A few weeks ago Sarah Richards and Ben Terrett visited the Government Security Secretariat (GSS) to talk about copywriting and the GOV.UK style guide. We asked Ben Aung from GSS to write about the visit and the work it has inspired.

The Government Security Secretariat within the Cabinet Office sets the security policies for government, these policies cover the how and why of protecting our people, information and buildings. I’ve been a member of the policy team for just over a year and am currently leading a refresh of the catchily-titled HMG Security Policy Framework. This is the body of documents that deals with everything from the type of locks we put on our doors to much broader issues such as counter-terrorism and cyber security.

Our problem was that security policy had become unwieldy. Full of jargon and many hundreds of pages long, it is difficult to interpret and use and therefore not able to do what we wanted it to do. This jarred with our aim of publishing policy that is accessible, supports effective decision-making, that makes it easier for industry to work with government and above all, is clear and straightforward.

The unintended consequences of poorly explained security policy can also cause real problems. It can add cost to ICT, make it difficult for staff to do their jobs or in extreme cases, put people in danger.

Chatting about style

We were really impressed by what GDS achieved with GOV.UK. The Design Principles and Style Guide struck us as something simple and effective that had been created to help people design and build good websites, which could easily be re-used for policy work. In other words, the principles matched our own aspirations for security policy.

We organised a workshop to look at how we could improve things and invited Ben and Sarah from GDS to talk to us about the detail that sits behind their work. It was remarkable to see how much research had gone into what is effectively a short and pithy list of rules.

Sarah pointed us towards the government’s policy of stabilisation in Afghanistan as an example of a hugely complex issue that had been distilled into a single web page, with links leading off to the detail for those who need it. This is the sort of clarity that our team felt was needed in security policy.

Refreshing security

We have now started putting together our own set of 10 principles borrowing heavily from GOV.UK. We have realised that our policy is not something that can only be expressed as physical documents or PDFs, but it is a reflexive set of information, which can be presented to people in a multitude of ways.

We plan to start analysing our existing documents, thinking carefully about the target audience and conscious that even deeply technical or specialist subjects should be readable and clear. This will be an ongoing process but we have the ambition to come up with something that can form the backbone of our policy framework for years to come.

Watch this space!

It’s the holiday season, and as millions of people head off on their travels the importance of a single source of authoritative and accurate travel advice becomes particularly relevant.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) completed their transition of content to GOV.UK back in March, and their detailed foreign travel advice for 225 countries and territories gets around one hundred thousand pageviews every day from users all over the world.

Figures like this, along with recent developments in the Middle-East and Africa, prompted me to investigate how people are accessing this information and how users’ behaviours and concerns might be reflected in the aggregated pageviews. With this in mind, I built a tool to show me more.

A Global Vision

Data about different countries naturally lends itself to a map-based approach. One can immediately get a feel for trends across the world and get an instant indication of the causal link between news events and traffic.

Before I go into any details regarding the visualisation, I’d like to stress that this is a quick mock-up with none of the gloss or testing you’d expect from a production piece of software. As such, expect a few issues and visual glitches here and there.

Disclaimers aside, let’s start with a screen grab:

This is a simple map of the world with a deceptively large amount of information. In a nutshell:

• the size of the circles are proportional to yesterday’s pageviews to that country’s advice pages
• colours reflect the percentage change in views compared to the day before, with the brightest green signalling the greatest increase in interest
• if you hover over a circle you will see a breakdown of the pageviews across the different subsections of that country’s travel advice (the bracketed values show the average for all countries)
• a country is shaded dark grey if there has been an unexpectedly large number of people looking at the ‘Contact Foreign Travel Advice Team’ section, as this could indicate that information is missing from the advice

If you click on a country it’ll zoom in, and if you click on any of the circles you can see the previous 14 days of pageviews data for the ‘Summary’ section. This gives a little more context, especially for countries which have short periods of high traffic volume.

I’ve included a screen grab of the breakdown hover as it clearly displays cases in which there is a specific bias towards certain sections. In this instance, we see a marked interest in the ‘Local Laws and Customs’ section of the Peru guide which ties in directly with the recent news story relating to the detention of two British citizens for alleged drugs smuggling.

Travel advice is always changing, so I’ve also included a small text box in the bottom-left which displays the latest updates. This is updated three times a day and might tell a slightly different story to the data on the map, which are totals from the previous day.

The Usual Caveats

I’ve really enjoyed building this. I’m currently hosting it on my Github account, so feel free to make a pull request if you have any improvements. As I mentioned, It is reasonably clunky and there are numerous bugs (the biggest being its dislike for Internet Explorer). Chrome, Safari or Firefox can -mostly- handle the way I’ve made it (using Mike Bostock’s excellent D3 javascript library).

Feedback is always welcome. Enjoy!

On 1st July the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) launched the beta of the Lasting Power of Attorney digital tool. Service manager Kit Collingwood wrote about the release on the MoJ Digital blog, and we asked her to write about what they’ve learned since.

Even though it’s only been six weeks since we’ve launched, we’ve already learned a lot. Overall, our experience of going live has been great and the feedback so far has been brilliant – I’ve got to use my favourite line from a member of the public: ‘Dear Sir: this is the best government website I’ve ever used !’

However, nothing ever goes 100% to plan – that’s where the fun and the challenge lie. We’re really cutting our teeth on the LPA service and, though we’ve got an amazing cross-agency team and had prepared really well for launch, you can’t predict exactly what will happen when you go live. In the event, it has been easier in some ways and harder in other than we’d expected – here are our top lessons:

With support, practice makes perfect

Keeping the LPA service running, and improving it, is jointly owned by the OPG and MoJ’s Digital Services Division. The two agencies are working across different locations, and we’ve found that building a single-team ownership of support and continuous deployment has taken some real effort.

The model is now working well; we’re going from writing user stories based on feedback to deploying changes in a matter of days, as well as fixing bugs in minutes or hours. We’ve also learned that you can’t mimic live services perfectly before you launch – some bumps in the road are inevitable (and are learning opportunities) and smoothness only comes from practising together.

You might be more popular than you think

We’d planned for the tool to be a ‘soft launch’ with very little fanfare, before increasing visibility of the service when we felt confident that it was running smoothly. In the event, we had more interest in the tool than expected and, while that’s great, it presented a couple of issues too.

I’d suggest to others launching similar services to future-proof systems and models – more people might want your service than you’d have thought – and to be aware that in the world of social media, there’s no such thing as a soft launch of a public service any more!

