One of our design principles at GDS is “Make things open: it makes them better.” Since GDS was set up in 2012, working in the open has been a big part of who we are.  It’s great for us to get feedback about our code and the way we approach things – and we can also learn a lot from seeing how governments in other countries meet user needs.

We’ve worked closely with governments around the world to share best practices. That was why it was so exciting to see the US Digital Service (USDS) formed in 2014, as described by US Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith and Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan in their blog post last week.

As President Obama said in his joint press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron last Friday, we’re “expanding our collaboration on digital technologies”. The President went on to say that the point of this is improving how both the UK and US governments serve our users. We couldn’t agree more.

The USA and the UK have a lot of the same challenges and opportunities. We both have ageing populations and have to do more with less, while making sure we create services so good people prefer to use them. The way we work, the way we collect tax, the way we want to consume public services are changing all the time. We’re transforming government digital services, and will continue to work with our partners in the US to share what we’ve learnt so far.

We’re also working with people in the US through the Open Government Partnership, so we remain among the best in the world when it comes to government transparency and the public being able to access government data. The US has made a great start on this. They’ve released 138,470 data sets, all related to areas where they can have real economic impact. Much like GDS, the US (through a programme called PortfolioStat) has also made significant savings for their taxpayers, by reining in wasteful and duplicate IT spending.

Both GDS and the USDS will continue to be involved in improving people’s digital skills across both countries. The UK is setting up a school curriculum to help children to learn to code, while certain schools in the US have long standing practical experience of teaching code; clearly an area ripe for fruitful exchange. In 2013, Mike Bracken visited Washington DC, meeting with the Presidential Innovation Fellows and giving a speech at the Code for America summit. We’ve long had the pleasure of working closely with Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America’s founder and executive director, and are really impressed by her great contribution in getting digital to the heart of the US government. She also helped start 18F, a GDS-style team that’s part of the US’s General Services Administration. One of the lessons we’ve shared across the Atlantic has been that, with an agile approach to digital transformation, rapid change and digital successes can be born from the ashes of challenging legacy systems.

Transforming government requires committed, creative and skilled people, who share what they’ve learned and who keep making things better. We’ve worked with colleagues in the US throughout their journey, and are really looking forward to seeing some of our friends and colleagues from the USDS when they visit GDS again later this year.

Vince Cable, the Secretary of State for Business, gave a speech in Brussels the other day and took digital by default one step further: right across Europe.

He was talking about a policy paper called the UK vision for the EU’s digital economy. I urge you to take a good look at this one. It calls for a single digital marketplace for the EU, for digital public services for EU citizens, for open data and for sensible legislation and regulation.

Here’s an excerpt:

Our vision for the digital single market is one which is digital by default, where it is even easier to operate online across Europe than it is to do things offline in a single state. Where online businesses go through administrative processes once, not 28 times, and where football fans can stream matches they’ve already paid for wherever they go.

This is great stuff. It’s a glimpse of the future. It advocates radical change; not change for the sake of it, but change that’s necessary to push the entire EU economy into the modern era.

Governments aren’t usually very good at drastic, rapid change, but they need to be. The internet is changing the world around them, and if governments don’t adapt they will find themselves irrelevant, impotent, and ignored.

I wholeheartedly support this vision, and encourage the EU authorities to consider its suggestions (and implications) very carefully. This is clearly where the internet and digital technologies are taking us, all of us: people, businesses and governments alike. People and the businesses will adapt – they’ve already started. Governments cannot afford to drag their heels.

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Terrific news from Australia: the government there has announced a new Digital Transformation Office and tasked it with “using technology to make services simpler, clearer and faster for Australian families and businesses.”

The emphasis there is on transformation, this is about changing the government to better serve citizens.

One of the first items on the DTO’s todo list will be a Verify-style identity service “to ensure people no longer have to complete separate log on processes for each government service.”

It will be a multi-disciplinary of designers, developers, researchers and content specialists.

It all sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Huge congratulations to all involved. Needless to say, you have our heartfelt support. If you need input from us, we’ll be happy to provide it. And if any of your team find yourselves visiting the UK, you’ll be made welcome at our office in Holborn. It will be the least we can do to repay the hospitality shown to Ben Terrett and Liam Maxwell when they visited Australia last summer at the invitation of Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull.

Digital transformation is fast becoming an international effort, something we saw clearly at the D5 summit we hosted in London last December. The Australian team joins others in Mexico, Israel, the USA, Estonia, Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand – together, we’re building an amazing community of knowledge and experience. The pace of momentum is striking.

