When we were designing and building our user research lab, we learned a lot about how best to build one. During the past 6 months of running our lab, we’ve learned even more.

In this post I’ll share our successes, what we’ve learned and where we could have done better.

Things to brag about

A very worthwhile investment

Within the first month of opening, our lab was being used to 70% capacity. Within 2 months, it was being used to 100% capacity.

In fact, because our lab is fully booked at least one month in advance, some GDS teams are once again using external labs. There’s no doubt this overflow could accommodate a second in-house lab space, even if much simpler and smaller.

The lab is an estimated 25% cheaper than going to market

By using an in-house lab, we’re spending an estimated 25% less than renting external labs. At 100% usage, our lab should  have paid for itself in 3 years.

This includes all running costs, such as our full-time Lab Controller and things like stationery, biscuits and tea for guests.

User research is a team sport: our lab’s making this easier

Our lab is becoming more than just a lab space – it’s a space in which team members and senior managers (not just user researchers) come together to learn about users first hand. It’s also a place where people get to know one another.

GDS user researcher, Mark Branigan, says:

It’s been considerably easier to get senior management involved when they only have to pop downstairs instead of across town. That’s a major win. Making recommendations based on research is a whole lot easier when the decision makers have seen users interacting with a service first hand.

Also, it’s far easier for observers to link up meaningfully with the rest of the team during research sessions, which has meant very rapid and effective fixes where there have been tech problems.

Liz Griffin, a GDS Content Designer:

The onsite lab is a great resource for anyone working on content (including new starters). It’s also been helpful for members of the wider project team to be able to join us, as you learn things about your users from this kind of research that you can’t get from web analytics, call centre feedback etc. You can learn a lot from dipping into a random session too.

Caroline Jarrett, a GDS user researcher, adds:

It’s thrilling to go in the lab to observe research and discover that it’s already full of people; also a great way to meet people working on other aspects of projects.

Getting cross-government teams involved

Every Friday, we open our lab space to user researchers from across government who can use it free of charge. ‘X-Govt Fridays’ are now fully booked almost 2 months in advance.

We’re starting to see cross-government teams drop in to observe research too, which is wonderful.

John Beale, a User Researcher, from Land Registry did just that:

...it was truly inspiring to see how hard the team are working to make every detail as intuitive as possible. This really is public service at its very best.

I found myself holding my breath like everyone else as the participant went through the screens, completing the revised photo upload section (bit of hesitation, notes scribbled) – would we get his full name? Yes! High fives all round.

A flexible space that accommodates many research needs

When we built our lab, one of our key goals was to create a flexible space – one that would suit a variety of needs; even those we’d not foreseen. For this reason, we designed the lab to run on a bespoke A/V setup and we don’t use proprietary research software. Because we understand the mechanics behind our lab, we can do whatever we want.

We’ve used the lab for various research methods such as forms studios, unmoderated usability research, cards sorting with paper cards, research with people working as a pair, research with people working individually, benchmarking and more.

We’ve dramatically improved the sound in the lab

The sound in our lab was ‘buzzy’ and ‘muddy’.

Jonathan Rodriguez, our Lab Controller (he’s also a qualified Sound Engineer), diagnosed our problem as “unwanted acoustic anomalies like flutter echoes”. These anomalies were treated with acoustic foam – seen below as large white canvases on the wall – adjusting of mics, and a frequency cut using the lab’s built-in EQ facilities.

Our sound is dramatically improved.

We’ve learned how to run our mobile testing more smoothly

Our mobile testing is set up to run on MirrorOp for Android and Apple TV for iOS mobiles. Our mobile testing capability could be improved still further but, for now, our setup feels as natural and uninterrupted as possible.

We’re now using Recordable for Android mobile testing to show interaction ‘snail trails’.

Although we’ve got really great ceiling cameras, we’ve learned that recording mobile usage with an external camera is tricky: hair gets in the way, reflections make the phone screens hard to see, and people don’t hold their phones still.

Even though we’ve got this very useful and team-building lab, it’s good to remember…

Yes, user research happens in the lab but no, that’s not the only way to do it; it’s only a small amount of the total user research. As we’ve got the facility it’s great, but you shouldn’t let lack of a lab hold you back. – Caroline Jarrett, GDS user researcher

Things we would do differently next time round

Involve the IT team from day one in the lab

We had meetings with our IT department when we first introduced the idea of the lab, but we didn’t follow through enough on their involvement.

If you want your lab’s long-term technical support to be delivered in-house, it’s important to get your IT department involved from day one, and keep them involved.

It’s usually possible to be supported by an external supplier, but it’s less convenient, may not be useful when you’ve got a last-minute problem, and it is more expensive.

Make sure you have an analog option for all your digital workflows

Digital is great when it works. Not so much when it doesn’t.

Our lab is primarily controlled using a digital console served via an iPad. The Lab Controller uses the console to remotely manoeuvre lights, sounds, cameras and what appears on the observation room screen. If the digital console won’t work – which happens rarely – the whole system comes to a standstill. Even if rare, we can’t afford any downtime in the lab.

Whatever your setup, it’s useful to make sure you have a readily available analog workflow as a backup to your digital one.

Sometimes bigger is better

Our observation room accommodates 12 observers and it’s regularly packed to the hilt. We could certainly do with more space.

It’s important to remember that an observation room is not just about cramming people in to watch a screen, it’s also about allowing people space to collaborate: write sticky notes, put things up on walls (or on boards which the teams can take away with them) and gather around things. The more space you have to play with the better.

When bigger is not always better

When we first set up the lab, we chose to store our videos as ProRes files, which are monstrously big, even if very good quality.

It was inevitable that storage of videos would soon become a problem, and it didn’t take long before it did. We now transcode our files to MP4 format using Handbrake, an open-source video transcoder. We’ve managed to maintain excellent quality, and cut our storage requirements from 7 TB per month to just 140 GB. That’s a huge difference.

In short, when setting up a lab space, it’s useful to think about how, when and where your videos will be used in the long term.

Don’t underestimate the need for good lighting

We’ve got bog-standard office lighting in our lab. It’s absolutely fine from a participant and moderator point of view but, as any camera buff will tell you, lighting is everything if you want to get the most out of your video.

We’ve got Lumens 1080p HD cameras in our lab, which record a very good picture. We’ve however noticed problems when the sun shines through the window – because the light is bright and uneven, the camera can’t hold focus.

If you’re building a lab, try and make your lighting as even as possible. We’re told that LEDs are a good bet. Also, make sure to have blinds or curtains so that you can block out glare when necessary.

On this point, when you furnish your lab, avoid white surfaces and glossy surfaces. You want to cut down visual glare as much as possible. We went for light grey and matt surfaces, which works well.

The equipment is hot

Our lab setup includes a lot of equipment, and it’s hot. The bulk of the equipment is housed in a cooling rack, which might keep the equipment cool but gives off its own heat. The large monitors contribute their share. Add 12 tightly packed people to the mix and you’re bordering on the tropical.

We need to upgrade our standard air conditioning to something special. If I’d known this would be a problem, I would have planned an A/C upgrade into the original build more carefully.

Think carefully about your research participants door-to-door experience

There definitely is a transition when you start running your own lab – no more receptionist and no more drinks and sandwiches.

We quickly realised we’d have to think about how to get our research participants to and from the lab in a way that felt welcoming and relaxing. We now routinely include a host as part of recruitment. The host ensures participants are well looked after before and after their research session.

Make sure to consider a waiting area with as much care and attention as you do the actual lab space.

We’ve had several nice articles about the lab published

Economist: Digitising public services: Laboratory conditions

Digital by Default news: GDS unveils user research lab

Telegraph: Government bureaucracy ‘insanely arrogant’ says digital boss (actually a positive story)

Other fun stuff

See a spontaneous log of our lab’s story on this Twitter search. Read more blog posts about our GDS user research lab.

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At GDS, we’re in a unique situation where our product teams have lots of people who can code, but in other teams there’s not so many. However, across these teams, there’s definitely an appetite to learn more.

Through the year I’ve had a few conversations with people who’ve identified a need for some technology which could help them work better, but weren’t sure what the next step would be in trying to make it exist.

To try and improve this, I’ve recently started an evening code club at GDS. With the help of a few developers, 20 GDS people have been learning the basics of HTML and CSS.

We’re combining an online course on Codecademy with some extra activities to experiment with GOV.UK code.

So far, we’ve had really good feedback and, since we were oversubscribed by more than 100 people for the first course, we’d like to try scaling this up in the future. There’s also been interest from other government departments.

I’ve heard good things from people at GDS who have been improving their skills in other ways, too. Some of the design team have been pairing and shadowing with developers when making prototypes, and others have been taking part in courses run by organisations like Decoded and General Assembly.

When technology underpins our daily life, understanding how it works is the first step in being able to use it to make positive change. What’s more, if we want to be able to reason about how technology and society intersect in the future, everybody should have at least a basic understanding of how things like the internet work.

Once seen as the exclusive domain of the stereotypical ‘bedroom coder’, it’s great that the last few years has made code more accessible than ever before. Learning to code isn’t the only way to do that, but at GDS, we’re going to carry on doing our bit to help out, and we’ll try to write more about what we learn along the way.

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Last night HRH The Duke of York hosted an event at Buckingham Palace for the D5 delegates. Various UK digital start ups were there to showcase their talents and products to the international attendees.