The OPG office

You’ll never please everyone

We are putting the user at the heart of everything we do – we want the service to work for the people using it. However, we’ve found that there are a few people who have problems with the service which, when we’ve looked at them, we just can’t fix while keeping the main features and aims of the tool in place. In these cases there’s a judgement to be made: will this feature help or hinder the majority of users? No service will be perfect for every user, so we’ve aimed at the many rather than the (very) few.

The issues never come where you think they’re going to

Before we launched, we predicted where some problems may arise; for example, we knew that only through user feedback would we know exactly how to pitch the guidance in the tool. In the event, the guidance hardly needed tweaking; in the mean time, other aspects weren’t working as well, so some effort went where we hadn’t planned. We’ve definitely learned that only in live service can you know what’s going to go stunningly well, and what will prove to be more complicated.

As ever, happy to chat about any of this: @kitterati on twitter or email kit.collingwood@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

We’ve put together a video on the assisted digital team, showing a bit about who we are and what we do. Thanks to Graham Higgins and Giles Turnbull for making this for us, following their previous excellent work introducing the Transformation team, Finance team, Hosting and Infrastructure team, User research team, Procurement team and the Product analysts.

Meet the assisted digital team – video transcript

Rebecca Kemp (Team Leader, Policy, Government Digital Service):

At the moment you have a digital service, you might have a paper channel, you might have a phone channel, and they’re all separate. Whereas in future, you would have a digital service that’s all digital behind the scenes, with a bit of extra help for the people who need it for Assisted Digital.

Karen Stokes (Project Manager, Government Digital Service):

We know that not everyone will be able to use digital services independently so we need to make sure that we provide some help and some support for those people who are offline, and that’s Assisted Digital.

What sort of people is Assisted Digital for?

We’re talking about people like my dad, one finger at a time when he does use a laptop, and who gets very frustrated about looking at forms online. “That’s not giving me the answer, that’s not going to help me, I don’t know what that’s all about.”

Mark McLeod (Digital Policy Advisor, Government Digital Service):

My nana would benefit from Assisted Digital support. So she’s 94 and she’s never used a computer, and she’s not interested in using a computer.

Richard Smith (Policy and Projects Officer, Government Digital Service):

It’s mainly for people who have problems using technology in general, and also people with certain disability needs, people from certain socio-economic groups, anyone really who, for whatever reason, is disadvantaged using a computer.

Delivering Assisted Digital

Rebecca Kemp:

Last year we were working on the Government Digital Strategy, so thinking big thoughts about what Digital by Default means and what Assisted Digital might look like. Now we’re moving from strategy or policy development into delivery phase.

Assisted Digital is part of Digital by Default

Mark McLeod:

The way not to think of it is: we have digital and non-digital. I think the way you need to think about it is: you have your Digital by Default service that includes Assisted Digital provision that’s going to allow the people that aren’t online to access that service.

Rebecca Kemp:

The reason we call it Assisted Digital, not other channels or alternative channels, is because we want it to be thought about together. The process should be pretty similar. It’s about understanding user needs, it’s about meeting them efficiently and effectively, it’s about getting people services in the ways that are comfortable and that work for them.

@ReemaGDS

Kathy talks about what we’ve been doing over the last few days at GDS, including the Digital Leaders meeting and our all-staff meeting. She also discusses Dan Collins’ tool for examining page views of FCO travel advice, what we’ve learned from the LPA beta, and welcomes several new starters to GDS.

Matt:
Hello Kathy.

Kathy Settle, Director, Digital Policy and Departmental Engagement, Government Digital Service:
Hi there, Matt.

Matt:
A couple of big meetings starting off the week at GDS.

Kathy Settle:
We did. We had a great one of our All Staff meetings. These happen monthly and it’s a really great opportunity to bring together all the hundreds of staff across GDS now. Obviously many of them are based in our office in London in Aviation House, but we’ve got a lot of them based with departments, out doing the exemplars, so it’s really great to get them all together. As part of that, all the teams give an update of what they’re doing. I loved the one that Anna (Shipman) did, all about problems with her roof, actually, which she really applied it to how software designers think and work, applied it to a really practical life problem which was really interesting.

And the other person it was great to see there was Mike Blackburn. So he formerly worked at Apple and he’s now coming to work at UKTI (UK Trade & Investment), so again it’s one of those new recruitment posts that we’re getting into the heart of government at a senior level and it’s great to see that expertise from the private sector coming over and now working in the public sector.

We also had our regular monthly Digital Leaders meeting. I think I mentioned last week that we were going to be talking about Digital Inclusion and the work of the new team that we’re setting up, so we had a great discussion about that and got very clear agreement from digital leaders about what they wanted the team to do. We also talked about how the new technology structures should work across government, so we had an alpha of what that model should look like and we had a really good debate about that and the team are now going away to work up a beta. So we iterate models just as we do with websites.

Matt:
And what else have we been doing at GDS this week?

Kathy Settle:
Two things probably worth flagging actually. One was on the HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs) website transition. We had a fantastic meeting with representatives of all the tax professional bodies and we were starting getting their really early input into what the migration might look like and how HMRC content will appear for them on GOV.UK, and to make sure it really meets their needs. So it was the start of a dialogue, a long dialogue I suspect over the next year, but a really good kick off.

The other thing that’s worth flagging is a blog that was written by Dan Collins which people might want to read. He’s been looking at the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) content about worldwide travel advice and he’s produced what I guess I’d call a heat map, which shows where the recent trends are of where people are looking for travel advice across the world. And what’s really obvious is how it reflects the news, so how it moves from recent issues in Turkey to Egypt and Syria and so on, so please do read the blog and have a look because it’s really interesting.

Matt:
Any other news from places outside of GDS this week?

Kathy Settle:
Yes, actually, another blog that was written this week, which was by Kit Collingwood, who’s the service manager for the Office of the Public Guardian project to build a new Lasting Power of Attorney digital offering. Kit’s written a great blog about what they’ve learnt so far since the product’s been out and how much great take-up they’ve had of that product, and she’s also flagged some of the learning they’ve had as well. But one thing that was interesting, she actually didn’t include in her blog, was an issue that’s come up in their call centres. All their call centre operatives have a screen that they have to touch, so when they get a call they can allocate it to a particular topic, and they’ve recently just had to add a button where you can just record that someone’s made a call to give some positive feedback. So it’s the first time ever there have been lots and lots of calls they have received that has purely been positive feedback, so we’ve now got a positive feedback button on their screen and that’s fantastic news.

Matt:
That’s terrific. What’s coming up next week?

Kathy Settle:
Well, it’s a bank holiday, which is fantastic; we all look forward to those. And then we also have some visitors next week; we have some visitors from New Zealand and from South Korea, so carrying on our tour round the world, if you like, or virtual tour round the world at least.