Just over a week ago, the Prime Minister and President Obama announced a digital government partnership between the US and the UK. Then Mikey Dickerson of the USDS asked technologists there to join his new team:

I don’t blame you if you are skeptical that we can fix the biggest problems in government. I used to be, too. But every day, I am reminded of a quote by President Kennedy that is sewn into the Oval Office rug: “No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.” We have found the problems. We need the human beings.

This is exciting stuff. Onwards indeed.

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Next Tuesday (3 February), we shall be welcoming over 450 people to the British Film Institute in London for Sprint 15. We’ll be celebrating 400 days of delivery with colleagues from across government, international visitors, digital and tech suppliers, tech media and national tech correspondents.

We’ve delivered radical change, but our work has barely begun. It’s a celebration of everything we’ve achieved so far, and an opportunity to share our plans for the future: government as a platform.

If you missed out on tickets to Sprint 15, fear not: shortly after the event we’ll be posting plenty of videos, interviews, blog posts and more. On the day, we’ll be posting updates from our Twitter account @gdsteam, and using the hashtag #Sprint15.

Here’s what happened at Sprint 13 and Sprint 14.

And here’s the agenda:

1.00 – 1.45pm: Registration and networking

1.45 – 3.15pm: The story so far

Host: Ben Hammersley

The digital transformation of the UK government

Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude

The perspective from France

Thierry Mandon, French Secretary of State for Reform and Simplification

GOV.UK Verify and HMRC digital services Mark Dearnley HMRC Chief Digital and Information Officer and Chris Ferguson Deputy Director, GDS

One-to-one interview: Revolution not Evolution, 4 years on

Baroness Lane Fox of Soho

The Digital Economy

Baroness Shields

3.15 – 3.45pm: Break and networking

3.45 – 4.30pm: Digital transformation in government and business around the world: panel discussion

Host: Gerard Grech CEO Tech City

Panel members:

• Jen Pahlka, Executive Director Code for America

• Mark Thompson, Senior Lecturer University of Cambridge, Joint Owner & Strategy Director Methods Group

• Tim Moss, CEO Companies House, UK Government

• Siim Sikkut, ICT Policy Adviser Government Office of Estonia

4.30 – 5pm: The future: Government as a Platform

What is Government as a Platform?

Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc

The digital transformation of the UK Government – what happens next?

Mike Bracken, Executive Director Digital for the UK Government

5pm: Networking

Yesterday we hosted Sprint 15, a chance for colleagues from all over government to catch up, swap notes and tips, and find out more about the digital transformation programme.

Two years have passed since we began with Sprint 13, when we promised 400 days of delivery. Yesterday was a chance to see a small fraction of what’s been delivered, and talk about what comes next.

We welcomed guests from France, Estonia and the United States, as well as Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude, Martha Lane Fox, and the Prime Minister’s Digital Economy Advisor Baroness Shields.

Our thanks to all of them, and to everyone who attended and made it such an interesting and entertaining event.

Here are a few photos and highlights.

Francis Maude: We are building a properly digital government of the future. You should be proud to be at the forefront of digital government worldwide.

Thierry Mandon: I am very impressed. We look to the UK government for inspiration. We need to work on a shared vision for European public service.

Martha Lane Fox: “It’s got to be more of the same. ‘The strategy is delivery’ is absolutely right, but it’s even more inspiring in government.”

“There’s still an opportunity to create a platform from which more services can bloom. The world of broadcast and we-know-best-in-government is over.”

Joanna Shields: “I have the best job in government because I always bring good news, and the digital economy is good news.”

Janet Hughes: “Real people are using GOV.UK Verify to access real services.”

Mark Dearnley: “We are really pleased with our GOV.UK Verify beta. Users really liked the experience. This year, 11,000 people didn’t pay a fine because of Verify.”

Jen Pahlka: “Over the next 10 years, this whole agenda will be changing how people feel about government, and whether they trust you … It can be about life or death. When we remember that, it all comes into sharp focus.”

Siim Sikkut: “In Estonia, our government agencies are banned from asking for the same piece of information twice. That’s a principle.”

Mark Thompson: “For every platform correctly defined, there’s a thriving ecosystem.”

Tim Moss: “We need to understand what the barriers are before we can remove them.”

Tim O’Reilly: “You standardise railways by building tracks … data is the 21st century railway.”

Mike Bracken: “Government as a platform is nothing if we don’t give it values … our software is a public service.”

There are more photos on the GDS Flickr photostream, and plenty of tweets to explore under the #sprint15 hashtag. Thanks once more to everyone who came along – see you again next year.

Lots of my blog posts in recent months have included a bit of moaning about failure waste – problems created by poorly-designed services, most of them decades old and paper-heavy, that leave their users with nothing but questions.