The D5 summit themes included teaching children to code, open markets and connectivity.

Coding in particular has been big news this week – with President Obama writing his first piece of code, and school children visiting No 10 to take part in the #HourofCode event.

It was my birthday on Wednesday, and Companies House sent me a present: they moved to GOV.UK that day. It’s been a good week for them – on Tuesday, their new beta service passed its assessment against the Service Standard. Well done to all involved.

Most of my recent posts here have been about visits to our exemplar projects up and down the country. Companies House is not one of them, but I happened to be nearby last week, and took the chance to spend a couple of hours with Chief Executive Tim Moss and Chief Digital Officer Gareth Lloyd.

They took me on a guided tour around an organisation that’s under the radar but doing a terrific job. Companies House has been re-inventing itself for years now – they started back in 2006 – and they’re well on the road towards becoming an entirely digital operation.

The tour included a quick look at the beta, which includes an impressively long list of features but doesn’t overwhelm you with options – in fact, the only thing you’re asked to do is search for a company name or number. (There’s a very nice bit of autocomplete technology at work inside the search box too.)

What it gives you is a beautifully designed summary of public information about that company: its status, registered address, names of directors and secretaries, and a list of filing dates. It’s an impressive start on an important digital service, and a vital part of the work being done to prepare for making all Companies House digital data free to access next year.

They also showed me some work they’ve been doing on dashboards – digital displays for performance data. This one shows a live overview of how many documents they’re processing – even the paper ones. A simple screen like this can really help drive the business. As you might expect, these screenshots are the product of months of development work, with a very strong focus on user research. (Companies House invested in its own user research lab two years ago.)

Head of Customer Insight Sara Ball and Design Manager Helen Hourihane showed me some of the data they’re using to drive decision making.

“We’ve got a really good analytics API, which means we can see what pages are causing issues,” Helen said.

Better paper handling

There’s another project known internally as Ewok – short for Electronic Workflow. For all its success at digitising its business, Companies House still handles a lot of paper – 1.7 million documents this year. That’s 120 tons. You can still see piles of documents on trollies.

But rather than leave the paper side of things languishing and slowing things down, they’re investing in technology to make the paper handling as efficient as possible. They’ve built up an impressive scanning and OCR system that’s reduced the workload of the examiners – the people whose job it is to check details on incoming company accounts and make sure they’re accurately entered into the database.

One of those examiners, Dan Reed, showed me the old process and the new process side-by-side. The new one was much quicker. “Ewok is so much better for us,” he said.

As a result of these changes, examiners work faster and more efficiently, and they can work from anywhere. Now some of them can work from home if they wish.

Small is beautiful

Companies House is small, in government terms, but doing some amazing work – they’re a model for a digital department or agency. In nearly every part of their operation, they’re ahead of the curve: they’ve brought technology in-house – there are no huge system integrators doing it for them. They’re making good use of their data, using open standards, reducing the paper processing burden, hiring technology and digital experts locally, simplifying due diligence, and investing in digital leadership. Where Companies House is a model agency, Tim Moss is a model digital leader. Other government agencies should follow them.

One more thing: we need to build a community of trust within government. Companies House shows how government organisations should become suppliers and consumers of services and data. Not just with the outside world, but with and between one another. There will be dozens of platforms necessary to put government as a platform into action, and it will be teams like this one that build them.

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We’ve said before, and no doubt we’ll say again: transformation means more than fixing websites. It goes deeper than that, right into the organisations behind the websites. There’s a logic to it: digital service design means designing the whole service, not just the digital bits. If you’re redesigning a service, you need to think about the organisation that runs it.

This is the hidden side of transformation. It’s not so easy to see, because there isn’t always something obvious you can point to and say: “That’s transformation right there.”

That’s partly why I took a train to Swansea a couple of weeks ago, to visit our colleagues at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). You can see the deeper transformation happening there.

I was accompanied by Iain Patterson, CTO at DVLA; Mark Evans, Chief Architect; Sally Meecham, Transformation Lead from GDS; Alan Morgans, Transformation Manager; Magnus Falk, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government; and Dafydd Vaughan, Technical Architect.

DVLA’s headquarters on the edge of Swansea is enormous. Everyone remarks on it when they first visit. I did. It looks a bit like a university campus. It was built to process enormous quantities of paperwork – because of course, that’s how things used to be done. But things are changing now. Paper’s not dead, but it’s being phased out. We’ve already said goodbye to the tax disc.

First we looked at the 3 DVLA exemplar projects: View Driving Licence, Personalised Registrations, and Vehicle management. The first of those went live back in October, so our focus was on the other two, which will shortly move into public beta after some time in private beta testing. Service manager Rohan Gye and his team did an impressively short demo – here’s what they showed me.

Selling a vehicle into the motor trade

Many people will recognise this piece of paper. It’s the V5C form, aka vehicle log book. You use different bits of it for different things when buying and selling a car. In total, there are 18 million vehicle management transactions every year, including changes of address, private sales, and buying from or selling to the trade. The last of those – selling to the trade – accounts for about 5.5 million transactions per year¹. So even if the new digital service gets just 20% take-up, that will mean one million fewer pieces of paper sent to the DVLA.

Seven out of 10 car sales are made to motor traders, often when owners do part exchange deals on newer models. Most of those sellers leave the V5C with the traders too, expecting them to handle the transfer-of-ownership paperwork.

Here’s the beta service for selling a vehicle to motor traders. It’s very simple. It’s aimed at the traders themselves, since they’re the ones who usually do this task on behalf of their clients.

The first step is to identify the business – so the first step is to enter a trading name and postcode. A location service from Ordnance Survey looks up the address (or users can enter it manually if they prefer).

Once that’s done, they’re asked to enter the details of the vehicle being sold. They need the registration number and the latest V5C document reference number. Most traders will know where to find this number without even thinking, but just in case the service is being used by someone who’s not familiar with the paperwork, there’s a little graphic on this page, showing you exactly where to look for it. That’s a nice touch.

The third step is to confirm the details. All the trader has to do now is tick a couple of boxes to confirm that the current official keeper gives their consent and approves the sale, pick a date, and optionally enter the milage of the vehicle. Then they click “Confirm sale” and it’s done.

Finally, the trader is shown a summary page, which they’re asked to print out and send to their customer. There’s even a “Print” button to make that easier.

Another button says “Sell another vehicle”. If the trader clicks this one, they’ll go back to step 2. They won’t have to enter their identifying details again, because the service remembers them automatically. So if they’ve had a busy day of buying and selling, they can sit down during a quieter moment towards the end of the day and go through all the changed ownerships in one go.

User research has shown that most users don’t need much in the way of assisted digital support, although some have found some help useful the first time they tried using the service. The team is setting up a helpdesk to answer user questions, and they will continue to test this approach as the beta phase continues.

There’s so much to admire here. It’s a beautifully simple digital service that will save traders hours of time. What’s more, the changes recorded here will be updated on the DVLA’s database in real time. The turnaround is instant. That matters because the law says you’re entitled to a refund on vehicle tax you’ve paid in advance for a specific vehicle. So the refund can be on its way much faster than it was before – which is good news for everyone.

Take a registration number off a vehicle

Now let’s take a look at another service that’s in beta. There are about 1.6 million personalised registration transactions per year, of which about 240,000 deal with retaining a registration². This beta service is called “Take a registration number off a vehicle”. In the spirit of “Show the thing”, the name tells you everything: this is the service you use when you want to retain a personalised registration, probably so that you can put it on a new vehicle.

Anyone who owns a personalised registration will understand why. The registration often means more – and sometimes, is worth more – than the car it’s attached to. When they want to sell their car, owners often want to keep the registration and transfer it to another vehicle. That’s where this service comes in.

Again, the beta is aimed at motor traders, simply because they tend to do a lot more of the admin and paperwork than the rest of us. They will often be taking ownership of the vehicle that’s having the personalised registration removed, so part of their work involves arranging for that vehicle to be assigned a normal registration and giving it a new number plate. Otherwise they won’t be able to sell it on again.

The first step is to enter the registration, the latest V5C reference, and the keeper’s postcode. The user is asked if they are the registered keeper, or if they represent a business that has consent to act on the keeper’s behalf – most of the time, traders will be choosing this option. Again, the trader is asked to identify themselves and their business, and again DVLA is using the same Ordnance Survey address look-up system behind the scenes. The same tool, used for the same job, but in two different services. In the old days something like this would have been procured twice, probably at great expense. Now it’s a much cheaper off-the-shelf purchase from the Digital Marketplace.

Next, the details are displayed back, so the user has a chance to check them. Notice how the registration is displayed to look like the number plate you’d see on a car. It’s a small, simple thing but it really helps to make the information more readable.

The trader gets a confirmation, and – instantly – a replacement registration to fix on the vehicle once the personalised one has been removed. On the final page, they’re given the reference number they need for the transaction, and they can immediately assign the personalised registration to a new vehicle.

Every single one of these steps has been designed to meet a specific user need. Lots of the tiny changes and design tweaks are there because research showed they would help users. The address look-ups, the number plates that look like real number plates, the little graphics to remind you where to find the right reference numbers on the right forms – all of it results from user research and constant iteration.

Service designer Louise Pierpoint told me: “The trade have been calling for something like this for years.” I bet they have. Louise (pictured doing the demo at the top of this post) and her colleagues have been meeting motor traders – some of them small family businesses, some of them huge corporates trading in whole fleets of cars – to get their input on this service.