Matt:
And finally, have we got any new starters this week at GDS?

Kathy Settle:
Yes, we’ve got several actually, and one that’s particularly worth mentioning is Victoria Ufondu, and she’s coming into the Transition team, so the team that’s transitioning all those hundreds of agencies and Arm’s Length Bodies onto GOV.UK, so welcome to her and all the other new members.

Matt:
Terrific. Enjoy your bank holiday.

Kathy Settle:
And you.

At the start of the month I went out to Sebastopol, California, for Foo Camp. It was a feast of good conversations; a great opportunity to share and get feedback on the work we’re doing at GDS, and to talk with makers from many different backgrounds about ideas, tools and projects relevant for our work.

Foo Camp

Foo Camp is an “unconference” (and the inspiration for many similar events) where the attendees design the agenda at the event. Topics ranged wildly, from big data to synthetic biology. Amongst all of that three of us from GDS talked about our work.

We knew going in that many of the attendees would be familiar with our work on GOV.UK, so we used our session to explain that work in its broader context. We talked about transformation, policy, the IT strategy and many of the other strands of GDS’ work.

The broad range of content makes for unexpected connections, which is really the aim of the event. It was exciting to see how many of the attendees had heard of our work and hopefully some of what we were able to talk about was useful; we certainly benefitted from the questions and conversation.

Back in SF

After the event I headed back to San Francisco where I visited Code for America and the Mayor’s Office for Innovation. I was joined by Frances Berriman, the former front end lead at GDS who recently left us for a new life in California.

We did a talk for a group of fellows and staff at Code for America, chatting afterwards about how we might be able to support each others’ projects a little more. Some of Code for America’s work in cities in the US overlaps with what we’re working on, and it was particularly interesting to think about how the approaches we’re taking on the transformation projects might better enable the sort of focussed innovative projects the Code for America fellows take on.

A good example is a project in New York which helps charities who run schemes focussed on offenders to identify the right candidates for those schemes. That service is made possible by the fact that the city’s judicial system is entirely digital, and has the right interfaces to allow new projects to search the data and take it to the people who need it.

In the Mayor’s Office for Innovation (http://innovatesf.com/) we spent some time with Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer for San Francisco, and Rodrigo Davies an ex-pat Brit working with them over the summer. They’ve got a wide range of work under their remit, from helping the city open its data, to helping the city connect better with its tech community, to finding projects that will improve the city. They’re starting out by making some simple tools which help citizens navigate changes to the healthcare system and interact with public space in the city better. Small projects that solve clear user needs and begin to establish some new capabilities and delivery.

And the code’s all out there in the open!

And home

Getting back from a few days away it’s easy to get buried in the mountain of email that has built up, but with that mostly under control there’s also new enthusiasm to plough back in and new connections to contribute.

I’m particularly looking forward to continuing conversations with Code for America about how the new infrastructure our transformation projects we’re putting in place could support projects like those they’re involved in, as well as sharing some of the San Francisco team’s code with the GOV.UK team so we can think about the next steps for some of our tools.

Here at GDS, agile thinking and techniques inform how we do what we do, this extends from delivering projects, programmes and the GDS portfolio of work. I’ve been working with a team of people to implement and run an agile portfolio management function at GDS and this is an overview of how and why we did it.

A growing organisation

In October 2012 we launched GOV.UK. This was a big milestone for GDS, and prior to its launch it was a large focus of our organisational efforts.

Although GOV.UK was a large part of the work we were doing, the organisation was also growing in other areas. We had gone from 12 people working on Alpha GOV to over 300 people working on a number of programmes of work in just over 1.5 years.

Rapid growth is a challenge  a small group of people have the ability to act more like a startup, but as an organisation gets bigger how do you make sure you can retain the same transparency and collective decision making?

After the GOV.UK launch, it was a natural time to take a moment to reflect on the organisation and re-consider our processes. This is where the GDS approach to an agile portfolio framework was born.

The implementation of a portfolio framework

We addressed the portfolio implementation project, much like we would any project at GDS, in an agile way: We spent time with the users and stakeholders to understand what their needs were; we spent time workshopping to understand drivers, what success looked like, what we hoped the project would do, and what our fears were – as well as opportunities that could arise from the project.

From this process we defined the project goals as:

• create a portfolio management function at GDS that compliments the existing agile project management methods
• create a cross GDS view of priority
• implement clear and understandable workflows
• produce clear, actionable management information

We also took time to map out the what the current situation was. How did a project or piece of work become part of someone’s backlog? What were the routes for work coming into GDS and who was making those decisions? This allowed us to pragmatically look at what was happening and how we could improve it.

The portfolio wall

The GDS Portfolio wall

At GDS we use walls to focus teams and show others what we are working on. Once we had tested some ideas for a new workflow with our users, it seemed natural for us to reflect it on a wallspace in the office.

(When we have visitors, it’s often the place that causes them to stop and appreciate the sheer number of things the team here are working on.)

The wall has been iterated on a few times since it’s initial incarnation, but the columns are currently:

Projects flow from an initial idea, through a short assessment, into a longer discovery, through delivery to operational or done. Each decision point allows for sharing information and the opportunity to stop something if need be.

The information on the portfolio wall is the most up to date project information and allows everyone in the GDS offices to easily see what we are currently working on. We then back up data from the wall into Google Docs that we can manipulate to provide insightful and actionable management information.

After the wall first went live, we spent some time with product owners getting each project into the relevant columns. We then mapped each of those projects to the GDS goals. Using this information along with any deadlines gave us a list of all projects in priority order, priority is then considered on each project at each stage to give a continuous view across GDS as to what we should be doing.

Forums and decision making

One important item that came out of the discovery is that we needed some clear decision gateways. This also helps gather useful data about projects, which in turn helps us make decisions about what we are doing as an organisation.

Asking for information of busy people isn’t enough. Getting the right regular forums in place to gather data for clear purpose has better success.

We added a weekly meeting (called the GDS Approvals Board) where we ask one simple question of the senior management team: Based on the information we have, should this project move into the next stage? This meeting takes no more than an hour a week and over the past few months we have managed to make it shorter.

The amount of information gathered prior to this meeting is dependant on what stage the project is in; e.g. if it’s to understand if we should move from assessment to discovery (work out what the project would deliver and what effort would it take to deliver it) than we ask just five questions around the need for the project, fit with goals and how long discovery will take. If it’s to understand if we should move a project from discovery to delivery (actually doing the project), the questions will be more detailed, e.g. what is the user need, what are the success measures, what are the technical considerations.