The organisations running those services find themselves in a state of learnt helplessness: after decades of outsourcing, they’re stuck with technology they can’t change. Even when they know exactly what sort of digital transformation they want to bring about, they don’t know how to start.

The users, unsure about what they should do next, usually resort to picking up the phone and asking for help.

Of course we should provide help for people who need it – that’s at the heart of our assisted digital strategy – but we should also re-design public services to make them so simple that most people won’t need any help. That’s what we mean by digital by default. It’s far, far cheaper and more efficient for government to provide services digitally than over the phone, so if digital services are successful we end up saving money for the government and for taxpayers. It’s common sense.

Newport in South Wales is the home of the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), the organisation that looks after patents, trade marks, designs and copyright in the UK. They aim to help people and businesses get the right kind of legal protection for their creations and inventions. The rules surrounding IP are complicated and international in scope; helping people get their heads around it all is an important part of the job.

In recent years, IPO has made good progress with online services. Already, 99% of trade mark applications, and over 90% of patent applications are submitted electronically¹. But there are still problems to overcome before the organisation can become truly digital. Behind the scenes there are legacy computer systems and outdated processes that need replacing or updating. And there’s a degree of complexity and scale that many people not familiar with the world of intellectual property might find surprising.

Thankfully, the IPO team I met on my visit (including CEO John Alty, deputy CEO Sean Dennehey, COO Louise Smyth, CTO Simon Taylor, Customer Experience Manager Fiona Evans, and Renewals Manager Tracey Waters) know exactly what they’re up against. And they have a plan.

A new way to renew a patent

A patent is a legal protection for an idea or invention. Patent laws are complicated and vary slightly from country to country. A patent is only valid for a fixed period of time, and must be renewed by its owner within a specific timeframe to remain valid.

Every year the IPO receives 380,000 applications for patent renewal. The vast majority are done using a bulk renewal service which we’ll look at in more detail in a moment.

First, let’s look at a new digital service.

About a quarter of renewals (about 55,000 per year) are still done on paper – or were, until the team launched their new Renew a Patent service last year (that’s a screenshot of it above). Built as part of the transformation programme, it went live back in July last year, and it’s a terrific example of removing failure waste from the system. The team behind it have focused on user needs, responded to user feedback, and worked hard to make every step of the service as simple as it can be.

They’ve clearly done a good job, because one user said it was “a doddle” to renew a patent now. Most users are intermediaries, agents working on behalf of business clients. Survey work has shown that they’re happy with the new service: since going live, the user satisfaction rate has remained consistently above 90%. The survey also showed that because most users are patent professionals, the need for assisted digital support is very low.

Apply for a design alpha

Renewing a patent is the IPO’s biggest service by number of transactions, but now it’s live they’re turning their attention to other services. Next on the list is registering a design.

This is interesting, because while patent renewals is on our list of 25 exemplar projects, registering a design is not. Here’s a clear sign, if one was needed, that the exemplar programme is doing exactly what it was intended to do: to show what’s possible, to inspire similar projects. There’s a trickle-down effect. It’s heartening to see it happening.

So what does register a design actually mean? In the world of intellectual property, “design” means the aesthetics of a physical object. Functional aspects of the same object are covered by patents, and any logos that appear on it are covered by trade marks. All other aspects of its appearance come under design.

If you come up with an original design of your own, you can apply to the IPO to register your design which gives you exclusive rights to use that design for 25 years, and gives protection should someone else infringe on it.

The IPO gets about 5,000 incoming design applications every year, and right now they’re all done on paper. That number might not sound very large in comparison to many other services, but the problem lies in the next step: a huge majority of those applications have been made in error, or have errors in them. A staggering 87% of applications require some sort of follow-up from someone on the team. That’s failure waste. That’s more work to be done. Work that could be avoided, simply by designing the application process better. Many people don’t fully understand the difference between a patent, a trade mark and a design, so they apply for the latter when they don’t need to.

Take a look at the list of forms available for download from GOV.UK. (Remember, these are just the ones related to registering a design. There are others for patents and trade marks.) Working out which form you need to download is a job in itself. No wonder people get confused. That’s not criticism of the IPO team, but of the accumulation of process and inertia over decades. That is no person’s, no team’s fault. The people I met down in Newport can see what’s wrong, and they’re keen to fix it.

So work has begun on a new design applications alpha. They’re using agile working techniques, they’re making small, frequent releases, and they have a multi-disciplinary team in place (including Service Manager Lynda Adams, Delivery Manager Darren Thomas, SCRUM master Keith Mills, Product Owner Lucy Mills and Business Analyst Alastair Lawrie).