It’s always a good sign when service demos are over in a few minutes, as these two were. It shows that the development team have been doing the hard work to make it simple. There’s not much to see because the complexity has been stripped away. That’s how we build services now.

Again, there’s some telephone support in place to provide help to those users who need it. For both services, there are plans to make walk-through videos to help first time users, and the team is exploring the feasibility of web chat support.

Both of these services are terrific achievements. They both reduce a 3 week paper process down to a couple of minutes. Both are expected to go into public beta early in the New Year. I think they’re going to make a lot of motor traders very happy. Later during my visit, I met DVLA’s chief executive Oliver Morley and he was just as excited: “This is going to change the industry,” he said. He’s right.

Organisational change

This bit – the organisational change bit – of transformation is much, much harder than the websites bit. People have a natural, and entirely understandable, resistance to change. No-one likes it, especially when they feel it’s being done to them. But it can be done, and DVLA are doing it.

For example: there’s a new focus on services, and on service design. That means hiring or appointing service managers, re-organising teams, training and hiring people to make sure the right skills are there.

I sat in on one of DVLA’s regular “Show and share” sessions, and listened to Transformation Manager Steve Railton talking about what this means for people. As well as service managers, DVLA is appointing capability managers tasked with finding people with the right skills. Many of them will already work in the organisation. Some will need to be hired.

He talked about procurement – right now, DVLA procures everything on a project-by-project basis. That means it’s hard to re-allocate funding or resources when circumstances change. Perhaps, he suggested, it would be better if DVLA procured at the portfolio level? Then project teams could dip into a larger pot of shared resources and just use what they need, when they need it.

Technology change

DVLA’s technology is complicated. It’s been built up over decades, with each new layer of technology laid on top of the layers below, like geological strata.

Mark Evans wrote about it earlier this year, saying:

These systems have their origins in the paper based world, embodying processes, rules and data constructs which were relevant when records were held on paper and stored in filing cabinets … It’s very clear that these systems will not act as the platform we need as the DVLA offers more and more services as digital by default.

That’s the issue in a nutshell. Here’s a diagram of DVLA’s technology as it stands:

It works, yes – but it’s inefficient, slow, and much more expensive that it needs to be. Mark told Magnus and I that, at the moment, 77% of the money they spend on IT is spent just to maintain this behemoth of legacy technology. They’re spending three quarters of the budget just to stand still.

Re-designing it all is a big job, but it can be done. Mark took me through how they’re doing it. This is what he wants the DVLA’s tech stack to look like in future:

This diagram doesn’t cover everything that the previous one did, but you get the idea: it’s much simpler, and the whole system is designed to be interconnected. It’s made of lots of small pieces, each one “channel agnostic”, each one re-useable. Data flows between them via APIs.

In short, “it’s made of lots of small, logical pluggable components,” in the words of Iain Patterson.

It’s not the kind of change you can do overnight, so instead they’re doing it slowly, piece by piece. As newer systems are activated, the older ones will be gradually decommissioned. Eventually, they’ll reach a tipping point where there’s more new stuff than old stuff. That’s when momentum takes over, and change starts to speed up.

Change looks like this

DVLA are doing some terrific work right now. They’re fixing websites, they’re fixing the technology behind the scenes, and they’re re-arranging the whole organisation around a new approach to user-centric service design. If that doesn’t define “transformation”, I don’t know what does.

I’m hugely impressed with what they’re doing, and all I can say – all I did say when I was there – is “Well done.” DVLA is a poster child for modern digital government.

Let me end with this: when I started working in government back in 2011, people warned me to stay away from certain things.

“You can’t change DVLA,” I was told. Not true, it turns out: they’re doing it themselves.

“There’s no skills – you can’t hire developers around Swansea,” I was told. Wrong again, yes you can: there are plenty of skilled people in south Wales, and they’ll be even easier to find now that DVLA has begun to set up closer links with universities in south Wales, and invested in the TechHub centre in the centre of Swansea.

This is what it all comes down to: people and skills. The Civil Service is changing, and we need to bring back the skills that we outsourced in recent decades. Designers, developers, user researchers, service managers, all of these and more. Come one, come all – come to Swansea, and help DVLA build modern user-centered digital services.

Footnotes

1 and 2 – Figures from the Performance Platform.

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A huge programme of work, transition has seen over 300 agencies and arm’s length bodies move their content to GOV.UK. This has been no cut and paste job. Instead, people at the agencies and arm’s length bodies have worked with the GDS transition team to reshape the existing content around user needs. Duplicate content has been removed and archived.

The GDS team, led by Elisse Jones, has trained over 1,000 writers and publishers. GDS transition managers have been at hand helping people in the agencies and arm’s length bodies with questions and queries. But much of the work has been done by people in the agencies and arm’s length bodies themselves, making sure their content is fit for GOV.UK, the government publishing platform. Here’s a film about the works that’s been done:

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Transcript:

Transitioning 300+ agencies and arm’s length bodies to GOV.UK

Elisse Jones, Delivery Manager, GOV.UK Transition Programme

We’ve moved 285 websites on to GOV.UK with a further 28 websites to move by the end of December. The main change for users is that there is now a single website that they can go to. Without the agencies and all of the hard work across the digital teams this transition would not have been possible.

Ragnar Karlsson, Web Content Administrator, Coal Authority

My biggest trepidation really was the sheer amount of content we had, well over a thousand pages worth of content.

Elisse Jones

They’ve had to work with their policy teams and the subject matter experts to really change the thinking around is this piece of content built upon a user need.

Andrew Rees, Website Transition Manager, Intellectual Property Office

It wasn’t about the Intellectual Property Office or GDS, it was just about what was good and what was going to work for our users.

Rachel Purkett, Digital Media Manager, Monitor

Focusing on user needs has really helped us to change how the whole organisation thinks about digital content, about communications.

Andrew Rees

It’s getting educated if you like into that sole kind of user need of the customer, what exactly is the customer going to look for.

Rachel Purkett

I’ve had good feedback from my team that the training on the style guide has been really helpful and has helped them to focus better on user needs and how to write for GOV.UK.

Andrew Rees

The transition managers we’ve had excellent relationships with, as well as people in the mainstream content teams.

Rachel Purkett

Our search traffic is up since our transition to GOV.UK so that’s a good indication that things are looking good and people are finding the site.

Ragnar Karlsson

GDS has done a really good job of pulling round the content and the information that they need to support those of us out in the wider elements of government. It’s actually brought about quite a bit of change internally within the Coal Authority of how we write, how we communicate. We’re using plain English for the intranet, we’re using plain English for all of our communications and social media. So it’s changing how people actually communicate as a whole within our organisation.

transition.blog.gov.uk

Rural payments is an exemplar that meets the complex needs of farmers, a really important group of users. When the service goes into public beta in early 2015, it will allow farmers to digitally apply for agricultural subsidies from the EU. This will save farmers time and give them an overview of the information Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) has about their land use and save the UK government money by limiting disallowance fines.

When I visited the team at Defra in Reading recently, I was really impressed to see how much work the team has put in to make things better for users. All of the exemplars have required digital teams to do the hard work to make it simple. That’s never been more true than for this project. It was one of the first exemplars we started working on back in winter 2012, so they’ve had to do a lot of learning while doing.

Rural payments sits within the CAP Delivery Programme (CAPD), which Defra set up to handle IT systems and delivery across four different government bodies: Natural England, Rural Payments Agency, Forestry Commission and Defra. The exemplar is a response to some new, highly complicated policy from the European Union, the first of which is the Common Agricultural Policy’s Basic Payments Scheme, which will come into effect during the spring of 2015. These payments are an important part of farmers’ income, which means they also have a knock-on effect for many other businesses in the rural economy.

It’s not just the policy that’s complex. For this exemplar alone, we’re talking about roughly 110,000 farmers and 1,200 land agents.  Farmers hire agents for many reasons, but one of the things agents do is apply for different funding on farmers’ behalf. Farmers themselves are a diverse group of people, whose properties can range from a smallholding to an industrial scale business. The average age of farmers in the UK is also quite high, with many being in their 60s and 70s. A robust assisted digital offering is required for any service to pass the Service Standard assessment, and should be able help users who for one reason or another can’t immediately use the digital channel themselves. The team in Reading wrote to farmers who didn’t previously have digital contact with the Rural Payments Agency: 4,000 responded. The team is now phoning all of these farmers to talk about what might be getting in the way of them using a digital service. They’re also working on a pilot programme of “support centres”: it’s early days, but they’re learning a lot about how best to support their users.

Focus on simplicity

That said, it’s really important to not be blinded by how complicated things are, but instead focus on how simple you’re going to make them. There’s a lot of edge cases that the user researchers led by Jay Spanton, have come across in the last year or so. The team told me about 10-year-old hobby farmers, people who might not be used to filling in forms. That sort of insight into users is great, but it’s also important not to focus on the edge cases when building a digital service. We don’t go for a one-size-fits all approach, because we recognise that edge cases exist. But by building services to meet the needs for the bulk of users, we create simpler, clearer and faster services for them, and have the time and financial flexibility to offer case by case support for edge case users.