Project Card

We also have a weekly stand-up with representatives from each of the functional areas across GDS, where we walk the wall, move project cards and highlight project blockers, all of which is feeds into management information.

Where we are now

The portfolio management framework at GDS has created a single place to see what is happening across the organisation and a framework to manage that within. It has created increased transparency to allow all of GDS to see what we are working on, what’s coming up and provides management information so that we can make decisions as an organisation.

Projects by stage

Of course, we are continuing  to improve it; the next iteration will include further joining up the people side of projects and how we ensure that it links in with the portfolio framework.

If you’ve got any questions, leave a comment or send me a tweet @ewebber

Getting user research into agile teams in a way that is timely, relevant and actionable is a challenge that teams the world over are tackling. Working effectively in agile has recently been the driver of some fairly significant changes to the way our researchers work at GDS.

In the early days of GDS, the User Research team worked across the different projects here, as well as helping support the exemplar transactions. We did a mix of in house research, as well as managing usability testing and other research that was outsourced to specialist companies.

Using this model we found it difficult to provide insight to teams quickly enough, and researchers were spread across projects to the extent that they were never really a part of the team shaping the design or developing real depth of expertise in a particular product or its audience. This was less than ideal for both project teams and researchers.

Research analysis done on the wall

We’ve been iterating how we do research in the same way we iterate our product design, and learned that the following techniques seem to integrate good research into agile teams more successfully.

Dedicated researchers for each team

Rather than a team of researchers taking research briefs from lots of project teams, each project team has a dedicated researcher working closely with the team of designers, developers, content designers and product owners.

This allows the team to be closer to the product design and adopt a more ‘experimental’ approach – hypothesising about what design or content approaches might work and designing ways to measure what is more or less successful.

Test designs at least every fortnight

The ‘Two week rule’. We don’t design anything for more than two weeks without watching real end users interacting with it. This means that most teams are out in the field or in the research laboratory at least every fortnight, putting our design and content in front of potential end users.

Everyone in the team should take part

We believe that research is a team sport and encourage all team members to observe research sessions for at least 2 hours ever 6 weeks. There is good evidence that this helps teams create better products. And having dedicated researchers in our teams makes it easier for everyone on the team to get regular opportunities to watch people use the product they’ve designed.

A varied toolkit

It’s easy for teams to get comfortable with a small set of research methods and to use those for everything. An experimental mindset requires that we are always looking for better ways and a more varied research toolkit to help us get a richer and more accurate understanding of our users and their needs.

We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods and work closely with our web analytics colleagues to design studies that allow us to better understand how people respond to interface design and content using A/B testing and detailed path analysis in early prototypes.

See it through from analysis to action

Getting interesting insights from research isn’t hard. Getting those insights into the design of products can be surprisingly tricky. We analyse our research collaboratively and make sure we extract both findings and actions from each study. Findings build our understanding and go into our research library. Actions go into the project backlog, into sprint plans and therefore into the product design.

We don’t do powerpoint presentations or detailed reports and we use the time we’ve saved from that to work more closely with the team.

Sharing what we learn

As we do more research in more of our teams, there is a lot to gain by sharing our findings. We’re experimenting with ways to capture and share research across teams and even across departments, so that research becomes a real valuable and reusable asset for government.

We’re iterating how we work in the same way we’re iterating our projects. As we find better ways to work within teams and within the agile framework, we are better able to help teams build empathy with users and shape products that are focused on their needs.

Follow Leisa on twitter: @leisa

Over the past two weeks, the assisted digital project with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design has evolved from understanding the reasons that older people are either not online at all or are only partially online, to developing ideas for potential design solutions.

I have been exploring how assisted digital support can meet the needs of older people with users at the Age UK Hackney computer centre and at New Horizons community centre in Chelsea. Though ‘older people’ is often defined as those aged 65 and over, I use a broader definition of the term, including people aged 50 and over in my research, who span middle and older ages. (This does make a difference to Internet use, GDS’ Digital Landscape Research shows that 30% of those aged 55-64 are offline, while 41% of those aged 65 and over are offline.)

My user research sessions serve two primary aims:

• uncover technical or cultural problems
• test possible solutions to these problems

Common problems

Through my research, I have been building on the initial findings of the project to identify some common problems faced by older people when attempting to complete digital transactions. One of the earliest findings was that many of the older people I spoke to who were online were more comfortable conducting a one-way search query than a two-way personal information transaction. Further research has revealed that the lack of confidence underlying these users’ reluctance to make a two-way transaction often results in increased user error when they do attempt transactions.

The older people I’ve been researching with seem to be facing four common problems:

1. Some still do not trust the Internet enough to make digital transactions.
2. Many often do not trust themselves enough to complete a transaction online without error.
3. A lack of independence is associated with not being online.
4. Many lack access to the Internet – this affects both those who are technologically curious and those who do not want to use the Internet.

Potential design solutions

So far the research has revealed three opportunity areas for the design of assisted digital support:

1. User at home – technology enables the user to connect, from their own home, to a real person who will assist in completing a digital transaction.
2. User travels to another location – where they can access digital equipment, experts and peers who will help them to transact online.
3. An expert comes to the user – and brings their own Internet equipped computer or tablet, which they can use when helping the user to complete a digital transaction.

I have used these to underpin my ideas for potential design solutions to address the problems older people face. I presented four of these ideas to colleagues at GDS last week, these are shared below as diagrams, with descriptions of how they could work.

A disclaimer: at this stage, these ideas are still very much works in progress, and they are not the plans of GDS. Some may be more or less appropriate to explore further as design solutions that could potentially feed into future assisted digital support.

1. Digital bike delivery

Digital bike delivery

Every council in the UK has at least one library. This scenario builds on existing book delivery services that libraries already provide, and adds in a person who can provide Internet access and expertise or serve as a friendly link to digital government services for those who do not have access themselves. The messenger would be equipped with an Wifi enabled tablet or laptop to complete any digital transaction needed while also delivering and picking up books to return.

In the urban environment the service could be provided by a bike messenger on a cargo bike that would use a tablet for their list of deliveries with GPS that draws a clear map from one person’s home to the next.

2. Printed GOV.UK site

Printed GOV.UK site

The research workshops are often group discussions and often those discussions turn into impromptu brainstorms with the people that would use the service most.

This idea was first a question that inspired a discussion about how a physical book could provide a guide to the GOV.UK website. A place for notes in the margins of the book could enable an analogue entry point into a digital interaction, by serving as a signpost to the website. The book would have the same layout and feel as the GOV.UK site itself, and could be used as both a guide and an informal training tool.