They’re making use of local skills: the design project has an experienced Java developer on loan from regional neighbours Companies House. (More widely, IPO is keen to attract local talent and has appointed a number of school leavers through an apprentice scheme, as well as running dedicated IT recruitment events – the next one will be on 29 January at its headquarters in Newport.)

It’s still just weeks old, but here’s a sneak peek at what’s been done on the design alpha so far:

It looks a lot simpler than those pages of forms, doesn’t it?

There are clearer signs of the need for some assisted digital support for this service. The IPO plans to provide face-to-face help via its network of walk-in Patent Libraries (there are 13 of them around the UK) as well as phone support via its call centre.

Bulk smash

The vast majority of patent renewals (87% of them – yes, there are two different 87% figures in this post) are handled via a bulk filing system.

Many companies around the world hold hundreds or thousands of patents each, all of which have to be kept up-to-date in different countries where those companies operate. It gets complicated. Most large patent holders outsource the job of maintaining and renewing patents to specialist agencies.

You might expect it to be a largely automated system, but it’s not.

Companies that have enrolled in the scheme are asked to send in bulk data as a .csv file attached to an email. Someone at the IPO then has to manually open each email, check that the submitting company has paid enough money in advance to cover the renewals they’re claiming for, then save the attachment to a different location so that it can be imported into an Oracle database which handles the finance stuff. They get about 30 of these emails every week. This has been going on for 12 years.

As for that Oracle system: it works, but it’s slow by modern standards. Each day’s incoming applications and renewals are stored, then the payments validated overnight, before the user gets a confirmation message saying all is well (or that a problem has cropped up that they need to deal with) within 24 hours of submitting the data.

You can see why they’re keen to change things.

And change things they will, I’m pretty sure of that. There’s talk of building a new, more automated system – something that lets clients upload their data directly, in XML rather than .csv files. Something that starts to bring bulk renewal applications on a par with the fantastic new exemplar service. There are also plans for replacing that legacy system and speeding things up.

Sean Dennehey told me this: “We have a 5-year strategy. In 5 years time, our customers should have more joined up experience across government and other intellectual property organisations.”

Their transformation programme is called TRIPOD, and it’s made up of six inter-related projects, all delivering digital services, all designed for easy re-use elsewhere, and all driven by user needs.

I told you they had a plan.

Corporate identity versus personal identity

How do you prove corporate identity? In the digital era, how can an individual acting for a company prove their identity accurately and securely? Until there’s some sort of secure online registration and business identity verification system in place, IPO will have to continue relying on paper forms, wet signatures and postal delivery.

What they’d like is something that allows all users – individuals, businesses, and agents acting on behalf of businesses – to manage their intellectual property needs and pay fees online. It also has to work internationally. The new patent renewals service alone has been used by customers in 50 different countries since it went public last year.

Many patent users are already using a smartcard system to authenticate with online services provided by the European Patent Office. Last year the IPO ran an alpha to see if it could make use of the same scheme – it was successful, and work has now begun on a follow-up beta. This is a positive move that will help a lot of business and agents, but it doesn’t solve the whole problem. GOV.UK Verify will also be helpful – as more Identity Providers join, the IPO team hope it will plug a big gap in the proposition.

All of this uncovers a deeper need. This is a big, difficult problem to solve, and IPO shouldn’t have to face it alone. Business identity, like personal identity, is a government-wide issue, and it would be best fixed with a government-wide solution. Maybe that’s another thing we could add to the list of platforms government should build.

A network of trust

The IPO is in the same boat that many other government agencies find themselves in. They understand the digital agenda, and they have a fantastic forward-looking team in place, but they’re still at the beginning of the path towards being digital by default. Like those other agencies, this is an organisation that’s chomping at the bit to change, but held back by its dependence on out-dated technologies and processes.

Thankfully, John Alty and his team can see exactly what the challenges are and already have some ideas for fixing them. The new renew a patent service was a brilliant first step on that path, and the designs alpha is an impressive second. They know what needs to be done, and they have a five-year strategy for doing it. They’ve cleverly avoided getting bogged down in learnt helplessness. I’m full of admiration for them.

Being digital isn’t just about the product, it’s also about the team and the APIs and the interconnections between organisations. I said this back in December, in my post about Companies House: government organisations have got to get good at both providing and consuming services, with and between each other. I want to see us building a network of trust around government, so that public sector organisations can buy and supply innovative new services based on data. The IPO is in a unique position and has a unique dataset – if we could open up that data to the public and to the rest of government via APIs, just imagine how useful it could be.

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Footnotes

1 – All figures from IPO

Last week, we held an event: Sprint 15. It marked the culmination of the two-year transformation project that began with Sprint 13, when we made our plan clear: there were 400 days to transform government.

Here we are, 2 years and roughly 400 (working) days later. What have we achieved? Let’s make a list.

