From time to time we like to give the teams at GDS the chance to talk about their work. This time we dropped in on the IT network team to find out if life in the bat cave really is like the IT Crowd.

Thanks to Richard Thomas, Paul Collman, Mohamed Hamid, Charles Turner and the rest of the team for braving the camera.

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Transcript

Meet the IT network team

Paul Collman, Internal Network Team Leader
Ohh, you’ve all seen ‘The IT Crowd’, haven’t you? It’s probably a bit like that; we probably don’t think we are.

Richard Thomas, Head of Internal IT Services
It’s the people that make the IT team.

Mohamed Hamid, Network Analyst
The way you think, I think you need to have a strategic outlook.

Paul Collman
I think the main thing really is to be interested in problem solving.

Charles Turner, Internal IT Analyst
It’s knowing that solution is going to have such an impact on the business and it’s going to make the workflow so much easier and better.

Mohamed Hamid
It is a fun job. GDS is an environment that’s always changing.

Richard Thomas
If we can give the best service, people respect us and it demonstrates that we respect other people as well because we understand their pressures, we understand what difficult jobs they’ve got.

What’s in the bat cave?

Paul Collman
So the bat cave, what we’re doing in there is, number one, build the network, and number two, run it; configuring network devices, implementing servers, managing those servers.

Mohamed Hamid
One thing that I like about GDS, and it’s quite unique, is that because it’s always changing, there’s always new people coming in, it’s a growing organisation, that means that the network’s also growing.

An exemplar for government

Paul Collman
We set out trying to build our network environment and build our Macs for a fraction of the cost that it usually takes government. Other departments are coming to talk to us and they are coming to say. “How have you done it?”, “What do you do?”, “Tell us what kit to buy?” It can be different. You don’t have to outsource that. You can do it yourself if you’ve got the right skills, and you can save an amazing amount of money.

Back in June, we launched the live phase of the new Register to vote digital service, number one on our list of transformation exemplars. I can’t overstate the importance of this project, and how proud I am of the team that made it happen.

As most of you will know, the nature of voter registration has changed. It used to be very old-fashioned, with its origins in the Reform Act of 1832: a form was sent to your home, a form that had to be filled out by the “head of household” on behalf of every eligible voter who lived there. We don’t think of “households” in the same way the Victorians did, and we certainly don’t think of “heads of households” as they did either. Times have moved on.

Now the law has been updated. Each voter registers individually, solely on their own behalf. No-one is beholden to a head of household any more. That’s why it’s called Individual Electoral Registration (IER).

Making things better

The digital service allows anyone to register to vote online, from any device connected to the web. It’s incredibly quick and simple – it takes less than five minutes. All you need is your National Insurance number (or your passport, if you’re abroad). It’s so quick, you could be forgiven for thinking “Is that it?” when you’ve finished your registration.

We spend a lot of time talking about the practical stuff behind the scenes (stuff like code and databases) which makes it easy to overlook the deeper, more fundamental change: this is how democracy works now. Voters are users too, and this service was designed to meet their needs.

Here are some things users have said about it during user research sessions:

That was really easy. Really straightforward.

The questions on each page are good – rather than having them all on one page. That’s a good feature.

I’d say it’s probably the clearest thing I’ve ever seen.

That’s so simplified – that’s good stuff.

The way it’s laid out – the forms, the spacing – it makes it relaxing to do. You can’t really go wrong with it.

This wasn’t a small project. Some of the numbers are staggering: it supports 46 million voters registered with 387 local authorities ¹.

I could go on, but you get the idea, and you can get an excellent understanding of how the team did it by reading recent blog posts by my GDS colleagues Mark O’Neill (Changing the way we register to vote), Pete Herlihy (I fought the law and the users won), and Martyn Inglis (Under the hood of IER). They tell the story much better than I can, and with the passion you can only get from being part of the team that did the work.

Unsung heroes

I will go on about one thing, though: the unsung heroes behind it all. You can see some of them in the photo at the top of this post.

They are the IER Support Centre, providing crucial support for local authorities across the country as they make the switch to the new voting system. I had a brief visit to their office to meet the team and chat with Service Director David Kirsch-Mills, Operations Manager Marianne Ainsworth-Smith, Product Manager Greg Cusack, and Colin Dingwall, Programme Director for the Electoral Transformation programme in Cabinet Office.

They explained how their work is split between two teams.

Team one manages a one-off data verification exercise with data currently held by Local Authorities. There’s a lot of data to verify – on average, the team handles 1.95 million voter registration records per day ². This data is what each authority already knows about its voters. It’s sensitive and valuable, so it has to be handled carefully. Uploads are done in batches, with each authority allocated a specific day to send its data. Each upload is checked to ensure all the data has been uploaded successfully, then gets verified against existing records. This process will continue through to mid-August.

Team two does service support. They deal with technical issues and answer questions posed by the public through this form.

Many other people from across government have helped build this new service, including the programme team in the Cabinet Office, as well as local authorities themselves – 387 teams up and down the country, whose efforts will ensure that the new register can support the running of elections. The Department for Work & Pensions and the Electoral Commission also played an important part.

Now that work on the initial alpha and beta phases is complete, GDS is gradually handing over control and maintenance of the live digital service to this new team, who will look after it and further develop it from now on.

One thing I say a lot is No More Big IT, and this team shows that in action. They do a job that in the old days would have been contracted out to a third party, at much greater cost and nothing like as quickly and efficiently.

This team’s work will help make the electoral register data more complete and more accurate than it’s ever been before. It will help local authorities have greater confidence in the quality of their own data. And members of the public can register to vote in a matter of minutes, whenever and however it suits them.

