one, who’s actually coming into the Digital Inclusion team I’ve just mentioned, is a guy called Jon Rimmer. Looking forward to meeting both of those.

Matt: 
Fabulous. Until next time.

Kathy:   
Thanks.