I encouraged the team to think about the complex large scale services we’ve already delivered as part of the exemplar programme, across the country. We have over 135,000 users who have claimed Carer’s Allowance online, and have 1 million people applying on the online system to register to vote in the course of a few months. Sure, there are a lot of moving parts, but its important that we keep the focus on users.

From edge cases to hedge cases

One of the best things about working in an agile way is that we can iterate on what we’ve built to better meet user needs. We know what we build isn’t likely to be perfect the first time, so iterating quickly lets us put new services in front of users and keeps us improving.

The old way of processing rural payments was largely paper based. When a farmer wanted to show that they’d changed anything about their land, the RPA would send them a form and (if the farmer asked for it) a paper copy of the map of that bit of land. The farmer would then draw in the shape of the change to their land. With pens, pencils or sometimes even crayons. On a piece of paper. In the 21st century.

It would look a bit like this:

These maps and forms would then be sent back to the RPA. A team of people called ‘digitizers’ would check the change against other evidence, like aerial photographs. In case there were still discrepancies, inspectors would be sent out to the farm to double check.

These discrepancies are one of the causes of huge fines (called ‘disallowances’) from the EU: since 2005, they’ve totalled around £600 million. What a waste of money.

A new digital mapping tool is at the centre of the new service. Using it, farmers will be able to see what information RPA has about their land and land use. The service will also be able to do basic validations about land use and land cover and send messages when it has verified that the reported land use is correct.

As product owner Oliver Slocombe mentioned in his presentation, “We’re asking about what we need to know.” The mapping tool will go through many more iterations, but it currently looks a bit like this:

Before you start asking “how difficult can it be to make a map”, think about things like hedges. Farmers can get extra subsidies for hedges under a rule about Ecological Focus Areas (EFA), because they have ecological value. But the hedges have lots of rules around them, like having to be on or adjacent to arable land. Add that to the fact that we’re working with a group of users who do not necessarily use computers daily, and you get a sense of why people who have been working on the exemplar, like Lee Gathercole, tech architect from Abaco, end up saying: “I’ve been dreaming of hedges at night!”

Some farmers pay third party agents to handle this stuff on their behalf. Some farmers give other people permission to submit applications on their behalf; these people might be agents, but they can also be family, friends or other helpers. Regardless of who is using the new service though, they will have more insight into how the process works than ever before. Since the platforms the team at Defra are building are service agnostic, they can be used for more than just the Rural Payments service. A sign that we’re building services, not websites.

One of the big challenges for Defra has been bringing together people who work in different locations. I had the pleasure of meeting remote teams in Gdansk and in Belfast via video conference; one of the ways that Defra are solving the problem of bringing talented people together. The people who are at the forefront of building these services can look forward to their skills being in demand as government continues to move toward becoming digital by default.

Taking the step from drawing in crayons to a fully digital system was never going to be easy, but building other services has shown us that we can build great services. It requires us to not stare ourselves blind at the complexities of each part. Instead, we need to keep thinking about building a service that’s beautifully simple. We’re building services, not websites; I’m excited to see rural payments show the results of making things as simple as possible for users.

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One question we’ve been asked a few times is: “What does your film production team look like? How can our department/agency/organisation build a team like that too?”

In the spirit of “publish, don’t send,” and since this isn’t a topic covered by the Service Manual, this post explains how our team works at GDS. You might find the same approach works for you.

Flexible roles

Filmmaking, like user research, is a team sport. We usually get a team together for each film, and we take a flexible approach to assigning tasks and roles, depending on what’s required.

With a bit of juggling, it is possible for one person to do everything: setting up the camera, recording the audio, and conducting the interview. It’s possible, but we don’t recommend it – this approach is hard work for one individual, and you’ll get much better results by spreading the load a bit further.

So at a minimum, we tend to assign two people to each film project: one to operate the camera/monitor the sound, and one to conduct the interview. They are the owners of that film project and will look after it from beginning to end. This works very well for the majority of films we make, which are usually talking-heads interviews with one, two or three people.

Film-making roles

The camera operator is responsible for the recorded image. They need to make sure the subject is well framed, properly lit, and in focus. Lighting is a skill in itself, whether that means making use of available natural light or setting up specialist lighting equipment. Recording the sound properly means someone has to listen to it while the interview is taking place. We usually combine those three roles, so the camera operator is in charge of setting up lights and listens to the audio while watching the camera screen as well. It’s quite demanding and requires a lot of concentration, but it works for us.

If you can separate out the technical roles of camera operator and sound recordist, you’ll make life easier for both of them. That means they have fewer tasks to juggle at once. We don’t do this for every shoot, but it’s useful to have it as an option.

We’re lucky enough to have several people who can take on the role of editor. Like operating the camera, recording the sound, setting up the lights and designing motion graphics, editing footage is a skilled job that can take years to learn. Our camera people double as editors too, but that doesn’t mean you can’t separate the roles if you’re able to. One thing to consider is that editing is very time-consuming; if your camera operator and editor are one person, you’ll have to allow them enough time to edit each film they shoot.

We don’t use motion graphics in all films, but we do in some, and one member of our team is a motion graphics designer. This is another job that’s often a lot more complicated and time-consuming than people expect it to be. While it’s not essential for all films, we think it helps to have access to someone with this skill – either as a member of the team, or as an occasional freelancer.

The interviewer poses questions, and has to listen carefully to the subject’s answers and respond appropriately. A good interview sounds like a conversation. The interviewer should prepare in advance by ensuring they understand what the finished film needs to say, and how they can guide the interviewee to say the most helpful things. Generally speaking, our interviewers double as writers for the rare occasions when we write a script or a storyboard.

The producer makes sure that everyone on the team:

• knows where and when to be for the shoot
• has what they need to make the film
• understands what the purpose of the film is

Often, it’s useful for the producer to sit in during filming, keeping an eye and an ear open for problems that the interviewer and camera operator are too preoccupied to spot.

Roles and people

We’ve found that roles don’t necessarily equal individuals. Often, the individuals on a film production team will perform more than one role, and those roles vary from one film to the next.

Just as you’d expect with other multidisciplinary teams in government, the film team is flexible. Sometimes a film might only need input from two or three of us. At other times, all of us will chip in. It helps to have lots of people with a variety of skills, so they can swap roles when needed. Sometimes we do hire in extra help from a production company, and on those occasions juggle our roles and to-do lists to fill the gaps that the production company’s team can’t fill.

We usually go through rough cuts as a team as well, and use feedback from those sessions to make more polished edits.

Whatever works for you

This arrangement works well for us, but we’re very aware that we still have a lot to learn from other teams elsewhere in government. So if you have tips or suggestions based on your own experience, please let us know or post your story in the comments below.

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The new Carer’s Allowance digital service goes live today. If you have access to the internet it’s now easier than ever to apply for Carer’s Allowance. Here’s a short film we’ve made about the service:

As you can see, the Carer’s Allowance team in Preston has done much more than digitise the paper application form. By doing user research, and diving into the detail of the application process, the team has been able to remove 170 questions from the application process – that’s 49% of the questions.

This is crucial because carers don’t have a lot of time on their hands – a fact highlighted by service performance data which showed usage spikes in the small hours of the morning.

The service is part of government’s transformation programme, and it’s a great example of doing the hard work to make it simple.

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Transcript:

When we were designing and building our user research lab, we learned a lot about how best to build one. During the past 6 months of running our lab, we’ve learned even more.

In this post I’ll share our successes, what we’ve learned and where we could have done better.

Things to brag about

A very worthwhile investment

Within the first month of opening, our lab was being used to 70% capacity. Within 2 months, it was being used to 100% capacity.

In fact, because our lab is fully booked at least one month in advance, some GDS teams are once again using external labs. There’s no doubt this overflow could accommodate a second in-house lab space, even if much simpler and smaller.

The lab is an estimated 25% cheaper than going to market

By using an in-house lab, we’re spending an estimated 25% less than renting external labs. At 100% usage, our lab should  have paid for itself in 3 years.

This includes all running costs, such as our full-time Lab Controller and things like stationery, biscuits and tea for guests.

User research is a team sport: our lab’s making this easier

Our lab is becoming more than just a lab space – it’s a space in which team members and senior managers (not just user researchers) come together to learn about users first hand. It’s also a place where people get to know one another.

GDS user researcher, Mark Branigan, says:

It’s been considerably easier to get senior management involved when they only have to pop downstairs instead of across town. That’s a major win. Making recommendations based on research is a whole lot easier when the decision makers have seen users interacting with a service first hand.

Also, it’s far easier for observers to link up meaningfully with the rest of the team during research sessions, which has meant very rapid and effective fixes where there have been tech problems.

Liz Griffin, a GDS Content Designer:

The onsite lab is a great resource for anyone working on content (including new starters). It’s also been helpful for members of the wider project team to be able to join us, as you learn things about your users from this kind of research that you can’t get from web analytics, call centre feedback etc. You can learn a lot from dipping into a random session too.

Caroline Jarrett, a GDS user researcher, adds:

It’s thrilling to go in the lab to observe research and discover that it’s already full of people; also a great way to meet people working on other aspects of projects.

Getting cross-government teams involved

Every Friday, we open our lab space to user researchers from across government who can use it free of charge. ‘X-Govt Fridays’ are now fully booked almost 2 months in advance.

We’re starting to see cross-government teams drop in to observe research too, which is wonderful.

John Beale, a User Researcher, from Land Registry did just that:

...it was truly inspiring to see how hard the team are working to make every detail as intuitive as possible. This really is public service at its very best.