It might look like a small team in a small room, but the IER Support Centre is a great example of how things are changing in the Civil Service. It’s a piece of the wider digital civic infrastructure, a living breathing system that makes useful data connections between other things. This is what future digital government services look like.

Footnotes

1. Cabinet Office figures.
2. IER Support Centre figures.

Our fourth design principle is “Do the hard work to make it simple”. A team working at the Ministry of Justice have been putting that into action recently, trying to simplify a legal process known as “accelerated possession”, just one small part of the wider Civil Claims system.

One of the hardest problems they faced was simplifying language without changing the law. It was a perfect example of doing the hard work to make it simple: the team went through the process (and the forms associated with it) almost word-by-word to see what could be simplified, as I found out when I visited them a few weeks ago.

What are Civil Claims?

Civil Claims are legal claims against other parties made through the civil courts system. Often, they’re about non-payment of money owed, or breach of contract, or personal injury cases, disputes between neighbours, things like that.

Anyone can make a civil claim against anyone else. So in theory, anyone can be a claimant, and anyone can become a defendant in a civil case.

Inevitably, there are lots of paper forms to fill in. You’d think, given that anyone could find themselves involved in a case, that they’d be written in clear, plain English. But you’d be wrong.

How it used to work

The Civil Claims system, looked at in its entirety, is daunting. The team at MoJ Digital Services mapped it out and stuck the whole thing on the wall. You can see it in the photo at the top of this post. The map is a masterpiece – you can step back and see the scale of the whole system at a glance, or step closer and see tiny step-by-step details for individual legal procedures. George Sheldrake wrote a great blog post with more detail about the map-making process.

It shows in a glance that the whole system is too large to modernise in one go. That’s why the the team deliberately chose to tackle a thin slice through it, an echo of our fifth design principle, the detail of which says: “The best way to build effective services is to start small and iterate wildly” – an idea I like so much, I’ve got it printed on some of my business cards.

The slice they picked out to work on was Accelerated Possession, represented by a single blue box on that wall chart:

Accelerated Possession is a legal process designed to help landlords reclaim property that tenants haven’t vacated.

In theory, the process sounds simple enough: as long as all the qualifying criteria have been met, and the form filled in correctly, the court will order the tenant to leave the property.

In practice, though, the form that has to be filled is full of obscure legal language that makes it hard to understand. For example: at one point, it asks if the property concerned is “a dwellinghouse, or part of a dwellinghouse”.

It’s 2014. We shouldn’t be running public services littered with this sort of Victoriana. The law might be centuries old, but the language we use to communicate it to people shouldn’t be. Remember: anyone can be a defendant. Their list of user needs includes things like “As a defendant, I need to understand what I’m being asked to do by the court.” We can meet needs like that by using simpler, clearer language.

There are about 35,000 of these cases every year ¹, and this form is just one of about 20 different entry points into the civil justice system. It’s another classic example of failure waste, which I mentioned in my post about transforming Carer’s Allowance. Failure waste is the price we pay for  not designing services to meet user needs in the first place.

Making things better for users

This is the beta service for Accelerated Possession. There’s still a paper form involved, but the new web service fills it out for you, and gives clear instructions for the next steps you must take after printing it out.

This beta was built in just 10 weeks, thanks to close collaboration with Paul Harris, Paul Downer and colleagues at Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, and members of the Judiciary. It’s a terrific example of fast, iterative delivery.

It uses much simpler, more direct language: “What kind of property do you want to take back?” it asks, with two simple options beneath. There’s nothing about “dwellinghouses”.

Simplifying the language on the form was one of the biggest challenges faced by the team. There are two ways to deal with legal jargon: either rewrite it in plain English, or keep it and provide plain English notes that explain the legalease. The team ended up using both approaches for this particular project.

As product manager Eliot Fineberg put it: “We had to find the right balance between words that are understandable and words that are illegal.” They got advice from legal experts and senior judges to make sure the simpler language didn’t sacrifice essential points of law. The result is something that’s still legally accurate, but more accessible to readers.

Building a digital version of the form also gave them the chance to design a smarter form. It can adapt, for example, and only show applicants the questions that directly relate to them and their case. That makes everything quicker and less confusing.

Using the new digital service, applicants answer a series of questions and the form is filled out for them. At the end of the process, they see a draft copy that’s all ready to print, along with clear instructions on what to do with it next.

There’s been some positive feedback from users during user research sessions.

In terms of finding the form and stuff like that, it’s all just there, one click and you’re on it.

Oh that is good. (That was someone looking at the guidance notes.)

To be honest it was a lot easier than I thought… and quite straight forward.

The form itself is very easy and straightforward to fill in.

What’s particularly interesting is that although only a few users have tried this new service, some of them have already asked: “Why do I need to print off the form and post it? Why can’t I submit it digitally?”

Good question. That’s the next step.

It was hard work, but now it’s simple

We can’t continue delivering public services using paper forms that people can’t read. It doesn’t matter whether that’s because they’re based on centuries-old legal practices, or because they’ve just been badly written and never changed.

Using simpler language worked at GOV.UK, which won awards for the quality and clarity of its written content. As a government, we have to apply the same rules right across our work. Every service should be written in simple, plain English – even if the legal stuff behind the scenes remains just as complicated as before.

My visit to MoJ Digital Services was all too brief, and I’d like to grab this opportunity to say thanks to all the people who showed me their work while I was there. I’ve highlighted just one project in this post, and it represents just a small fraction of what I saw. To everyone who showed me work I’ve not mentioned here – thank you. And well done.

MoJ is making huge strides towards building what’s known within the Civil Service as “digital capability”. In other words, they’re hiring skilled people and assembling multi-disciplinary teams to tackle difficult digital projects. Most of the work is done in-house, rather than outsourced. Their focus is exactly where it should be: on user needs and delivery.