We transitioned 350 websites to GOV.UK. A single website on a single domain, meeting thousands of user needs. We trained over 1,200 people to write and publish on GOV.UK.

We revolutionised the IT profession in government. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) has re-shaped how government uses and buys technology. We’ve replaced the old IT governance arrangements, which looked like this:

… replaced them with a simpler governance system that looks like this:

… and established the Technology Leaders Network to oversee it all. We simplified the IT procurement process, and begun giving civil servants better technology that’s at least as good as the devices they have at home. The Cabinet Office Technology Transformation project delivered better IT for over 2,000 civil servants, and sets the standard for further roll-out in other departments.

We put new emphasis on people and digital skills. We redesigned the Digital and Technology Fast Stream that brings talented young people into government. We hired 89 senior people (directors, CTOs, CDOs), and we’ve put 91 more digital specialists in place through the transformation programme. We trained 200 service managers to run digital services in the long term – people who understand service design, users, and user needs.

New digital teams are springing up all over the UK. From the Ministry of Justice in London, DVLA and its connections with TechHub in Swansea, Companies House in Newport, to HMRC’s Digital Delivery Centre in Newcastle and DWP’s Digital Academy in Leeds. These local centres are just the beginning. I foresee many more coming soon.

Our exemplar programme is a great success, with 17 out of 25 projects now live or in public beta phase. The transformed services have already seen 5.8 million user transactions. The work continues, even for services that have gone live – there’s always more user research to be done, more to learn, more to improve.

We worked closely with search engines so that sites reportedly scamming consumers – or claiming to act on behalf of government – were removed from search results. We also ran a short #startatgovuk campaign, directing users of those services to the right place.

We’ve been working with colleagues to ensure that help is in place for those people who lack digital skills and can’t – for any reason – use government digital services independently. The work is divided into three closely related fields – assisted digital, digital inclusion, and digital take-up. We designed the digital inclusion scale to help service design teams measure and compare digital skills. Last December, we published the UK Digital Inclusion Charter and Government Digital Inclusion Strategy. Just a few weeks ago, we hosted the Digital Inclusion Forum event to improve communications with the many partners we’re working with. This work isn’t easy; these are crunchy, hard-to-fix problems. There’s still a long way to go, but I’m proud of what the team has accomplished to date.

The UK has become a world leader in digital government. In December 2014, GDS hosted D5, the first summit for an international network of most digitally advanced governments in the world: the United Kingdom, South Korea, Estonia, Israel and New Zealand. Soon afterwards, the USA announced the creation of the US Digital Service, closely modeled on GDS. Now the Australians have set up their own Digital Transformation Office. The word is spreading.

We’ve started building platforms: GOV.UK is one, and the Performance Platform is another. It opens up government service data like never before. It’s an essential tool for service managers (who love the full-screen views –  here’s one for Carer’s allowance) and a source of useful data for everyone else. Government shouldn’t guess, or act on hunches. It should act on data. The Performance Platform captures, collates and presents that data more clearly than ever before.

The Digital Marketplace is also a platform. It’s there to help the people transforming public services buy what they need, from a greater variety of suppliers both large and small. The G-Cloud 6 framework just went live on it last week, bringing the total number of suppliers to 1,852 – and 87% of them are SMEs. Between them, 19,966 services are on offer to the public sector. If you want to see the effect the Marketplace is having, just take a look at the sales data graphs, which are climbing ever upwards.

There’s nothing like GOV.UK Verify anywhere else in the world. Yet. It’s a new way to prove who you are online. Verify has been one of our toughest challenges. It’s taken two years of very hard work (and a great deal of user research), but it’s really exciting to see it slowly emerge into the public eye. HMRC’s Mark Dearnley gave a great example of Verify in action during his presentation at Sprint 15: this year a massive 11,000 people filed their self-assessment returns using GOV.UK Verify. That got a well-deserved round of applause.

What’s next

We have built some great services, we’ve started building great platforms – our new goal is government as a platform. Common services should be built, designed and shared in common, right across the public sector. No single department should have to solve problems that are applicable to many, or to all.

Our plan is to explore platforms further. We have a list of about 30 things we think could become platforms. Early in the next Parliament, we’d like to develop prototypes for three of them. We’ll share more detail about that in the near future.

Always learning

We’ve learnt such a lot in the last 2 years. We know that focusing on user needs works. We know that we can work in an agile way, even in government. It’s been hard work, by more people than I can name. Thank you, all of you, for your enthusiasm and your determination. Your work is world-renowned, and rightly so.