3. Digital Dialogues

Digital Dialogues

Digital Dialogues would be a regionally-based event, held once a month at each library. These would be drop-in sessions where people could sit in groups and be trained on how to navigate the GOV.UK website and have a discussion about it. The event would be a live forum for users and a way of getting live feedback on GOV.UK, where people could describe their needs to their peers. One-to-one sessions would support people on specific tasks, using the equipment provided by the library.

This sort of event would be a positive way for people to socialise with their peers and meet other people in the community who might have similar needs or aspirations. The best teaching is often done by peers; this sort of serendipity would be supported by an event like this.

4. Digital custodian

Digital custodian

This is an idea based on a real example of something that is already happening in communities. This image shows Jane Carson who used to babysit for her next door neighbor Bill (names have been changed). Bill is now 17 and is skilled and confident with using the Internet. He is an early adopter of digital services, while Jane is a late adopter, and he helps Jane with anything Internet related.

This particular idea formalises and lightly incentivises this relationship. Bill would officially sign up as a ‘digital custodian’ for Jane, who already puts her trust in Bill’s online expertise. Bill would then simply walk next door to help Jane complete digital government transactions, and could even transact on her behalf when required.

Next steps

In the coming weeks, I want to make the research more focused, looking at some specific interactions involved in completing a transaction on GOV.UK. These could include registering or logging into a service, submitting an application, making a payment, and maintaining or updating personal information.

This research will be conducted at events in the triborough libraries, a consortium of libraries in Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham, and Westminster which shares and links activities. I am currently working with Sue Cornish, the adult learning co-ordinator for these libraries, to advertise and organise sessions with older people who are just beginning to explore the possibilities opened up by being online.

I will aim to talk to a diverse group of users with diverse interests, to identify the specific problems faced around the above interactions. I will then work on designing, testing and refining design solutions to these problems, and will continue blogging about my findings and ideas.

Today we are happy to announce an exciting new phase in the Identity Assurance Programme as we develop user-focused identity services for exemplar transactions as part of the transformation of government digital services.  Five of the Identity Providers on the cross-government identity assurance framework (Digidentity, Experian, Mydex, The Post Office, and Verizon) have now signed contracts to deliver our first live services.

The identity assurance service will enable people to assert their identity online safely and securely, and allow government to be confident that users of online services are who they say they are.

We are pleased that these suppliers have chosen to invest in this phase of the programme and work with government to create this new market.  We will now be working closely with those that have signed, who represent the range of types of providers needed to make online identity provision a success.

The number and nature of organisations engaging with the Identity Assurance Programme is growing. Helping industries understand and develop identity assurance is an important part of what we do – and we’re doing it transparently via the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) forum.  Working together in this way is proving to be mutually beneficial for government, for identity providers and for the people who will be using the service once it’s live.

Our contracted suppliers are working closely with us and the government departments in an agile way to develop the service and help us understand and meet future needs.  Inevitably, new features and capabilities will be required as the service matures and we’ll add these into our next phases.

This is a rapidly developing marketplace, and Cabinet Office is pleased to continue to support and manage this for all of government to provide a better, faster and safer way for users to access government transactional services.

We’ll be posting news of our first Beta services soon.

Mike Beaven talks the report Smaller, Better, Faster, Stronger: Remaking government for the digital age, an upcoming Digital Advisory Board meeting, Thursday’s Open Standards event, and more.

Matt:
Hello Mike.

Mike Beaven:
Hello there.

Matt:
Can you tell us a bit about what we’ve been up to today.

Mike:
So today’s been a really good day. We’ve had an off-site meeting with the GDS senior management team where we’ve done a number of exercises. First we looked at the first 6 months of the fiscal year, what’s been delivered against the plan, which was kind of terrifying because there seemed to be an awful lot of it. And then we’ve looked forward to the next 6 months, see what we’ve got left to do this year, and again there’s a fair amount to do there. And then we’ve looked at where we think the issues are and where we can help each other to unblock any things that are going to get in our path between now and April next year. So a really good day for the team, a lot’s been done but there’s a hell of a lot left to do as well.

Matt:
Lots of other things going on this week as well.

Mike:
Yes, a few interesting events or announcements. There’s a brilliant document being released by Policy Exchange around the future of government and digital government, which really throws some pretty challenging questions. I read it on Friday night with a glass of wine and it was a very good read, some very profound predictions about how government needs to operate so I’d recommend everyone takes a good look at it.

Also we’re doing some work with our identity providers. So these guys are integral to providing the identity credentials for people who are using our platform, we’ve got a few suppliers now signed up: Digidentity, Experian, Mydex, the Post Office and Verizon, so there are some familiar names there and some very specialist names.

Matt:
We’ve got a couple of events coming up later this week as well.

Mike:
Yes, we have, so in the general running of our broader programme we’ve got one of our Digital Advisory Board meetings, which for people who don’t know what that is, that’s some of the great and good across industry and the digital space. So we have a session on Wednesday where we’re going to be talking about the Identity Assurance programme and also about Digital Inclusion and how that work’s progressing.

Matt:
And another event on Thursday evening as well.

Mike:
Yes, so we’ve got an event all about Open Standards on Thursday, so basically we’ll be able to understand how standards get selected, they get debated and get through the whole process. So if you follow #OpenGDS you’ll be able to look at that on Twitter as well.

Matt:
We’ve got a few new starters as well.

Mike:
Five of them actually. As ever, we expand, so a couple of new user researchers quite crucially: Pete Gale, who’s joining the Transformation team looking at some of the BIS (Department for Business Innovation & Skills) exemplars and Esteban Olmedo, who’s going to be working on GOV.UK.

Matt:
And one fond farewell.

Mike:
Yes, sadly, Nick Stenning is off to Berlin, which sounds very exotic, to join the Open Knowledge Foundation, so we’ll miss him but wish him very well.

Matt:
Terrific. Until next time.

Mike:
Thank you very much.

Blogging makes it easier for government to talk about its work, share information and ideas, and connect with those with a common concern.

A few months ago, we launched the new GOV.UK blogging platform – which is designed to help people from within government blog as easily and cost-effectively as possible.

It’s a space which any government organisation can use to write about what they’re up to, or to develop practice or theory in a particular field.

We thought we’d tell you a bit more about the platform and the blogs already on it – and, if you’re reading this from within government, help you think about whether it’s the right space for you.

Blogging in government

We developed the GOV.UK blogging platform with a close eye on the types of format that were already working well in government.