Footnotes

1. Figures from Ministry of Justice.

We’ve updated the guidance on naming and registering government domain names to make it faster, simpler and clearer to read through and decide whether you can apply for a gov.uk domain.

A local authority staff member using the updated naming guidelines

If you are a local authority, a fire service, devolved government etc, you may want to use a gov.uk domain to instil confidence in your users, who use your website for advice/information or a service, or when communicating with them. A gov.uk domain makes clear that your organisation is official and can be trusted.

The Central Office of Information (COI) had responsibility for managing the guidance until late 2011 when the Government Digital Service took over.

The original guidance was formed back in the mid noughties and was pretty much unchanged from then. This meant that all applicants accessed the process through the same point. With the differing needs of central government and local government, this caused potential confusion about how approvals happened.

When we moved the guidance to GOV.UK we took this opportunity to work with our Naming & Approvals committee (NAC) (which includes representatives drawn from central government, local government and other sectors) to revise the guidelines. We separating them into two different journeys as each needed to consider the specific needs and demands of their area and be fit for purpose:

• central government (and its agencies)
• local government (including fire services, Associations of Local Councils, Internal Drainage Boards etc)

But, the changes we have made are much more than just visual. With the old guidance, it took some time to read through before getting to the main questions of ‘is my organisation eligible?’ and ‘how do I apply?’.

We were aware that parish and town councils often have part time staff and may not have a web team that has time to read and understand the guidance, along with all its technical conditions. So, we separated the journeys (one for central government and one for local authorities) and simplified the language. We believe this has made it easier to find what you are looking for and what to do next.

Its been a long journey, and NAC will constantly be checking to ensure the guidelines can be followed and are easily understood. But we would also like to know what you think so, please take a look at the new guidance here.

Good news from the north east: our colleagues at HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have officially opened the Digital Delivery Centre Newcastle, a new headquarters for the HMRC Digital team.

David Gauke, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, paid a visit there last Tuesday to cut a red tape and declare the centre officially open. The team there is pioneering new ways of working and new ways of thinking, and it’s important that efforts like this get support from the top.

Work began there back in January, and since then head of centre Jason Kay has been busy recruiting staff and building a creative space for them to work in. Here’s what it looks like.

I’m especially pleased that Denise Wilton has joined to head up the design team – she’s not just a great designer, she has internet running through her veins. It’s vital that government organisations listen to, and take direction from, experienced internet people like her. HMRC have already had help from experts at GDS like Etienne Pollard and Tom Loosemore. Denise will be another terrific asset to the team.

There are now 130 people there, raring to go. I can’t wait to see what they build.

Jason puts it like this: “We’re creating a new agile collaborative working environment. We’ve got an ethos and a vision about making this a great place to work. We want to create something new, exciting and modern. It’s a major shift in how people work, and how HMRC delivers digital government services.

“There’s a phenomenal buzz here, and people are interested in what we’re doing. Not just from elsewhere in HMRC, but from other government departments too.”

Big projects, big prizes

This is a fantastic step forwards for HMRC and for government. Thanks to the efforts of Permanent Secretary Lin Homer and Digital Leader Mark Dearnley, HMRC is embracing digital ideas and agile working. This team’s work will directly affect every taxpayer in the land, and contribute to the digital ripple effect spreading through the civil service.

At GDS, we’re always encouraging departments to get digital skills in-house and to assemble multidisciplinary teams working on agile projects. The HMRC Digital Delivery Centre is what doing that successfully looks like.

Among many other things, they’re working on four transformation exemplars:

• PAYE for employees
• Digital self-assessment
• Your tax account for businesses
• Register as a tax agent

And there’s a bunch of non-exemplar projects too, such as Tax Credit Renewals (already a big success – 350,000 of these have been completed online), My Personal Tax Account, and Friends and Family (these last two both currently in alpha).

The scale of the work is enormous, but so is the prize for getting it right: as Mark Dearnley told the Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead earlier this year, 70% of all government transactions come through HMRC. You can see why it’s so important that they invest in digital projects and people with the skills to do them.

We’re opening up digital centres across the UK

Newcastle is one of a series of departmental digital initiatives around the country. You can see similar things happening at the Ministry of Justice Digital Service in London and the DVLA digital team in Swansea.

This was always part of the plan. We’ve always said that GDS should be a catalyst for wider digital change across the civil service.

Better yet, these teams are all sharing their work. Gone are the days where departments work in separate silos. Now teams are encouraged to get together and share data, research, knowledge and experience.

You read a lot of nonsense in the press about the digital scene in London, but there’s one myth I’d like to destroy right now: you don’t have to be in London to be part of the UK digital scene. There are skilled digital people all over the country. There’s been a thriving tech community in Newcastle for years, right on HMRC’s doorstep, but they were locked out of working for government by decades of big IT contracts. No-one in government even knew they were there.

So while I have the chance, I want to thank Thinking Digital organiser Herb Kim, who has done fantastic work opening doors and making introductions between HMRC and the local tech community in and around Newcastle.

I could see the early signs of this happening when I attended Thinking Digital myself back in 2013. I remember meeting and listening to some of the attendees and thinking: “You’re just the sort of person we need.” Now, they’re part of the team.

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The winner was … a prototype of a quick and easy online service to let people pay fines using a simple reference number. With a working payment system, the prototype wouldn’t be far away from a releasable public beta. In fact, DVLA intends to do just that.

This is from Amy Whitney’s blog post yesterday about the DVLA Hackathon. It’s a throwaway line, but things like this are really important.

Currently, you can only pay fines like these over the phone. It requires dozens of call centre workers to process them.