It’s important to understand that the “we” I’m talking about throughout this post isn’t just GDS. It isn’t just Cabinet Office, of which GDS is one small part. It’s all of us, everyone working in government. Change is happening faster in some places than in others, but it is happening: I see it on the walls and the desks everywhere I go in Whitehall and beyond. It’s visible and tangible. We’re changing how we do our work and how we think about the people we’re here for: the users.

This video says it all. “Users first” isn’t just a throwaway catchphrase: it’s the core around which all this change has begun. Users are why we’re here.

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Transcript:

I thought that was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Anybody worrying about it and thinking, “What happens if your parent, or your partner, or whoever it is dies, what are we going to do?” if I can do it, anybody can do it. It’s easy.

One of the greatest irritations for businessmen is going in and out of countries where they’re not a passport holder. I think this has made it much easier for people to come into the UK, and I think it’s going to be a good boost for the UK business overall.

People don’t mind taking their laptops home. It’s just generally a lot easier to work. I absolutely wish this had been done a long time ago.

He’s like, “You don’t know much it means to be” even that day when we’re going to visit, he’ll be ringing like, “Are you coming, are you coming?” and I’m like, “Yes yes we’re coming”, and he’ll be like, “I can’t wait to see him” and all that stuff and it’s nice to know that I’m making someone’s day. It’s nice to know that he’s happy, he can’t wait to see us. I feel loved.

Definitely issues that affect young people are important to me in terms of politics. It was just, kind of: go on, very straightforward, get your National Insurance number card thing and, then, done. Sorted. I think it’s just, like, knowing that your voice is being heard. I think that’s the best part.

User research is a large part of what we do here at GDS, but we aren’t the only ones hard at work carrying out user testing, as this guest post from Katy Arnold, Head of User Research and Design at the Home Office, explains:

Here in the Visas exemplar, we’ve been working hard to understand our users. This has involved lots of user testing, including:

• remote testing with people overseas
• visits to language schools in the UK
• meeting high volume users, like legal representatives who fill out forms on behalf of their clients
• usability testing in the same day service centre.

But one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to visa applications. We were due to release a Visit Visa for Chinese tourists in June 2014. We currently receive about 300,000 Visit Visa applications from China, mostly through our centres in Beijing and Shanghai. In total we have 12 Visa Application Centres (VACs) across the country; they process work and study visas as well as the more popular tourist ones. Unfortunately, we hadn’t had much luck finding users through our usual channels. So, we decided that if we were really going to get to know our users in China, we were going to have to go and see them.

Planning and preparation – lots of it

I can’t overemphasise the amount of planning involved before we went on the research trip to China. We were about to embark on 7 days of research over 9 days in a completely new environment. With people we’d never worked with before. Jet-lagged. In Chinese. As a comparison, the GDS standard is 1-2 days of research every 10 days. We really needed to know what was coming, but we also needed the flexibility to be able to react to what we learnt while there.

At home, we spoke to researchers across government who had experience of working in China. We also contacted research professionals who operate in China – such as at Dalian University – and carefully worked out a strategy that prioritised what mattered most.

We designed a methodology which would allow us to speak to as many ordinary Chinese users as possible during our short trip. Nearly 70% of visa applications are received through the Beijing and Shanghai visa application centres (VACs); many users travel from the surrounding countryside to these huge Tier 1 cities to make their application. To avoid wasting time on travel, given China’s enormous size, we decided to target Beijing.  We made a point of communicating with users in Chinese. This meant recruiting experienced interpreters for usability testing. We also enlisted local embassy staff to help out.

Finally, we took advice from our departmental security units about and how we might gather and store insights while we were in China.

Day-by-day planning – with flexibility

We drew up a day-by-day plan. Early on in the trip we had clearly defined activities planned, with more flexible plans for the last few days of the trip, so we could respond to what we’d found on the scene. In preparation for the first day in the usability lab, we wrote scripts and shared them with the Chinese moderators and interpreters. We also agreed on how we would approach our first day of research in China with caseworkers (known overseas as Entry Clearance Officers or ECOs) and arranged for many of them to come along to observe our days in the lab.

What we did when we were there

We learnt so much in the time we were there. It’s impossible to cover everything in this post, but here are some of the highlights:

Inviting local staff to the lab days was a brilliant way of getting more out of the day. Having them on site meant we could involve them in debriefs between sessions. We could also immediately sense-check any assumptions we might have made about solutions. It also helped them to understand what we do.

Usability testing gave us solid evidence that some key elements in the design needed to change. We’d had our doubts about some aspects of the form and the way we were asking for some of the information, but what we saw over there was comprehensive. As a result we are about to release a significant change to the user interface – especially the review and summary parts.