The FCO blog

For example, we worked hard to understand the needs of colleagues in the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who have excellent and well-established blogs, providing personal testimony to the work they’re doing in different countries. We referenced the superb digital blogs from our colleagues at the Department of Health and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

And we’ve also looked within our experience – we’ve used the GDS blog to show how the GOV.UK site went through its journey to launch and beyond; talked about our shift to fixing transactions; and admitted when things haven’t worked.

But not all government organisations are as well set up to blog – and there are clear economic benefits to sharing blogging capability. Our blogging platform – developed in WordPress using a company on the G-Cloud framework – is designed to be highly scalable. It’s also robust, secure, and free to use for any government organisation who can meet a few basic criteria for using it.

The platform’s also designed to keep pace with the main GOV.UK platform – such as sharing a look and feel, and method of signing up to email subscriptions – so that users will have a consistent experience on GOV.UK no matter where they begin their visit.

Who’s blogging already?

A quick look at some of the dozen or so blogs already live on the GOV.UK blogging platform gives a pretty good indication of the opportunities offered.

For example:

• DVLA’s digital transformation blog on GOV.UK

  every digital exemplar project is encouraged to set up a blog to tell the story of their product development, and to share their learnings – DVLA and DWP are first off the blocks, but there will be plenty of others joining shortly

• our own Inside GOV.UK blog, for people who publish content to the GOV.UK site, discusses what we’re working on – for example, finding better ways of showing related content

• the Civil Service Quarterly blog contains detailed, unique insight from within the civil service – such as how to improve charitable giving through behavioural insight

• VOSA’s Matters of Testing blog on GOV.UK

  VOSA’s Matters of Testing blog for the MOT testing industry showcases a few MOT horror stories such as this one, discovered by Binny from Chana Car Centre (pictured right)

We’re also particularly proud of the History of Government blog, which has, for the first time, given the government a single place to talk about its history. Curated by the National Archives, it features contributions from across government and from a number of leading historians, supported by the History and Policy Group at King’s College London.

Can you guess, for example, which former prime ministers volunteered to pay for an ironing board themselves or found the prospect of:

“a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge”. (answer here)

What next for GOV.UK blogs

Civil Service Quarterly on GOV.UK

We’re keen to make our blogs a more integrated part of the main GOV.UK site – and to make it possible, for example, for departments to feature blogposts on their homepage, and for relevant blogposts to turn up in the GOV.UK search.

We’ve also got a bit more work to do to help those departments who’d like to move existing blogs over to our platform, to do so.

And of course, like every other bit of GOV.UK, we’ll continue testing and improving the product itself.

If you’re from within government and you’d like to know more about setting up a blog on GOV.UK, then you can find out more in (can you guess…?) our blogpost here.

Follow Graham on Twitter: @gkfrancis

Last night GDS hosted the first in a series of events to increase awareness, and participation in, the open standards process. It was held at  The Hub, a venue in Kings’ Cross. We want your help to identify the specific open standards that will most benefit users of government technology and services.

Liam Maxwell outlined the goals of the open standards principles in transforming government services, the principles and process were presented in more detail by Linda Humphries and Hadley Beeman followed by a panel discussion moderated by David Cotterill.

It was nice to be able to respond to some of the discussion points by citing pages on GOV.UK such as the service design manual, the transformation programme the performance platform and, as always, our design principles which guided the criteria used for assessing open standards, in particular: putting the needs of the user first and make things open, it makes them better.

Ultimately, most of the questions from the audience, especially those involving individual standards, could be answered with encouragement to participate in the process.

Get involved

The Standards Hub is the place to submit, comment upon and provide evidence for challenges to open standards.

Engaging on the Hub will help build the community, and where an individual challenge is proving difficult, you may also help us form a working group.

Get more involved

There are two panels being created to coordinate the evidence and proposals arising from the challenges, evaluating them and providing advice to the open standards board. The board makes recommendations to Liam, the chair, for approval. Essentially one panel will specialise in technical formats and protocols and a second will concentrate on issues surrounding the semantics of content.

The panels will meet regularly in person, probably in and around London but we can arrange remote access such as video conferencing or phone conferencing facilities for those unable to travel. A call for volunteers to participate in the panels is open until 10am on 30 September, and if that wasn’t enough, there are periodically calls for volunteers to sit on the Board itself.

The success of the whole process depends almost entirely upon your participation, so please help us to use the right open standards to make government services better.

Keep an eye on the blog and @GDSTeam to find out when the next event will be.

Back in May of this year I tweeted about how impressed I was that London-based agency ustwo had released an update to their “Pixel Perfect Precision” handbook, which included a new section on accessibility.

The handbook, written so that new members of their team can quickly get up to speed on how they’re expected to work, was notable in that it pushed accessibility as a skill designers and developers should be giving consideration to. That it does so in such an open and inviting way is a great thing.

As the Accessibility Lead for the GDS I spend my time sharing that view; across the GDS, and across wider government, and the web community. I was contacted by ustwo and invited to go and speak to their designers and front-end developers about my role in the GDS, how we work, and the kinds of things that accessibility here encompasses.

The talk was a success so I found myself back there again last Thursday, this time to talk to their developers. This talk focussed more on how we test the products we’re building, and the kinds of problems we focus on, as well as a lengthy discussion of how we apply that to our agile development approach.

I’m always interested in speaking with other teams about how they approach accessibility, and it’s always good to share experiences and approaches so that we can all move the web forward for everybody.

The questions that happen after the talk are always the most interesting part of the talks for me. If the slides and my speaking notes provoke any further questions I’ll be happy to continue the points here, and if anyone has and requests for me to come share our approach directly, I’ll be happy to talk about that too.

Thanks again to ustwo for the invitation!

Follow Josh on Twitter: @partiallyblind

For almost the first time, we are using conversion funnel data to improve government transactions. The comparisons between services are fascinating.

When you are browsing books on Amazon, the pages are full of links. Want to see a bigger picture of the cover? Click on the thumbnail. What do other people think of this book? There are pages of reviews to explore. More from this author? Just click on her name.

The second you Proceed to Checkout however: everything disappears. The picture of the book cover is removed, even the Amazon logo no longer links back to their homepage. The only thing you can click is the nice friendly button labelled ‘Continue.’

Amazon browsing (top) vs Amazon checkout (bottom)

At this stage, Amazon just want to get you through the necessary steps to complete the sale. The statistics of how many people make it from one step to the next is called the conversion funnel.

A basic conversion funnel showing how many people drop off at each stage of the transaction to legalise documents

For Amazon an effective conversion funnel is an important income driver: they will have worked very hard to make it easy for people to get from one end of a transaction to another.