There’s no reason for that still to be the case when a motivated, multidisciplinary team can prototype a digital alternative and test it with real people in just a couple of days.

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Our boss Stephen Kelly, the Chief Operating Officer of HM Government, has announced today that he will be leaving government in a few months. He will go on to lead Sage plc as Group Chief Executive.

We in the Government Digital Service have much to thank him for. Establishing new cultures and operations at pace is always difficult; in a place as changeable and febrile as Whitehall, it is doubly so. Cabinet Office is a loose collection of (often divergent) pieces of government, ranging from digital to constitutional and parliamentary affairs, and including things as diverse as property, procurement and parts of domestic security.

Stephen brought together many of the functions of Cabinet Office into the Efficiency and Reform Group, which has been responsible for the £14.3bn savings in 2013 to 2014 and important to driving our Minister’s agenda, celebrated recently with the Chancellor. While that may sound like conventional group management, the challenge of dealing with so many conflicting agendas and doing so against a difficult political background cannot be underestimated.

Through this Parliament, Stephen has been an unrelenting supporter and champion of GDS and of all things digital across government. He has opened doors to Ministers, spoken at events, helped remove and route around a huge number of obstacles to delivery, and always with a positive worldview. It’s that last characteristic that I will miss most. As Tom reflected of the early days when GDS teams found their paths blocked in large departments, “Stephen always gave me and my team rock-solid support, even during situations where such support caused him profound inconvenience.”

I am not surprised he is going to lead in the private sector and I’m delighted he is going to a British software and services company. Our digital economy needs more success stories like Sage, and our digital and technical communities need permanence, beyond early stage VC-backed start ups and imported Internet brands. That gain for the UK economy is government’s loss. I doubt Stephen will miss the parochial nature of Whitehall, but I hope he reflects that he has played a huge part in delivering the early stages of the UK Government’s digital development.

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Recently, GDS took part in the Whitehall Schools Conference. The conference is for bright 12-13 year olds from underrepresented backgrounds, and shows them the career opportunities available to them in the Civil Service.

Over 100 teenagers from across the UK came to London to take part.

What we did: beating the bad guys

On the day, we ran 30 minute workshops that allowed these young people to experience what it is like to work at GDS. The workshop was based on GDS’s #StartAtGOVUK campaign.

We asked the teens to design a campaign showing GOV.UK is the best place to find government services and information online, and how the public can ‘spot the fake’.

Working in small teams, and stocked with post-it notes and permanent markers, they set about their task. Each team only had about 20 minutes to come up with their campaigns, but the results were really great. Some of our favourites are highlighted below (you can see all the posters on our Flickr page):

Why we did it: opening up government

Getting involved in the Whitehall Schools Conference is quite an unusual activity for many of us here at GDS. We deal with a lot of very different things in our day jobs, but working with school children is certainly out of the ordinary. But, for those of us involved, it was important for us to take part.

Firstly, because these are our future users. Most government services are aimed at people aged 17 and over – things like booking a driving test can’t be done until you’re 17. Events like this give us a chance to raise awareness of GOV.UK as a platform, so future users will know where to go for government services.

Secondly, because its important for us to inspire a new generation of digital professionals. Government digital services can only keep improving if we open up careers to everyone, and we need to inspire the right people from an early age.

Getting the message out early: always start at GOV.UK

Whilst our teenagers got the chance to involve themselves in GDS’s work, and gave us some really interesting ideas, the most important thing for us was what these young people learnt about government digital services.

GOV.UK is the best place to find government services and information online. These teenagers now know how to ‘spot the fake’.

When they’re looking for government services and information, they know:

• to look for the Crown logo
• that gov.uk should be in the URL
• that GOV.UK is always the cheapest place to get services from the government

And, most importantly:

• to #StartAtGOVUK

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We recently held our first ever video production workshop with a small group of participants from the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG). The aim was to pass on what we’ve learned about making films in the last couple of years. We went through our list of basics (last spelled out in How we make films at GDS) and added a practical session too. Since it was our first attempt at a workshop like this, it was as much a learning opportunity for us as it was for the OPG team.

Do it yourself

The easiest way to make a short film is to pick up the phone and call in a professional production company. That gets great results, but is usually very expensive. You can easily spend £1,000 per minute of finished film.

When we started making our own films, we wanted to help spread the word about agile working around the rest of the civil service. We also wanted to explore agile filmmaking. We thought: what if we do it ourselves? What kind of production values could we achieve? How good could our own films be?

We soon learned a few things:

1. Stick to interviews. They’re quick and easy to turn around. Talking to clever people about what they’re working on is a really good way of passing on that knowledge.

2. When video works and when it doesn’t. It works well for sharing experiences, or the feel of doing something. But if you need to go into detail, video isn’t the answer. A film of someone talking, together with a detailed blog article or some guidance (like in the Service Manual), adds a human element that can really help demystify a new or complex subject.

Making good decisions

One of the points I made at the workshop was the importance of good decision making.

The first things I do when setting up the camera for an interview are:

• decide where to put the camera
• how to make best use of the available light
• how to compose the shot

How do you learn to do these things? It gets easier with experience. But you can also improve by thinking ahead, trying to anticipate the challenges you may face. One of the things I’ve found myself getting better at is seeing the light; I’ve worked on this by doing things like looking at people’s faces and studying the work of artists like Vermeer and Rembrandt to see where the light falls.

Don’t neglect sound. Always use a good external microphone, and monitor it through headphones while you’re recording.

It’s all about the sensor

In the afternoon practical session, we got the attendees to conduct a short interview in front of three different cameras, so we could compare the footage from each.