I found myself holding my breath like everyone else as the participant went through the screens, completing the revised photo upload section (bit of hesitation, notes scribbled) – would we get his full name? Yes! High fives all round.

A flexible space that accommodates many research needs

When we built our lab, one of our key goals was to create a flexible space – one that would suit a variety of needs; even those we’d not foreseen. For this reason, we designed the lab to run on a bespoke A/V setup and we don’t use proprietary research software. Because we understand the mechanics behind our lab, we can do whatever we want.

We’ve used the lab for various research methods such as forms studios, unmoderated usability research, cards sorting with paper cards, research with people working as a pair, research with people working individually, benchmarking and more.

We’ve dramatically improved the sound in the lab

The sound in our lab was ‘buzzy’ and ‘muddy’.

Jonathan Rodriguez, our Lab Controller (he’s also a qualified Sound Engineer), diagnosed our problem as “unwanted acoustic anomalies like flutter echoes”. These anomalies were treated with acoustic foam – seen below as large white canvases on the wall – adjusting of mics, and a frequency cut using the lab’s built-in EQ facilities.

Our sound is dramatically improved.

We’ve learned how to run our mobile testing more smoothly

Our mobile testing is set up to run on MirrorOp for Android and Apple TV for iOS mobiles. Our mobile testing capability could be improved still further but, for now, our setup feels as natural and uninterrupted as possible.

We’re now using Recordable for Android mobile testing to show interaction ‘snail trails’.

Although we’ve got really great ceiling cameras, we’ve learned that recording mobile usage with an external camera is tricky: hair gets in the way, reflections make the phone screens hard to see, and people don’t hold their phones still.

Even though we’ve got this very useful and team-building lab, it’s good to remember…

Yes, user research happens in the lab but no, that’s not the only way to do it; it’s only a small amount of the total user research. As we’ve got the facility it’s great, but you shouldn’t let lack of a lab hold you back. – Caroline Jarrett, GDS user researcher

Things we would do differently next time round

Involve the IT team from day one in the lab

We had meetings with our IT department when we first introduced the idea of the lab, but we didn’t follow through enough on their involvement.

If you want your lab’s long-term technical support to be delivered in-house, it’s important to get your IT department involved from day one, and keep them involved.

It’s usually possible to be supported by an external supplier, but it’s less convenient, may not be useful when you’ve got a last-minute problem, and it is more expensive.

Make sure you have an analog option for all your digital workflows

Digital is great when it works. Not so much when it doesn’t.

Our lab is primarily controlled using a digital console served via an iPad. The Lab Controller uses the console to remotely manoeuvre lights, sounds, cameras and what appears on the observation room screen. If the digital console won’t work – which happens rarely – the whole system comes to a standstill. Even if rare, we can’t afford any downtime in the lab.

Whatever your setup, it’s useful to make sure you have a readily available analog workflow as a backup to your digital one.

Sometimes bigger is better

Our observation room accommodates 12 observers and it’s regularly packed to the hilt. We could certainly do with more space.

It’s important to remember that an observation room is not just about cramming people in to watch a screen, it’s also about allowing people space to collaborate: write sticky notes, put things up on walls (or on boards which the teams can take away with them) and gather around things. The more space you have to play with the better.

When bigger is not always better

When we first set up the lab, we chose to store our videos as ProRes files, which are monstrously big, even if very good quality.

It was inevitable that storage of videos would soon become a problem, and it didn’t take long before it did. We now transcode our files to MP4 format using Handbrake, an open-source video transcoder. We’ve managed to maintain excellent quality, and cut our storage requirements from 7 TB per month to just 140 GB. That’s a huge difference.

In short, when setting up a lab space, it’s useful to think about how, when and where your videos will be used in the long term.

Don’t underestimate the need for good lighting

We’ve got bog-standard office lighting in our lab. It’s absolutely fine from a participant and moderator point of view but, as any camera buff will tell you, lighting is everything if you want to get the most out of your video.

We’ve got Lumens 1080p HD cameras in our lab, which record a very good picture. We’ve however noticed problems when the sun shines through the window – because the light is bright and uneven, the camera can’t hold focus.

If you’re building a lab, try and make your lighting as even as possible. We’re told that LEDs are a good bet. Also, make sure to have blinds or curtains so that you can block out glare when necessary.

On this point, when you furnish your lab, avoid white surfaces and glossy surfaces. You want to cut down visual glare as much as possible. We went for light grey and matt surfaces, which works well.

The equipment is hot

Our lab setup includes a lot of equipment, and it’s hot. The bulk of the equipment is housed in a cooling rack, which might keep the equipment cool but gives off its own heat. The large monitors contribute their share. Add 12 tightly packed people to the mix and you’re bordering on the tropical.

We need to upgrade our standard air conditioning to something special. If I’d known this would be a problem, I would have planned an A/C upgrade into the original build more carefully.

Think carefully about your research participants door-to-door experience

There definitely is a transition when you start running your own lab – no more receptionist and no more drinks and sandwiches.

We quickly realised we’d have to think about how to get our research participants to and from the lab in a way that felt welcoming and relaxing. We now routinely include a host as part of recruitment. The host ensures participants are well looked after before and after their research session.

Make sure to consider a waiting area with as much care and attention as you do the actual lab space.

We’ve had several nice articles about the lab published

Economist: Digitising public services: Laboratory conditions

Digital by Default news: GDS unveils user research lab

Telegraph: Government bureaucracy ‘insanely arrogant’ says digital boss (actually a positive story)

Other fun stuff

See a spontaneous log of our lab’s story on this Twitter search. Read more blog posts about our GDS user research lab.

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At GDS, we’re in a unique situation where our product teams have lots of people who can code, but in other teams there’s not so many. However, across these teams, there’s definitely an appetite to learn more.

Through the year I’ve had a few conversations with people who’ve identified a need for some technology which could help them work better, but weren’t sure what the next step would be in trying to make it exist.

To try and improve this, I’ve recently started an evening code club at GDS. With the help of a few developers, 20 GDS people have been learning the basics of HTML and CSS.

We’re combining an online course on Codecademy with some extra activities to experiment with GOV.UK code.

So far, we’ve had really good feedback and, since we were oversubscribed by more than 100 people for the first course, we’d like to try scaling this up in the future. There’s also been interest from other government departments.

I’ve heard good things from people at GDS who have been improving their skills in other ways, too. Some of the design team have been pairing and shadowing with developers when making prototypes, and others have been taking part in courses run by organisations like Decoded and General Assembly.

When technology underpins our daily life, understanding how it works is the first step in being able to use it to make positive change. What’s more, if we want to be able to reason about how technology and society intersect in the future, everybody should have at least a basic understanding of how things like the internet work.

Once seen as the exclusive domain of the stereotypical ‘bedroom coder’, it’s great that the last few years has made code more accessible than ever before. Learning to code isn’t the only way to do that, but at GDS, we’re going to carry on doing our bit to help out, and we’ll try to write more about what we learn along the way.

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Last night HRH The Duke of York hosted an event at Buckingham Palace for the D5 delegates. Various UK digital start ups were there to showcase their talents and products to the international attendees.

The D5 summit themes included teaching children to code, open markets and connectivity.

Coding in particular has been big news this week – with President Obama writing his first piece of code, and school children visiting No 10 to take part in the #HourofCode event.

It was my birthday on Wednesday, and Companies House sent me a present: they moved to GOV.UK that day. It’s been a good week for them – on Tuesday, their new beta service passed its assessment against the Service Standard. Well done to all involved.

Most of my recent posts here have been about visits to our exemplar projects up and down the country. Companies House is not one of them, but I happened to be nearby last week, and took the chance to spend a couple of hours with Chief Executive Tim Moss and Chief Digital Officer Gareth Lloyd.

They took me on a guided tour around an organisation that’s under the radar but doing a terrific job. Companies House has been re-inventing itself for years now – they started back in 2006 – and they’re well on the road towards becoming an entirely digital operation.

The tour included a quick look at the beta, which includes an impressively long list of features but doesn’t overwhelm you with options – in fact, the only thing you’re asked to do is search for a company name or number. (There’s a very nice bit of autocomplete technology at work inside the search box too.)

What it gives you is a beautifully designed summary of public information about that company: its status, registered address, names of directors and secretaries, and a list of filing dates. It’s an impressive start on an important digital service, and a vital part of the work being done to prepare for making all Companies House digital data free to access next year.

They also showed me some work they’ve been doing on dashboards – digital displays for performance data. This one shows a live overview of how many documents they’re processing – even the paper ones. A simple screen like this can really help drive the business. As you might expect, these screenshots are the product of months of development work, with a very strong focus on user research. (Companies House invested in its own user research lab two years ago.)

Head of Customer Insight Sara Ball and Design Manager Helen Hourihane showed me some of the data they’re using to drive decision making.

“We’ve got a really good analytics API, which means we can see what pages are causing issues,” Helen said.

Better paper handling

There’s another project known internally as Ewok – short for Electronic Workflow. For all its success at digitising its business, Companies House still handles a lot of paper – 1.7 million documents this year. That’s 120 tons. You can still see piles of documents on trollies.

But rather than leave the paper side of things languishing and slowing things down, they’re investing in technology to make the paper handling as efficient as possible. They’ve built up an impressive scanning and OCR system that’s reduced the workload of the examiners – the people whose job it is to check details on incoming company accounts and make sure they’re accurately entered into the database.