Being in China in person let us recruit users who hadn’t been in contact with UK Immigration before, and let us observe them go through the Visit Visa application service in a natural way. Compared to what we’d seen remotely, user behaviour was much more representative of how they might behave with our service for real.  Making sure we did the research in Chinese was a big part of this. We had a native Chinese speaking moderator, users typed into the form using pinyin and most checked dictionaries on their phones, or used Baidu Translate to give their answers in English.

Focussing on a site where high volumes of users came into contact with our service was a great way of gathering lots of insight from real users, very quickly. We spoke to 61 people. They were applying to visit the UK either as tourists, to visit family here, or to do business for a short time.

We used one page paper interview sheets which were portable, didn’t arouse suspicion – in either the participants or the security staff – and allowed us to go wildly off script if that was needed. We down noted down everything participants told us - verbatim – but still within the same broad areas. This gave us a brilliant data set, which we could use to build truly representative personas of the people who most often use our service.

Spending time with local staff in the visa section of the embassy was invaluable. It gave us our most significant finding of the trip. Seeing the problems our colleagues face daily during the busy summer season helped us understand just how important it is that we deal with the lack of clarity around what users should send in with their application. Despite being highly organised, the team in the embassy offices in Beijing are quite literally, being weighed down by paper supporting documents – originals and copies – endless piles and piles of them.

Third party users have a lot to teach us. We found out that the biggest local travel agents send send all their clients a list of documents which they think should be submitted with applications. It’s likely that lots of smaller agents get copies of this list and pass it off as their own – which feeds the vacuum we’ve created. Supporting documents are also their biggest cost.

 What we did when we got back

Booking time with our service manager when we got back was a really good idea. It meant we were able to offload the important parts of what we learnt while it was still fresh. We included other relevant stakeholders, such as the customer insight team, policy and programmes working to reduce our reliance on paper. We are now all working together with the team in Beijing, to find a way to make the overall experience better for people applying from China.

Finally, something to say about the dignity, humanity and generosity of the people we met while we were there. Those who helped us run the research, who spared their time to take part, who showed us round the embassy and who shared ideas for how we can make things better. Thanks to all the staff at the embassy, to Xuejuan Yuan (Emma) our interpreter, and Haiyan, our moderator who were highly professional and flexible throughout. Also thanks to UK Visas and Immigration, for recognising that you can’t run a business with this impact without knowing who your customers are, what they need, and what makes them tick.

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Transcript:

Apply for a UK tourist visa from China – user research case study

Home Office user researcher Katy Arnold talks about her team’s recent visit to China to understand at first hand the experience of Chinese holiday visa applicants to the UK https://www.gov.uk/apply-uk-visa

Katy Arnold, User Researcher, Home Office:

The visa exemplar is a project to develop a new way to apply to come to the UK from China. This year they are on track to do between 300,000 and 500,000 applications.

We have feedback from our customer insight teams that people in China think applying for a visa is very difficult. We were really keen to start to understand why Chinese users supply enormous numbers of documents as evidence. When we walked around the embassy offices they’re literally drowning in paper.

We went to see the travel agents. Every time they take on a new client, they send them a list of documents. They have no incentive to limit that list. The difference is for users who want certainty around what documents to supply and how to negotiate the process of applying for an application, we’re not providing it, but travel agents are, but it’s just a very long list. They do at least say to their clients, “Send these in and you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting a visa.”

That was what was fascinating to us as well, to see a very clear reason for people using third parties to go through this process. The other big reason that they use them is that they don’t speak English. The difference with the beta service is it translates the entire service, users really appreciated that.

We actually have some very clear pointers from our trip that tell us which documents are being used in the decision-making process, so our recommendation will be to limit the list of documents to those and be very clear to Chinese users that they don’t need to send us the rest of them.

www.gov.uk/apply-uk-visa

The Home Office’s Registered Traveller Service is out of beta and fully live. After using this new quick and easy service, frequent visitors from the US, Japan, New Zealand, Canada and Australia are able to enter the UK more quickly and easily. Here’s a short film we’ve made about it.

In a nutshell, the service lets users apply to become a Registered Traveller. It takes about 5 minutes. Once registered, users:

• don’t have to fill in landing cards
• may use faster European Economic Area (EEA) border queues
• may use ePassport gates at participating UK international ports if they have a biometric passport

Making life easier for business travellers helps to keep the UK competitive. And by allowing travellers that have undergone detailed advance checks to use ePassport gates, Border Force airport staff are able to devote more time to other priorities.

The Registered Traveller Service is currently for travellers from Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States of America.

If you’re interested in the development of the service, here’s a blog post by Mike Bracken on how the development team was able to reuse code from another Home Office project, Visit Visa: How sharing helps us improve digital services.