The cameras were, from cheap to expensive:

• a smartphone with an external microphone (iPhone 4 & Rode smartLav mic)
• a semi-professional camcorder (Canon XA10)
• a full frame DSLR with a professional quality lens (Canon 5d Mark iii & 70-200mm L lens)

(Note: we’re not endorsing or recommending these particular products. They just happen to be the ones we use for our films. Many equally good alternatives are available.)

This exercise confirmed to us and the workshop participants that you get what you pay for. The external microphone for the smartphone is only £35, a fraction of the cost of a DSLR, but the quality of the final product takes a hit. The DSLR gives you that better quality, and will quickly pay for itself if you’re not hiring a production company.

On the one hand, the workshop attendees were really impressed with the look of the footage we could get with a DSLR. On the other hand, everyone (myself included!) was surprised at how well the video from a smartphone held up against the semi-pro camcorder. As a result, I can see us using a smartphone more in some situations (always on a tripod though).

Learning from mistakes

For me, the main thing to take away from the workshop is that, yes, you can make films yourself – but you need to give yourself time to do it.

People often say that one of the good things about agile is that it’s very tolerant of failure. If something doesn’t work out, you improve it. The same is true for making films: the way to improve is to practice and make mistakes.

We’re planning to do more workshops, and we want to improve them too. One piece of feedback from our workshop attendees was that the practical session should be longer and be more hands-on. We’ve taken that on board and we’ll change things next time.

If you think you or your team would like to attend a future version of this workshop, please get in touch via my colleague Alexandra Kelly: alexandra.kelly@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

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Over the last couple of months we’ve run search engine optimisation and analytics workshop sessions for content designers in government departments and agencies.

We work with them to challenge assumptions about user needs by looking at how people are actually using GOV.UK content, and show them how to use data to prove that their work is improving the user experience.

There are hundreds of people in agencies and departments who publish content to GOV.UK, and they all need to know how to find user needs and ensure that their content is meeting them.

We’re developing a culture where changes to GOV.UK are informed by user data, and monitored to determine whether the user experience improves. So, instead of cyclical, internally driven arguments about what and how to publish – which can result in poor content – we can work from hard evidence and prove the results with clear success measurements.

For example, we recently measured the effect of the new organisation template, and this graph shows how searches for ‘widows pension’ dropped when one of our content designers included this term on the relevant pages:

To start with, our analysis doesn’t require data at all. We search for the topic we’re writing about in Google to see what already exists. Then we search or navigate around GOV.UK with our need in mind to think about how people might be using our content. Once you’ve got a theory about how people are using your content, it’s easy to use data to confirm or challenge assumptions. This approach allows you to understand the actual needs of the user instead of being forced to publish blind.

The workshops cover how to use both Google and GOV.UK search data to find out about user needs. We also set everyone up with a dashboard for their content that reveals how people search for it in Google, top pages, and what they don’t find and have to search for on GOV.UK. We set attendees up with an email alert that acts as a weekly nudge – the aggregate voice of the user coming into their inbox to say ‘’Oi, this is what I need’’ in the form of search terms and top pages.

One of the perceptions about analytics that we most wanted to change was that data is really difficult to use effectively. There are some tricky access and login tasks, but once these are completed people generally find insights about their users easily.

For example, Neelam Hussain from the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) team found that people were searching for ‘qts’ (Qualified Teacher Status) on GOV.UK because they weren’t finding it. By featuring this on the NCTL home page, she was able to give people what they were looking for, which she proved with an increase in traffic and a decrease in searches. Brij Thakrar, our resident trainer plays a big part in making the data simple, meaningful and friendly, which was no small task given the short amount of time he had to become the answerer of a million questions about content analytics.

We want content designers across government to make quick analytics checks to inform their day-to-day work. Analytics will soon be a common language used in web teams across government to remove some of the time and effort needed to debate what users actually need by providing proof instead of relying on opinion.

We’ve now included SEO and analytics in our three day ‘Learning content design for GOV.UK’ training course. If you’re in a government department or agency you can sign up for this course here.

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If you hold a UK or European (GB) patent, you can now renew it more quickly and easily using a simple online service.

Here’s a very short film we’ve made about it:

What was a cumbersome process of filling in and posting forms now takes about 4 minutes online. You just need to enter your patent number, some personal details, and make an online payment. You receive a confirmation email soon after, so there’s no anxiety about forms getting lost in the post.

One user described it as “a doddle”, and the user feedback has been extremely positive overall. Since the service went public, 99% of users have said they were either satisfied or very satisfied.

Since its release in July, digital take-up has been excellent, and a clear channel shift can be seen on the performance platform.

The work’s been done by the digital team at the Intellectual Property Office in Newport, which is part of the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.

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We spend a lot of time banging on about sharing. Sharing code, sharing design ideas, sharing everything so that others can benefit. Until quite recently this was a rare thing in government, but I’m starting to see it happen all over the place.

There are some lovely examples of good sharing happening at the Registered Traveller exemplar project at the Home Office, as I found out when I went to visit the team earlier this year.

What is Registered Traveller?

Registered Traveller is designed to make life easier for people from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and the United States who frequently travel in and out of the UK. Once registered, an individual will find it quicker and easier to enter the UK, and will be able to use the ePassport Gates at Heathrow and Gatwick airports.

Right now the service is in private beta, with the number of potential users limited by a fairly strict set of qualifying criteria (one of which is that you have to have already been a user of the Iris Recognition Immigration System (IRIS) that was decommissioned last September). That means that only about 10,000 people are eligible. Later, when the restriction is lifted, that number will rise to 400,000.

Before work started on this project, these frequent travellers could apply for membership through a web form, but it wasn’t particularly user-friendly. Behind the scenes, it connected to a small database that was hard to scale up if the project was ever expanded. Border Force staff had to use a clunky, non-intuitive and fiddly interface to process applications.