One of those examiners, Dan Reed, showed me the old process and the new process side-by-side. The new one was much quicker. “Ewok is so much better for us,” he said.

As a result of these changes, examiners work faster and more efficiently, and they can work from anywhere. Now some of them can work from home if they wish.

Small is beautiful

Companies House is small, in government terms, but doing some amazing work – they’re a model for a digital department or agency. In nearly every part of their operation, they’re ahead of the curve: they’ve brought technology in-house – there are no huge system integrators doing it for them. They’re making good use of their data, using open standards, reducing the paper processing burden, hiring technology and digital experts locally, simplifying due diligence, and investing in digital leadership. Where Companies House is a model agency, Tim Moss is a model digital leader. Other government agencies should follow them.

One more thing: we need to build a community of trust within government. Companies House shows how government organisations should become suppliers and consumers of services and data. Not just with the outside world, but with and between one another. There will be dozens of platforms necessary to put government as a platform into action, and it will be teams like this one that build them.

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We’ve said before, and no doubt we’ll say again: transformation means more than fixing websites. It goes deeper than that, right into the organisations behind the websites. There’s a logic to it: digital service design means designing the whole service, not just the digital bits. If you’re redesigning a service, you need to think about the organisation that runs it.

This is the hidden side of transformation. It’s not so easy to see, because there isn’t always something obvious you can point to and say: “That’s transformation right there.”

That’s partly why I took a train to Swansea a couple of weeks ago, to visit our colleagues at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). You can see the deeper transformation happening there.

I was accompanied by Iain Patterson, CTO at DVLA; Mark Evans, Chief Architect; Sally Meecham, Transformation Lead from GDS; Alan Morgans, Transformation Manager; Magnus Falk, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government; and Dafydd Vaughan, Technical Architect.

DVLA’s headquarters on the edge of Swansea is enormous. Everyone remarks on it when they first visit. I did. It looks a bit like a university campus. It was built to process enormous quantities of paperwork – because of course, that’s how things used to be done. But things are changing now. Paper’s not dead, but it’s being phased out. We’ve already said goodbye to the tax disc.

First we looked at the 3 DVLA exemplar projects: View Driving Licence, Personalised Registrations, and Vehicle management. The first of those went live back in October, so our focus was on the other two, which will shortly move into public beta after some time in private beta testing. Service manager Rohan Gye and his team did an impressively short demo – here’s what they showed me.

Selling a vehicle into the motor trade

Many people will recognise this piece of paper. It’s the V5C form, aka vehicle log book. You use different bits of it for different things when buying and selling a car. In total, there are 18 million vehicle management transactions every year, including changes of address, private sales, and buying from or selling to the trade. The last of those – selling to the trade – accounts for about 5.5 million transactions per year¹. So even if the new digital service gets just 20% take-up, that will mean one million fewer pieces of paper sent to the DVLA.

Seven out of 10 car sales are made to motor traders, often when owners do part exchange deals on newer models. Most of those sellers leave the V5C with the traders too, expecting them to handle the transfer-of-ownership paperwork.

Here’s the beta service for selling a vehicle to motor traders. It’s very simple. It’s aimed at the traders themselves, since they’re the ones who usually do this task on behalf of their clients.

The first step is to identify the business – so the first step is to enter a trading name and postcode. A location service from Ordnance Survey looks up the address (or users can enter it manually if they prefer).

Once that’s done, they’re asked to enter the details of the vehicle being sold. They need the registration number and the latest V5C document reference number. Most traders will know where to find this number without even thinking, but just in case the service is being used by someone who’s not familiar with the paperwork, there’s a little graphic on this page, showing you exactly where to look for it. That’s a nice touch.

The third step is to confirm the details. All the trader has to do now is tick a couple of boxes to confirm that the current official keeper gives their consent and approves the sale, pick a date, and optionally enter the milage of the vehicle. Then they click “Confirm sale” and it’s done.

Finally, the trader is shown a summary page, which they’re asked to print out and send to their customer. There’s even a “Print” button to make that easier.

Another button says “Sell another vehicle”. If the trader clicks this one, they’ll go back to step 2. They won’t have to enter their identifying details again, because the service remembers them automatically. So if they’ve had a busy day of buying and selling, they can sit down during a quieter moment towards the end of the day and go through all the changed ownerships in one go.

User research has shown that most users don’t need much in the way of assisted digital support, although some have found some help useful the first time they tried using the service. The team is setting up a helpdesk to answer user questions, and they will continue to test this approach as the beta phase continues.

There’s so much to admire here. It’s a beautifully simple digital service that will save traders hours of time. What’s more, the changes recorded here will be updated on the DVLA’s database in real time. The turnaround is instant. That matters because the law says you’re entitled to a refund on vehicle tax you’ve paid in advance for a specific vehicle. So the refund can be on its way much faster than it was before – which is good news for everyone.

Take a registration number off a vehicle

Now let’s take a look at another service that’s in beta. There are about 1.6 million personalised registration transactions per year, of which about 240,000 deal with retaining a registration². This beta service is called “Take a registration number off a vehicle”. In the spirit of “Show the thing”, the name tells you everything: this is the service you use when you want to retain a personalised registration, probably so that you can put it on a new vehicle.

Anyone who owns a personalised registration will understand why. The registration often means more – and sometimes, is worth more – than the car it’s attached to. When they want to sell their car, owners often want to keep the registration and transfer it to another vehicle. That’s where this service comes in.

Again, the beta is aimed at motor traders, simply because they tend to do a lot more of the admin and paperwork than the rest of us. They will often be taking ownership of the vehicle that’s having the personalised registration removed, so part of their work involves arranging for that vehicle to be assigned a normal registration and giving it a new number plate. Otherwise they won’t be able to sell it on again.

The first step is to enter the registration, the latest V5C reference, and the keeper’s postcode. The user is asked if they are the registered keeper, or if they represent a business that has consent to act on the keeper’s behalf – most of the time, traders will be choosing this option. Again, the trader is asked to identify themselves and their business, and again DVLA is using the same Ordnance Survey address look-up system behind the scenes. The same tool, used for the same job, but in two different services. In the old days something like this would have been procured twice, probably at great expense. Now it’s a much cheaper off-the-shelf purchase from the Digital Marketplace.

Next, the details are displayed back, so the user has a chance to check them. Notice how the registration is displayed to look like the number plate you’d see on a car. It’s a small, simple thing but it really helps to make the information more readable.

The trader gets a confirmation, and – instantly – a replacement registration to fix on the vehicle once the personalised one has been removed. On the final page, they’re given the reference number they need for the transaction, and they can immediately assign the personalised registration to a new vehicle.

Every single one of these steps has been designed to meet a specific user need. Lots of the tiny changes and design tweaks are there because research showed they would help users. The address look-ups, the number plates that look like real number plates, the little graphics to remind you where to find the right reference numbers on the right forms – all of it results from user research and constant iteration.

Service designer Louise Pierpoint told me: “The trade have been calling for something like this for years.” I bet they have. Louise (pictured doing the demo at the top of this post) and her colleagues have been meeting motor traders – some of them small family businesses, some of them huge corporates trading in whole fleets of cars – to get their input on this service.

It’s always a good sign when service demos are over in a few minutes, as these two were. It shows that the development team have been doing the hard work to make it simple. There’s not much to see because the complexity has been stripped away. That’s how we build services now.

Again, there’s some telephone support in place to provide help to those users who need it. For both services, there are plans to make walk-through videos to help first time users, and the team is exploring the feasibility of web chat support.

Both of these services are terrific achievements. They both reduce a 3 week paper process down to a couple of minutes. Both are expected to go into public beta early in the New Year. I think they’re going to make a lot of motor traders very happy. Later during my visit, I met DVLA’s chief executive Oliver Morley and he was just as excited: “This is going to change the industry,” he said. He’s right.

Organisational change

This bit – the organisational change bit – of transformation is much, much harder than the websites bit. People have a natural, and entirely understandable, resistance to change. No-one likes it, especially when they feel it’s being done to them. But it can be done, and DVLA are doing it.

For example: there’s a new focus on services, and on service design. That means hiring or appointing service managers, re-organising teams, training and hiring people to make sure the right skills are there.

I sat in on one of DVLA’s regular “Show and share” sessions, and listened to Transformation Manager Steve Railton talking about what this means for people. As well as service managers, DVLA is appointing capability managers tasked with finding people with the right skills. Many of them will already work in the organisation. Some will need to be hired.

He talked about procurement – right now, DVLA procures everything on a project-by-project basis. That means it’s hard to re-allocate funding or resources when circumstances change. Perhaps, he suggested, it would be better if DVLA procured at the portfolio level? Then project teams could dip into a larger pot of shared resources and just use what they need, when they need it.

Technology change

DVLA’s technology is complicated. It’s been built up over decades, with each new layer of technology laid on top of the layers below, like geological strata.

Mark Evans wrote about it earlier this year, saying:

These systems have their origins in the paper based world, embodying processes, rules and data constructs which were relevant when records were held on paper and stored in filing cabinets … It’s very clear that these systems will not act as the platform we need as the DVLA offers more and more services as digital by default.