Government however has historically been weaker in this area, or at least highly variable. Some agencies, such as Companies House, have very good statistics as to how people are going through their pages and have iterated their transactions many times; others may never have seen any data on this before.

Fixing transactions is a core part of the Government Digital Service’s mission, so learning how easy it is to complete a transaction is a crucial piece of information. Conversion funnels help pinpoint problem areas of a transaction and give service owners the data they need to improve it. It is very good that we are beginning to track this data more widely.

Gathering this data is part of the standard to which we are holding all government websites, and all new services will be collecting this information. However, many older services are starting to gather this data now so that they have some baseline data as to how their website is performing. You can see our first conversion funnels beginning to appear in the services section of www.gov.uk/performance.

The conversion funnels for licensing (left), and for the premium service for legalising a document.

As with other information on the performance pages of GOV.UK, it is only by gathering the data that we are beginning to learn what a good conversion funnel looks like.

The funnels for Amazon, along with those for Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and others remain secret so we can’t compare ourselves with them easily. However, we can begin to compare across government: if a transaction in the Ministry of Justice is performing much better than a similar one in the Department of Health, sharing that knowledge is good for both sides.

One of the things which we have learned is that government transactions can also be more complex than popping to Amazon for your copy of The Pleasures of Counting by T. W. Körner. Getting a lasting power of attorney for example – whereby you nominate someone to take decisions on your behalf should you become incapacitated – requires gathering lots of information and actual signatures along with a payment to the Public Guardian. People often go to one stage of the transaction several times over several days as they collect more information meaning that instead of a pure downward trend, we have rolling territory where some later stages get more views than earlier ones:

Visits to the different journey stages while applying for lasting powers of attorney

At this stage we still need to gather data: lasting power of attorney (the dashboard for which we will be releasing shortly) will be our most complex transaction so far and we will know more about the best way of handling this the more data we have.

I’m fascinated to see this data and look forward to more rolling in. Tell me – what is your favourite online transaction? Why was it good? Did the last transaction you did with the government live up to it?

Follow Phil on Twitter: @philbuckley5

Mike Beaven talks about the latest quarterly update to the Transactions Explorer and welcomes cross-government heads of communications, whose monthly meeting is being hosted by GDS this week.

Transcript below

Interviewer:
Hi, Mike.

Mike Beaven:
Hello there.

Interviewer:
What have we got coming up this week, at GDS?

Mike:
So we’ve got an update to the Transactions Explorer. For anyone who has not seen that, it’s a kind of one stop shop for a lot of data about all the transactions that the citizens of the UK interact with government over. So, Cliff Shepherd and the team have got together a whole quarter’s worth of new data and loaded that into the tool.

Interviewer:
We’ve already had one visitor to GDS this week?

Mike:
Yes, we’ve had a delegation from the Singapore government. They came in today to talk to Liam (Maxwell) about his Office of Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) function, and basically what our approach is to running IT in the UK government.
Later this week, on Wednesday, we’ve got all the cross government heads of digital engagement and communication coming in. They’re holding their regular meeting here, but it’s good to have them in the heart of GDS, having that meeting.

Interviewer:
What were we up to last week at GDS?

Mike:
So last week, we had an interesting session about open standards, where we had a show and tell last Thursday. So, Paul Downey, who is one of our technical architects, he writes a regular blog on this, so you if you want to look at that on the GDS website. Generally, the thing about open standards is getting involved, so people should get involved.

Interviewer:
Graham Francis blogged about something else we’ve been up to recently?

Mike:
Yes, we have a blogging platform that’s available on GOV.UK, that any department can use if they want to, basically, blog about things. So it’s a really useful, valuable tool. If you want to get a sense of how it works, have a look at the History of Government blog that the National Archives have put on there.

Interviewer:
Finally, have we got any new starters, this week?

Mike:
We’ve got quite a few new starters this week. I won’t list them all, but we’ve got four new faces in the Content Team, who’s Cass (Bonner), Gavan (Curley), Charlotte (Harry) and Tom (Adams). GOV.UK have got some new people, and we’ve got some new people in the Transition team, moving all the content onto the main platform.

Interviewer:
Excellent. Until next time.

Mike:
Thank you.

Last week, several members of the GDS team decamped to the south coast for the Brighton Digital Festival, in particular to the one-day conference dConstruct. Now in its ninth year, it’s gained quite a reputation for giving brilliant speakers a chance to deliver thought-provoking, insightful talks about a vast range of digital and non-digital stuff (mind you, I would say that; I spoke at it in 2011).

I took a couple of days off to attend this year’s conference – and sister conference Improving Reality – to look at our work at GDS through a slightly different lens.

Listen to users and build for the future

Maciej Cegłowski, founder of Pinboard, talked about the uses fandom continues to find for tools all over the internet, co-opting services like Delicious or Livejournal in completely unforseen ways.

His appeal to makers to listen to the people who use the services they build rang all sorts of bells for those of us who sit near print-outs of the GDS Design Principles. Still, it’s always good to be reminded that it’s the right thing to do; when you’re neck deep in an iteration which hasn’t been tested and you can’t find a way out, chances are it’s time to put it in front of users so you can see where to go next.

Other validations came through talks by Luke Wroblewski and Simone Rebaudengo. Both showed the audience a selection of very different interactions than those we’re familiar with on GOV.UK – from internet-enabled objects to gestural interfaces.

It’s important that we remember to build something that can be built on; the GOV.UK you use today might bear very little resemblance to the GOV.UK you use on your smart watch in five years time. But if we make sure the information and services are clear, concise and easy to repurpose then you should still get a great experience.

Making the invisible visible

By far the biggest undercurrent of the conferences was the importance of making systems legible for users. Amber Case at dConstruct, along with Timo Arnall and many other speakers at Improving Reality, all came at the subject from different angles. Dan Williams, in probably my favourite talk, tied it all together wonderfully.

Dan Williams shows a clip from a George Méliès film at dConstruct

We’re surrounded by systems – like GPS, wi-fi and the internet – which render themselves invisible to most people. What you see is their effect, their function, but not the network itself.

Part of our job, as makers and designers, is to make those things easier to understand so people can use them effectively. We should make it clear what users are interacting with, what the implications are for them, and what happens to things like their data. We shouldn’t pretend it all happens by magic.

In a mundane way that means making sure our cookie notices are easy to read and understand, or showing how different bits of government join up together. But it also means things like being as clear as we possibly can be about what’s happening to a user’s information during a transaction, or during identity verification. It might also mean explaining more about how our infrastructure and tools work.