Making things better for users

Like all our exemplar projects, this one began with user needs. In this case, the needs of two sets of users: the travellers who are applying, and the staff who are dealing with their applications.

This is what we mean by simpler, clearer, faster. You still have to fill out a form, but it’s a much better form. It only takes a minute or so to find out if you’re eligible, just by answering a short list of  “yes or no” questions. If you are eligible, it takes 5 to 10 minutes to finish your application. And if you get confused, you can find all the help you need on a single guidance page.

And it’s easier for the team to make changes if they need to. I spoke to product manager Julian Dos Remedios, and he pointed out that content changes can now be made and deployed in hours, not the days or weeks that used to be required.

Needless to say, user research was a vital part of the process. The team ran sessions with travellers at Heathrow Airport and with Border Force staff at their office at Prestwick Airport. At Heathrow, the team did “guerilla testing”, sitting down with travellers as they waited for flights and asking them to try out the new service.

The feedback helped the team iteratively improve what they’d built. Comments included:

For a government form, I would give you 4.5 stars… maybe even 5 stars.

The whole point of the service is to make it easy for the traveler, so having an application process that supports that is wonderful!

The efficiency for something like this is something quite valuable for me.

Data backs up the feedback. According to customer satisfaction surveys, well over 90% of applicants said the new service was easy to use, was not unnecessarily complex, and that they felt comfortable completing it.

Sharing makes things better

The visa system is more complicated than you’d think. There are a lot of rules about who can travel from where, and with what kind of document.

Early on in the project, the Registered Traveller team found they needed software to help them work out what all the different possible visa documents are – a big task.

Thankfully, the same problem had already been solved by another team in the Home Office working on another exemplar project. The Visit Visa team built a product catalogue to help make sense of it all, and shared their work on GitHub, a web-based collaborative revision control service.

So even at that early stage, the Registered Traveller team was able to make use of the Visit Visa team’s code, saving themselves considerable time and effort and ensuring their own work didn’t get held up.

Making things open

When I visited, the team was squeezed into a fairly small area, but in some ways that’s a good thing: you can make much faster progress if you get all the right people in the same room at the same time.

The space there was so tight that the team had resorted to using a corridor for their agile wall. (Regular readers will know that we’re very fond of our walls as spaces for thinking out loud.)

The corridor setup helped the team split up the two ends of the work. On one wall was everything relating to the public-facing front end, and on the other they stuck everything about the back end, where staff manage and process applicant case files.

That back end system is now accessed via a beautifully designed web interface, and could itself have great potential for re-use elsewhere in government. How many other services hold documents or case files like this? There must be dozens of them, and all of them could benefit from the code that’s being written by the team here. Sharing works both ways.

If one team shares code, another team benefits. Today it’s a couple of teams in the Home Office, tomorrow it might be a few more in other departments. Imagine how much better public services will be when this becomes the default behaviour across government. That’s what we’re aiming at.

The new Registered Traveller service is due to go into public beta in the autumn, and should go live towards the end of this year (depending on user feedback). I can’t wait to see what emerges from the next few months of user research, iterating, and sharing.

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Today we’re announcing that more than 100 digital and technology experts have been brought into government departments over the last 12 months to drive the digital transformation of public services.

We’ve known all along that if we want to transform government digital services, we need great people in digital and technology leadership roles. It’s meant taking a different approach to getting people, one we’re already starting to see pay off.

Doing things differently

Rather than adopting traditional recruitment processes, we’ve proactively sought out good candidates and successfully placed them into roles throughout government.

We’ve also introduced specialist recruitment agencies into the government supply chain, who have successfully identified high calibre candidates for these roles.

Both of those things are common in the private sector, but it’s something government isn’t traditionally known for – at least when it comes to digital.

Finally, we’ve successfully attracted people who hadn’t thought about working for government before, largely by tapping into candidates’ latent desire to do something for public good. Being able to show them the impact teams like GDS and MOJ digital services have made has been critical; it proves they can make a significant difference to the way government works. We aren’t encouraging these people to become ‘traditional’ civil servants, we’re encouraging them to change the civil service.

Recent hires

At GDS we’ve been joined by the likes of Magnus Falk, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government and formerly CIO at Credit Suisse, and by Kevin Humphries, Government’s Chief Technical Architect and former CTA at Qatarlyst.

Meanwhile MOJ have been joined by Chief Technology Officer Ian Sayer – former Global Chief Information Officer at Electrolux – and Chief Digital Officer Paul Shetler, who previously co-founded start-ups Burnt Fingers and Digital Proximities and was CTO for Banking at Oracle.

Digital Leadership has been bolstered by the appointment of Chief Digital Officers like Mark Dearnley at HMRC, Kevin Cunnington at DWP, who was previously Global Head of Online for Vodafone and Jacqueline Steed who starts at Student Loans Company next week and was Managing Director and CIO at BT.  Office of National Statistics has taken on Laura Dewis, Deputy Director Digital Publishing, who was Head of Online Commissioning at The Open University.

Today’s announcement really underscores how valuable the work of Rebekah Ramsay and her team is. Rebekah herself is a senior leader recently recruited to government, now heading up the People and Skills function here at GDS. The difference these appointments are making to government is hard to overstate.

If you want to find out more, email Rebekah’s team.

Onwards!

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On Wednesday Ministry of Justice (MoJ) Digital’s Civil Claims service removed its orange beta banner and became the latest exemplar to go live.

It joins Electoral registration, Renew a patent, Student finance and Lasting power of attorney.