That’s the issue in a nutshell. Here’s a diagram of DVLA’s technology as it stands:

It works, yes – but it’s inefficient, slow, and much more expensive that it needs to be. Mark told Magnus and I that, at the moment, 77% of the money they spend on IT is spent just to maintain this behemoth of legacy technology. They’re spending three quarters of the budget just to stand still.

Re-designing it all is a big job, but it can be done. Mark took me through how they’re doing it. This is what he wants the DVLA’s tech stack to look like in future:

This diagram doesn’t cover everything that the previous one did, but you get the idea: it’s much simpler, and the whole system is designed to be interconnected. It’s made of lots of small pieces, each one “channel agnostic”, each one re-useable. Data flows between them via APIs.

In short, “it’s made of lots of small, logical pluggable components,” in the words of Iain Patterson.

It’s not the kind of change you can do overnight, so instead they’re doing it slowly, piece by piece. As newer systems are activated, the older ones will be gradually decommissioned. Eventually, they’ll reach a tipping point where there’s more new stuff than old stuff. That’s when momentum takes over, and change starts to speed up.

Change looks like this

DVLA are doing some terrific work right now. They’re fixing websites, they’re fixing the technology behind the scenes, and they’re re-arranging the whole organisation around a new approach to user-centric service design. If that doesn’t define “transformation”, I don’t know what does.

I’m hugely impressed with what they’re doing, and all I can say – all I did say when I was there – is “Well done.” DVLA is a poster child for modern digital government.

Let me end with this: when I started working in government back in 2011, people warned me to stay away from certain things.

“You can’t change DVLA,” I was told. Not true, it turns out: they’re doing it themselves.

“There’s no skills – you can’t hire developers around Swansea,” I was told. Wrong again, yes you can: there are plenty of skilled people in south Wales, and they’ll be even easier to find now that DVLA has begun to set up closer links with universities in south Wales, and invested in the TechHub centre in the centre of Swansea.

This is what it all comes down to: people and skills. The Civil Service is changing, and we need to bring back the skills that we outsourced in recent decades. Designers, developers, user researchers, service managers, all of these and more. Come one, come all – come to Swansea, and help DVLA build modern user-centered digital services.

Footnotes

1 and 2 – Figures from the Performance Platform.

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A huge programme of work, transition has seen over 300 agencies and arm’s length bodies move their content to GOV.UK. This has been no cut and paste job. Instead, people at the agencies and arm’s length bodies have worked with the GDS transition team to reshape the existing content around user needs. Duplicate content has been removed and archived.

The GDS team, led by Elisse Jones, has trained over 1,000 writers and publishers. GDS transition managers have been at hand helping people in the agencies and arm’s length bodies with questions and queries. But much of the work has been done by people in the agencies and arm’s length bodies themselves, making sure their content is fit for GOV.UK, the government publishing platform. Here’s a film about the works that’s been done:

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Transcript:

Transitioning 300+ agencies and arm’s length bodies to GOV.UK

Elisse Jones, Delivery Manager, GOV.UK Transition Programme

We’ve moved 285 websites on to GOV.UK with a further 28 websites to move by the end of December. The main change for users is that there is now a single website that they can go to. Without the agencies and all of the hard work across the digital teams this transition would not have been possible.

Ragnar Karlsson, Web Content Administrator, Coal Authority

My biggest trepidation really was the sheer amount of content we had, well over a thousand pages worth of content.

Elisse Jones

They’ve had to work with their policy teams and the subject matter experts to really change the thinking around is this piece of content built upon a user need.

Andrew Rees, Website Transition Manager, Intellectual Property Office

It wasn’t about the Intellectual Property Office or GDS, it was just about what was good and what was going to work for our users.

Rachel Purkett, Digital Media Manager, Monitor

Focusing on user needs has really helped us to change how the whole organisation thinks about digital content, about communications.

Andrew Rees

It’s getting educated if you like into that sole kind of user need of the customer, what exactly is the customer going to look for.

Rachel Purkett

I’ve had good feedback from my team that the training on the style guide has been really helpful and has helped them to focus better on user needs and how to write for GOV.UK.

Andrew Rees

The transition managers we’ve had excellent relationships with, as well as people in the mainstream content teams.

Rachel Purkett

Our search traffic is up since our transition to GOV.UK so that’s a good indication that things are looking good and people are finding the site.

Ragnar Karlsson

GDS has done a really good job of pulling round the content and the information that they need to support those of us out in the wider elements of government. It’s actually brought about quite a bit of change internally within the Coal Authority of how we write, how we communicate. We’re using plain English for the intranet, we’re using plain English for all of our communications and social media. So it’s changing how people actually communicate as a whole within our organisation.

transition.blog.gov.uk

Rural payments is an exemplar that meets the complex needs of farmers, a really important group of users. When the service goes into public beta in early 2015, it will allow farmers to digitally apply for agricultural subsidies from the EU. This will save farmers time and give them an overview of the information Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) has about their land use and save the UK government money by limiting disallowance fines.

When I visited the team at Defra in Reading recently, I was really impressed to see how much work the team has put in to make things better for users. All of the exemplars have required digital teams to do the hard work to make it simple. That’s never been more true than for this project. It was one of the first exemplars we started working on back in winter 2012, so they’ve had to do a lot of learning while doing.

Rural payments sits within the CAP Delivery Programme (CAPD), which Defra set up to handle IT systems and delivery across four different government bodies: Natural England, Rural Payments Agency, Forestry Commission and Defra. The exemplar is a response to some new, highly complicated policy from the European Union, the first of which is the Common Agricultural Policy’s Basic Payments Scheme, which will come into effect during the spring of 2015. These payments are an important part of farmers’ income, which means they also have a knock-on effect for many other businesses in the rural economy.

It’s not just the policy that’s complex. For this exemplar alone, we’re talking about roughly 110,000 farmers and 1,200 land agents.  Farmers hire agents for many reasons, but one of the things agents do is apply for different funding on farmers’ behalf. Farmers themselves are a diverse group of people, whose properties can range from a smallholding to an industrial scale business. The average age of farmers in the UK is also quite high, with many being in their 60s and 70s. A robust assisted digital offering is required for any service to pass the Service Standard assessment, and should be able help users who for one reason or another can’t immediately use the digital channel themselves. The team in Reading wrote to farmers who didn’t previously have digital contact with the Rural Payments Agency: 4,000 responded. The team is now phoning all of these farmers to talk about what might be getting in the way of them using a digital service. They’re also working on a pilot programme of “support centres”: it’s early days, but they’re learning a lot about how best to support their users.

Focus on simplicity

That said, it’s really important to not be blinded by how complicated things are, but instead focus on how simple you’re going to make them. There’s a lot of edge cases that the user researchers led by Jay Spanton, have come across in the last year or so. The team told me about 10-year-old hobby farmers, people who might not be used to filling in forms. That sort of insight into users is great, but it’s also important not to focus on the edge cases when building a digital service. We don’t go for a one-size-fits all approach, because we recognise that edge cases exist. But by building services to meet the needs for the bulk of users, we create simpler, clearer and faster services for them, and have the time and financial flexibility to offer case by case support for edge case users.

I encouraged the team to think about the complex large scale services we’ve already delivered as part of the exemplar programme, across the country. We have over 135,000 users who have claimed Carer’s Allowance online, and have 1 million people applying on the online system to register to vote in the course of a few months. Sure, there are a lot of moving parts, but its important that we keep the focus on users.

From edge cases to hedge cases

One of the best things about working in an agile way is that we can iterate on what we’ve built to better meet user needs. We know what we build isn’t likely to be perfect the first time, so iterating quickly lets us put new services in front of users and keeps us improving.

The old way of processing rural payments was largely paper based. When a farmer wanted to show that they’d changed anything about their land, the RPA would send them a form and (if the farmer asked for it) a paper copy of the map of that bit of land. The farmer would then draw in the shape of the change to their land. With pens, pencils or sometimes even crayons. On a piece of paper. In the 21st century.

It would look a bit like this:

These maps and forms would then be sent back to the RPA. A team of people called ‘digitizers’ would check the change against other evidence, like aerial photographs. In case there were still discrepancies, inspectors would be sent out to the farm to double check.

These discrepancies are one of the causes of huge fines (called ‘disallowances’) from the EU: since 2005, they’ve totalled around £600 million. What a waste of money.

A new digital mapping tool is at the centre of the new service. Using it, farmers will be able to see what information RPA has about their land and land use. The service will also be able to do basic validations about land use and land cover and send messages when it has verified that the reported land use is correct.

As product owner Oliver Slocombe mentioned in his presentation, “We’re asking about what we need to know.” The mapping tool will go through many more iterations, but it currently looks a bit like this:

Before you start asking “how difficult can it be to make a map”, think about things like hedges. Farmers can get extra subsidies for hedges under a rule about Ecological Focus Areas (EFA), because they have ecological value. But the hedges have lots of rules around them, like having to be on or adjacent to arable land. Add that to the fact that we’re working with a group of users who do not necessarily use computers daily, and you get a sense of why people who have been working on the exemplar, like Lee Gathercole, tech architect from Abaco, end up saying: “I’ve been dreaming of hedges at night!”

Some farmers pay third party agents to handle this stuff on their behalf. Some farmers give other people permission to submit applications on their behalf; these people might be agents, but they can also be family, friends or other helpers. Regardless of who is using the new service though, they will have more insight into how the process works than ever before. Since the platforms the team at Defra are building are service agnostic, they can be used for more than just the Rural Payments service. A sign that we’re building services, not websites.