Back at Aviation House…

So, a great couple of days, leaving all of us with a lot to think about. For me, it’s a prompt that we need to do more to show how the things we build work; what systems and platforms they’re built on, and how they join up across government.

Thanks to all at Clearleft and Lighthouse for putting together two great lineups.

Follow Matt on twitter: @mattsheret

Today, we’ve released an updated version of the Transactions Explorer, our tool for publishing performance data for the government’s transactional services.

Our list has expanded to include over 700 services, from 17 government departments. For 83 of the biggest services, we’ve published additional data on costs and digital take-up; we also have more data for some of the ‘exemplar’ services now being redesigned and rebuilt.

More data, more transactions

The Transactions Explorer includes data collected every quarter for a rolling 12-month period. This is our third dataset, covering April 2012 to March 2013.

For the first time, we’ve published data on services managed by the Department of Health and its agencies and public bodies. This includes two new high-volume services – European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) applications and Healthy Start reimbursements – and other services will be added with future releases.

Screen Shot of the updated Transactions Explorer

For this release we’ve completely rebuilt the Transactions Explorer. We’ve integrated it with the Performance Platform, which will make it easier for us to support the tool and accommodate additional requirements. It’s been rewritten as a static site generated with Python, with some front-end functionality provided by JavaScript. As with most GDS products, the code is open-source and freely available on GitHub.

As ever, we’d love to know what you think of the Explorer – please let us know how we can improve it.

Last week, Mark McLeod, Richard Smith and I visited Leicester Pension Service. We wanted to see first-hand how a major transactional government service operates, hear from front-line staff, and find out more about the needs of older users (who are more likely to be offline).

What Leicester Pension Service does

Leicester Pension Service is part of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). It administers State Pension and Pension Credit applications to customers living in South Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire and parts of Warwickshire. Leicester also delivers the DWP Bereavement Service to people residing in its geographic area.

The State Pension and Bereavement services are relatively simple transactions, with the former taking an average of 20 minutes to process and administer over the phone. By contrast, the Pension Credit service is highly complex, requiring the customer to provide a wide range of personal information and post supporting documentation as proof.

Leicester Pension Service notice board

At the start of the day, we met with Nigel Kimpton, the Site Manager, who gave us an overview of business. He explained that all work in the centre is conducted over the phone or through a single online system. Next we met managers and staff from teams across the centre. Those working on processing benefit claims appreciated being able to manage cases through the online system, which allowed them to see all their cases at once, view and update all the information related to a case in one place, and share information easily with colleagues working on the same case.

The staff we spoke to were highly professional and empathetic. They had to balance providing a quality service to customers with resolving cases efficiently and effectively. We ended the day by speaking to people working in capacity planning for the centre. This is a complex and highly data-driven task, involving using historical information about call volumes to plan the resource needed to staff the centre’s phone lines.

What we will take away from the visit

It was especially useful to speak to front-line staff and directly observe them delivering a service to customers. Their experiences in dealing with customers and their insights about older people as a user group provided us with some important lessons for assisted digital:

• though older customers are less likely to be online, they have differing capabilities and needs – many older customers (particularly the newly retired) would be able and willing to apply for pension services online, provided the digital service was good

• we need to ensure that assisted digital users can have a direct link with government – many users have family or friends who could help them to use a digital service, but some users prefer not to rely on others, and some are socially isolated, with little or no support network

• it is important to consider assisted digital requirements from a user’s perspective – users’ circumstances can vary when using different government services, and this may impact on the type of assisted digital support they need (for example, users can be particularly distressed when using the Bereavement Service, so may need extra support)

• assisted digital providers need to be able to estimate demand for the service in advance, plan resource accordingly, and adapt to changing levels of need

Thanks to Nigel and his team for arranging such an interesting and productive trip for us. The day was a great reminder of how important it is to hear from those involved in the practicalities of service delivery when designing a truly user-centred service.

Mike Beaven gives the latest news on the Transformation programme work going on at the Home Office, Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and DWP (Department for Work & Pensions). Lots of GDS people are speaking at events this week, including Structure Europe, EPIC2013, Monitorama and Webexpo, and on Thursday Richard Perez, Director of the 2014 World Design Capital Cape Town, will be visiting us at Aviation House.

Transcript below

Interviewer:

Hello Mike. How are you doing?

Mike Beaven:

Hi there. Not too bad, thank you.

Interviewer:

What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Mike:

Some interesting stuff going on in the world of Transformation. Home Office have a great Visit Visa alpha which they did earlier this year, which really does something that we’ve not seen before, which enables the user experience to be built dynamically, based on the type of visa someone’s applying for. We’ve been very happy with the alpha, and the beta build of that starts this week, so that’s exciting. As a side, we’ve actually taken that product and made a generic version of it for use by all the departments, so that’s a really good example of reuse of some of the things we’re developing with departments. That’s probably our most exciting one.

Also, we’ve got a couple of discoveries coming to a conclusion, one of which is the waste carriers permits, which doesn’t sound that exciting, but gives you the licence to do everything from clearing rubble from a building site to disposing of nuclear waste, so quite important; the other one is personal independence payments, which is the replacement for disability living allowance.

Other Transformation news also: HMRC (HM Revenue and Customs) wrote a digital strategy last year. We’ve been doing exemplar projects with them for some nine months, now, so we’re having a review and a reset of that in conjunction with GDS. That relaunched today, and that work will be happening up until about the end of October.

Then in other news, we’ve been doing some interesting work with BIS (Department for Business, Innovation & Skills) around the business usage of the GOV.UK site. We’re looking at some of the products on there, like the finance support finder, browse, content and employing people and setting up a new business, so a whole load of user-focused research on that.

Interviewer:

Several members of the team are out this week giving talks.

Mike:

Yes we are; we’re out there spreading the love. Firstly, Sarah (Richards), Lisa (Reichelt) and Janet (Hughes) are out talking around the whole world of user research, and then James Stewart is at Cloud Conference, talking about the Digital by Default standard on Thursday.

Interviewer:

In turn, we’ve got a couple of visitors to GDS.

Mike:

Yes, we have. A really interesting one; there’s a chap called Richard Perez, who’s representing Cape Town. For those of you who don’t know, Cape Town will be the World Design Capital for 2014. So, similar to other great cultural and sporting events, there’s one for design and Richard is the director of that event, so he’s visiting Ben Terrett and his team to look at what we do here.

Interviewer:

Finally as ever, some new starters this week.

Mike:

Yes, this week we have Khadeja (Al Harbi), who’s joining the Digital Inclusion team, which is growing nicely as that work spins up into life.

Interviewer:

Terrific. Until next time.

Mike:

Thank you very much.