Image by Boyce Duprey on a Creative Commons license

What the service is

Civil claims are a way for the public to solve civil legal disputes or obtain money or property owed. The exemplar has created a digital service initially for one type of claim – accelerated property possession – to improve the user experience and the efficiency of this service.

Where you can find it

You can find the service here and read more about how the exemplar fits into the wider claims system in this post about mapping services on the MoJ Digital blog.

Keeping things simple

Mike Bracken has written about how making things simple has been a focus of the team throughout their development of the service. During a visit to MoJ, Mike discovered that the process behind the service relies on complex and dated legal language and learnt of the team’s success in simplifying that language without changing the law.

The release of this service marks a milestone in the Transformation Programme - we now have 5 services that have passed the live Digital by Default Service Standard assessment and a further 8 being used publicly as betas.

What’s next

For Civil Claims? Work is already underway to expand the service to include other types of money claims. The exemplar will provide a foundation for other easy-to-use digital services that will give citizens access to justice.

In terms of the Transformation Programme, the journey continues. We have a busy time ahead of us – with a plan to guide another two services to live in the next month.

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Back in May, we wrote a short post explaining why we write the name of our website as GOV.UK, in capitals, and the URL as www.gov.uk, so that people know it’s a URL and know where to find it on the internet.

One of the first questions someone asked in the comments under that post was: how should we say it out loud?

The answer is like this: “GOV dot UK”. Or more phonetically: “guv dot yew kay”. And, if you’re saying the URL out loud, say the “www dot” too.

Saying the dot out loud helps people know that we’re talking about a website, and tells them exactly where to find it.

All the listener has to do next is type what they’ve heard into their web browser and they’ll end up at the right place.

So there you go. When you say it out loud, say “GOV dot UK”.

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A quick walk around our offices and you’ll see that vertical surfaces, whether wall or not, are both covered and coveted.

Project paraphernalia are our wallpaper. Sticky notes, images, screenshots, survey results, analytics and team photos name just a small selection of ‘stuff that should be stuck up there’.

More than rambunctious interior decorating, our walls have purpose. They’re vertical ‘campfires’; places where teams connect, stakeholders gather quick insight, and passersby take inspiration and add to them.

As user researchers, our walls are an important and constant broadcast signal. A well-tended wall keeps research insights and user needs constant in the collective ‘mind’ of the project team.

But enough of this poetic writing about walls. Here’s what you’ll find on some of ours.

Carer’s Allowance: mapping the service transaction

Many teams use their wall to map out end-to-end transactions for a service. The Carer’s Allowance team have done just that.

The team stick insights and notes to individual screens in the transaction. These are often quotes or comments from GOV.UK user satisfaction feedback and feedback captured while observing live claims.

Ben Holliday, user researcher on Carer’s Allowance says:

We try and post things up as they relate to each other and to understand relationships between insights, user needs and different parts of the transaction. Most importantly, everything is constantly discussed, pulled apart and updated by the project team, not just the user researchers.

User research is after all, a team sport.

Performance Platform: keeping users front of mind

Walls are great for creating a visual link between user needs and features being developed. Creating this link helps ensure that the things we’re making are grounded in users needs.

Researchers post user needs on their wall and the project team uses them to validate every story they’re planning or working on.

The wall should prompt the team to ask: “Why are we working on this?”. The team should always be able to point and answer: “Because it’s helping us meet this user need.”

User needs are the foundation of everything the team is doing.

By posting things that represent users on the project wall we’re able to encourage a constant (and constantly refreshed) connection between the project team and its users.

User researcher, Will Roissetter says:

I produce lightweight personas and attribute real user quotes to them. I’ve also made a ‘new’ sticker, which I place on new personas or user stories. This encourages the team to notice when a new persona is up and draws fresh attention to the wall.

Identity Assurance (IDA): connecting with a big project team

The Identity Assurance team have used a high-traffic passageway as their wall. Everyone on the IDA project team passes the wall at least a couple times a day.

Pete Gale, user research for IDA says:

With a team our size, it’s almost impossible to involve everyone in the collaborative process, so the wall means that anyone can take a few minutes, at any time, to catch up on the latest findings. The fact that it’s in a really central location means people always see when it’s updated.

The wall shares what the IDA research team have been looking at and what they’ve recently learned. Most of the time, the team post an end-to-end user journey from the latest prototype, share supporting quotes from users and highlight issues they’re addressing.

In coming months, we’ll share more detailed ‘what’s on our wall’ posts on the user research blog. Make sure you’re subscribed.

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The digital by default service standard went fully live in April. That means that, in line with the Government Digital Strategy, all new and redesigned public facing services have to meet this standard. Before April we piloted the standard and the assessment process for a year to help us learn, and to let departments know what to expect.

Since April we’ve been running assessments against the full 26 points of the standard. Services are assessed at alpha, beta and live stages. So far we’ve run 27 assessments, each with a panel of four or five GDS assessors.

Making the grade

So, what have we seen in our first five months of running assessments? So far the pass rate is 70%, and as we would expect, more exemplar services are passing assessments than non-exemplars. These learnings are being shared in departments and helping non-exemplar services in their own development.

More services are passing their assessment at the alpha stage than at beta or live. Again, this isn’t a surprise – the assessment panels look for more at later stages while the alpha assessment is an early opportunity to check things are on track.

Room for improvement

There are common areas which services are finding a challenge to address in their assessments. These include user research and assisted digital. The GDS user research and assisted digital teams are working closely with departments to support them in building the capability to be able to meet the service standard in these areas.

Some services also find it challenging to evidence the requirement to make all new source code open and reusable. We are looking at why that is, and what we can do to make it clearer to services how they can meet this criteria.