One of the big challenges for Defra has been bringing together people who work in different locations. I had the pleasure of meeting remote teams in Gdansk and in Belfast via video conference; one of the ways that Defra are solving the problem of bringing talented people together. The people who are at the forefront of building these services can look forward to their skills being in demand as government continues to move toward becoming digital by default.

Taking the step from drawing in crayons to a fully digital system was never going to be easy, but building other services has shown us that we can build great services. It requires us to not stare ourselves blind at the complexities of each part. Instead, we need to keep thinking about building a service that’s beautifully simple. We’re building services, not websites; I’m excited to see rural payments show the results of making things as simple as possible for users.

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The 5 people strong internal IT service desk team is in charge of making sure that all the equipment people at GDS use is up and running.  With over 600 people currently working at GDS, there’s a lot of devices, and a lot of things that can go wrong.

Here’s a film about what the IT service desk team do on a daily basis:

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Transcript

Meet the internal IT service desk team

Jacob Bonwitt, Service Desk Analyst

The service desk is a group of people that provide support for devices: phones, computers, systems. Emotional support.

What’s it like to work on the service desk?

Jacob Bonwitt
I work in a people-facing role. I deal with people all day, every day.

“Same concept to log on.”

“Yes, just log on, so if you go on to…”

Jacob Bonwitt
At the rate of about 1 every 10 minutes on a quiet day.

“3-0-6, thanks very much.”

“Thank you.”

Daz Ahern, Service Desk Analyst
It is a very sociable place to work.

Jacob Bonwitt
New starters tend to start new jobs on Mondays. There’s always many people to be seen that need to be set up on their devices.

Daz Ahern
I’ve always been interested in technology. You probably need a bit of patience. Patience and a fair bit of understanding.

Jacob Bonwitt
A lot of the services that we offer are fundamental for the operation of the organisation.

Sometimes it breaks

Jacob Bonwitt
It’s the nature of technology that sometimes it breaks.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s like a DNS issue.”

Daz Ahern
We have two data centres. One’s been down for about 4 and a half hours, and we go onto the back up one. And in the past 15 minutes that one’s gone down.

Jacob Bonwitt
We have contingencies to make a fix, go round it a different way, go to a different data centre, and our users are back up and running.

“Hello!”

Jacob Bonwitt
I like computers but the part of my job that I enjoy is working with people.

Daz Ahern
If you’ve got people who need help and it’s urgent, you have to be on the ball. You have to get these people back up and running.

“There you go. All right? Cool.”

“Thanks.”

“Cheers guys. “

Jacob Bonwitt
We are thinking, is this going to impact on how you work? How can we make this better for you?

We appreciate the finer things in life on the service desk. I’ve never known a techie who doesn’t like coffee.

“Is there anymore coffee?”

“I was going to say, shall we fetch another batch because…”

“…that really didn’t touch the sides.”

“Yeah, No, no, same here.”

This is something one of the GOV.UK team printed out, a simple word cloud that shows popular search terms on GOV.UK.

What’s the thing people search for most? “Jobs.”

Front and centre, far bigger than everything else on that page. Evidence of people all over the country looking for all manner of Government information about jobs. More than 70,000 searches are made on GOV.UK a month using terms related to jobs and careers. www.gov.uk/jobsearch is the most visited page on GOV.UK, with approximately 5m visits per month – nearly 9% of visits to GOV.UK involve looking at the above page. Real people looking at job policy, new job applications, looking for ways to develop their career – or start one.

If our work is truly user-led then getting this right is one of the most important things we will do. Getting digital into the heart of DWP, the government department responsible for benefits including Jobseeker’s Allowance and Universal Jobmatch, is critical to that. We need expertise and ambition to make a difference to millions of people.

For years, our services in this area have been reliant on aging technology which has, in recent times, restricted our agility and locked in many working practices. As I’ve said before, everyone (not just users, also colleagues in public services) suffers from poor technology.

We now have the opportunity to re-think many of our assumptions about jobs related information and services, and apply digital era thinking to what has been an industrial era. We need the Internet’s brightest and best technologists to transform this part of our estate, and to radically improve the lives of many in society in most need of help and assistance from the state.

This is a new mission for an old problem. Mayank Prakash, the new Director General of Technology at DWP, has made a great start. He’s just published a blog post seeking candidates for a new Chief Technology Architect at DWP, the first of many appointments for the team. Details for the role are here.

This is stuff that matters. I’m not joking when I say this really is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Mayank and I will help bring in those with the skills and attitude we need to DWP. GDS is fully engaged in supporting this approach.

This is a chance to make transformational changes to how we meet the needs of millions of people.

Image by Brimstone under a Creative Commons Licence.

It’s been a year since we moved the GDS blog to GOV.UK. Happy birthday, blog. Since then we’ve had over 500,000 visitors and nearly 1,000,000 page views. Here are the five most-read posts over the whole year.

In ascending order of views …

5. On getting people online

If we do these things, we’re doing digital inclusion.

A checklist for digital inclusion.

This was a checklist for government and other organisations that want to help people get online, and a call for feedback.

4. On GOV.UK site use

…the story here is the rapid rise of ‘portrait’ smartphone screen resolutions such as 768×1024 at the expense of traditional ‘landscape’ desktop resolutions. Further evidence of the rapid shift to a wider variety of screen sizes as mobile device use takes off.

Browser, operating system and screen resolution data for GOV.UK by Tom Loosemore.

Here Tom compared lots of interesting GOV.UK data from January 2014 to January 2013. This paints a picture of a trend towards mobile devices – a trend that seems to be continuing. And as Tom predicted, 2014 saw the first day when visits from mobile devices than a PC for the first time – on July 12.

There’s much more detail here on how that data breaks down.

3. On verifying identity

When you use [government] services, you want to be confident that someone else can’t sign in pretending to be you, see your sensitive personal records or use your identity to make fraudulent claims. You want to be confident that your data and services are secure and your privacy protected.

What is identity assurance? by Janet Hughes

This post explains the importance of verifying identity for both users and government when using government services.

This work has led to GOV.UK Verify, a way for people to prove who they are online when using government services.

2. On reporting misleading websites

Government services have been getting a growing number of complaints from people who feel misled by websites which charge for access to public services that are either free or much cheaper when accessed via the official GOV.UK website.

Report a misleading website to search engines by Tom Loosemore.

People searching the web for government services sometimes fall foul of prominent ads linking to intermediary services (to put it mildly and charitably). These are services which charge more money to use government services – more than would be the case by using the official service at GOV.UK. Hence the #StartAtGOVUK campaign.

Misleading ads can be reported to the search engine where you saw them. Here are the appropriate links for Google and Bing. It’s currently not clear where you report dubious ads to Yahoo. We’re trying to find out.

1. On how we design

We don’t want a culture of designs being ‘thrown over a wall’ to a dev team. We don’t make ‘high fidelity mock ups’ or ‘high fidelity wireframes’. We’re making a Thing, not pictures of a Thing.

What’s the design process at GDS? by Ben Terret.

Obviously people are very interested in how we do design at GDS. This post is a great start. We also have a blog about it: GDS design notes.

What else?

There’s been a lot of interest in working with us. More than 50,000 visitors wanted to find out more about GDS vacancies and what it’s like to work here. See the GDS jobs page for the roles we’re likely to be recruiting in 2015.

The busiest day of the year was 22 July when Mike Bracken wrote Making things open, making things better about open standards for file formats in government. July was our busiest month, too.

Let us know in the comments if there’s anything you’d like to hear more about this year.

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“A second digital revolution”, that’s what the Chief Scientific Advisor called the Internet of Things in his report in December. Rapid growth in devices connected to the internet – or networked in their own right – are certainly helping to make the internet a more visible presence in our lives.

We’re starting some work with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) that builds on the report, to find out how we can use our role in government to help in the field; what are the most effective things we can do to help the sector grow and make sure these platforms are valuable for end users and businesses alike.

We’re approaching the work the same way we approach service design; start with a discovery, try an alpha, and learn as we go. For the discovery we’re joined by Matt Webb, best known as a co-founder of BERG.

BERG were a design consultancy responsible for the first magazine on the iPad, the Little Printer – one of the world’s first consumer Internet of Things devices – and Berg Cloud, a platform for prototyping IOT products. Matt was also one of the people involved in the Tech City push, something that happened as GDS was starting to take shape.

Matt, Hadley Beeman and the rest of the team have already started talking to people inside and outside government about how we can encourage industry to innovate, and about our own networks of things and approaches to development; procurement, commissioning, maintenance… the everyday things that support the technology of tomorrow. Double-page spreads of “smart cities” and people covered in sensors have their place, but we need to work out what the mundane reality of networked devices looks like.

Matt’s experience in the sector will be hugely valuable as we explore what our role in IOT might be. Not only is he familiar with the industry, but he can look at public sector technology with fresh eyes to see where we might open it up for everyone’s benefit.

Open, interoperable and flexible technologies have made a huge difference to the quality and scale of digital transformation. Those aren’t just qualities of the software either – being open about how we build, develop and maintain services has been critical to our success.

The same values have a place in the technologies around us too. Would an open, interoperable Internet of Things help the sector grow? How can we encourage that growth, and where might we lead the way?

I’m looking forward to seeing what Matt and the team finds. If you’d like to get involved email matt.webb@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

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