Make things open, it makes things better

All of the assessment reports are published. Service managers have told us that they find it helpful to see these so they can understand what to watch out for in developing their own services.

We’re working getting a dashboard set up on the performance platform so that we can see some of these trends more easily in future.

Find more details of assessments on the GDS data blog, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts. You can follow Olivia on Twitter, too.

Image courtesy of Simon Cunningham under a Creative Commons license.

Sam Hall is Head of Publishing Operations at the Office for National Statistics.

Statistics may be defined as “a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty”.
W.A. Wallis, economist, statistician and US Presidential advisor

There are thousands of great quotations about statistics. Generally they are fairly rude, poking fun at the way figures can be used to satisfy any side of an argument. I’m sure this could be the case, but what statistics really do is provide people with critical, decision-making information. Information they wouldn’t have if data hadn’t been collected, compiled, anonymised, analysed and published for everyone to see.

Moving to GOV.UK

I’ve worked at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for 13 years, and for the last few my team has supported the publishing of hundreds of official statistics each year.

We also manage the Publication Hub, where all official statistics are announced. Towards the end of 2013 our technical colleagues alerted us to some concerns they had over the stability and longevity of the Publication Hub. We knew there were options available, but the most sensible involved moving from our ‘independent from government’ website to GOV.UK.

We had some big decisions to make and a lot of important people to talk to.

Each year in excess of 3,000 official statistics are announced on the Publication Hub and 2.5 million visitors use the website to keep up to date with releases and schedules.

Moving this facility to GOV.UK looked straightforward from a technical point of view. But changing the business processes and making sure we looked at any concerns our statistical producers, heads of profession and board members might have was a considerable task. We attended lots of boards, delivered show-and-tells to dozens of producers, wrote updates and information papers.

So far we have received lots of great feedback and really useful suggestions for future enhancements.

Focussing on the user

The GDS team we worked with were great at keeping us focussed on the users and not letting us over-think the solution. We kept things simple for both users and producers, and only transitioned the elements of the existing Publication Hub which were popular and widely accessed.

Using metrics and feedback we were able to identify that the most important element was the Statistical Release Calendar, which has been re-imagined and rebuilt on GOV.UK.

We’re really pleased with how its turned out. We are also very happy to continue our work with GDS to produce ‘best practice’ standards for statistical publishing.

Opening up statistics

Statistical information enables people to make informed choices. We tend to associate this decision making with politicians, administrators and the financial sector. However, when you work in statistics you see that the appetite for information is much wider than most people think. Everyone should be able to access the data they need. We’ve been lucky enough to work on a project which will open up statistics to an even bigger audience. That can’t be bad.

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Yesterday mobile network operator EE, in partnership with Age UK, held the first ever Techy Tea Party day to promote digital inclusion. EE staff held free sessions in over 500 stores all around the country, to offer help and advice to people that were having tech-related challenges.

This nationwide event aimed to inspire people to get the most out of technology and try something new; all while feeding them tea and biscuits.

As signatories of the UK Digital Inclusion Charter, the EE Techy Tea Party event helped take forward the charter commitments and the Digital Inclusion Strategy aim of reducing those offline by 25% by 2016.

As well as the many in-store events across the country, there was a Techy Tea Party held yesterday afternoon at The Houses of Parliament in Westminster.

Volunteers from the National Citizen Service and GDS were on hand at the tea party to demonstrate some of the benefits of using technology and helped guests from Age UK to learn some basic digital skills.

The volunteers helped with anything from using tablets to accessing social media; from learning about apps to showing guests how they could keep in touch with family and friends through using programmes like Skype.

Sir Francis Maude – Minister for the Cabinet Office – gave a speech, where he highlighted the importance of digital inclusion, and spent some time chatting to guests and volunteers.

He said:

The world is changing and when you can bank online at midnight and shop from your bedroom, people rightly expect high-quality digital services from government.

As part of our long term plan, we’re making government services digital by default. But we don’t want anyone to be  excluded, and that’s why we’re determined to make Britain the most digitally capable country in the world.

Organisations supporting the UK Digital Charter will help to make it easier for people to build their digital skills, and it’s great to see events such as today’s techy tea party, which play a major role in helping us achieve that.

Jane Robinson and Charlotte Clancy from GDS were 2 of the volunteers partnered up with Age UK guests Muriel and Anita, who both had different motivations for learning how to use technology. Muriel and Anita learned how to send text messages, take photos and send them to loved ones, and search for videos on YouTube. Jane even helped Muriel use GOV.UK for the very first time to look up information about charity pages.

Volunteer Dipa Shah said:

Helping out at the EE Techy Tea Party was a really rewarding way to spend the afternoon. The lady I was helping said she had learnt so much from the session. It was a bonus that it was at the Houses of Parliament and there was great cake too!

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Booking a prison visit should be simple and straightforward. Until now that was far from the case. Booking a visit required both prisoner and visitor to jump through hoops: paper forms and drawn-out phone calls. And if the visit date turned out to be impossible, they had to start all over again.

Now you can book a visit online. It takes about 5 minutes. Before, picking an available date was pot luck. Now there’s a date-picker that lets you select 3 possible slots instead of 1. It’s a straight-forward service with user-needs at its heart but, if you get stuck, you can call the prison’s visits booking line and someone will help you with the booking.

Here’s a very short film we’ve made about it:

By making it easier to book visits, prisoners will see more of their friends and family. Evidence suggests this will help their rehabilitation. Transformation isn’t just about websites.

The service was built by the Ministry of Justice, with a combined team from the National Offender Management Service, HM Prison Service and MoJ Digital Services.

For more of the story behind this service, read Mike Bracken’s account of his trip to HMP Rochester or check out the service’s transformation page.

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