Join the conversation on Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

As well as this blog, GDS has 14 other blogs about particular specialisms or programmes of work. Here are some stand-out posts from recent weeks.

1. The basic elements of a successful recruitment strategy by ZeShaan Shamsi on the blog Digital people.

Using an old job description or an out-of-date person specification will not save time; rushing into things will only lead to poor decisions. Taking the time at the beginning of the process to plan properly will save you a lot more time later on.

2. The next 6 months: services that plan to start using GOV.UK Verify by Jess McEvoy on the blog Identity Assurance and GOV.UK Verify.

We posted in January listing some of the services we were expecting to start using GOV.UK Verify before March 2015. This post provides an update on our plans.

GOV.UK Verify is a new way for people to prove who they are when they use government services online.

3. GOV.UK’s firebreak: why and how we spent a month working differently by Neil Williams on the blog Inside GOV.UK.

Throughout January 2015, we gave people in our product and infrastructure teams the freedom to work on anything they liked so long as it was good for GOV.UK.

4. Following on from that: Running a game day for GOV.UK by Kushal Pisavadia on the blog Technology at GDS.

The reality is that we can’t prevent the unexpected. However, there are some ways that we can prepare ourselves for it. We shouldn’t treat these unexpected events as outside the bounds of what we’re able to test. Instead, we should try to use them as a way to provide more feedback and help us become more resilient.

5. Why white is not a lab’s best friend by Kate Towsey on the blog User research.

When we built our user research lab, we avoided putting white work surfaces in the research space as much as possible. This is because white surfaces glare. White is at its worst when it has direct light shining on it. In relative shade, it’s only marginally better.

Don’t forget you can keep up to speed with government blogs on the GOV.UK blogs page, where you can search for things you’re interested in or filter by government organisation.

There are now 74 government blogs covering all sorts of topics. The Intellectual Property Office has a blog about the TV programme Dragon’s Den with their take on the intellectual property issues it raises.

That’s it for now. We’ll catch up again in a few months.

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From training hundreds of content designers across government and agencies, I’ve had a glimpse into what people find difficult about content.

It seems it’s not necessarily that words and sentences are hard to write, it’s more the idea of ownership of content that people can find hard.

The layers of emotion and history in there should not be underestimated.

We’ve talked in training sessions about how we can be reluctant to change content. Maybe because your boss wrote it. Maybe it was done a long time ago and you’re not sure about that process. You might feel awkward about changing something a colleague wrote. You may feel your writing isn’t that ‘good’.

It’s these perceptions that weigh us down

Remember when you were new in your job? You might have read some of the content on the website in preparation for your interview. You were excited, of course, and also a little bit nervous. You might have come from a different industry. Perhaps you’d had a bit of a break from work. What you learned in those first few weeks set the scene for you, it gave you context.

When you look back at that website and talk about re-doing that content, you’re writing over something that feels important.

Rewriting for the sake of it

Rewriting a 300-page PDF might not be everyone’s idea of a great week at work. It’s not just the sheer amount of words, it’s also the structure. How else could it be explained? It’s perfectly logical to say it in the order you do the process in, isn’t it?

Once you’ve read through it, it’s very difficult to imagine it in any other way. Rewriting it feels pointless. Dusting the edge of an overloaded table. You won’t have really done anything.

There is the idea that this content has been written and approved already. Why should we have to go through all that again? It was hard enough the first time.

Where to start

We know more about our users now than we ever have done before. This can help us make life easier for them.

An exercise we do in training looks at how to structure content starting with the need. Write it out on a post-it note or card and put it on the table. Next, write out all the different acceptance criteria (the checklist of what the content needs to include) on separate post-it notes or cards and put those on the table too. Arrange the acceptance criteria in the order you’ll answer them in the content.

Once you’ve arranged them, take a quick break and go back to it.

Don’t miss this step out. It’s easier to rejig a few cards on a table than it is to rewrite that 300-page document, so give yourself enough time to get it right. You might also want to get some input from colleagues to make sure you’re answering the actual user need, not your version of it.

This card exercise will help you take the emotion out of the content. Seeing it on the table makes it feel easier to deal with. You’ll be able to get some perspective.

Action at the top, background at the bottom

Once you’ve agreed your structure – think action first, background later – move on to thinking about the actual content. It’s much easier to add information in – don’t start with your existing stuff and try to take some out.

Every time you add, look up to the user need and ask yourself: “does this help the user do their task?”

Think about how often a user will come to the content. Have they done the process before? What evidence do you have about them that will help you at this stage?

Things we don’t talk about when we talk about content mostly involve emotions. Sentimental and fearful ones, maybe the odd angry one. Being a good writer doesn’t come from being a robot, we do need those emotions to help keep our users in mind.

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We’re proud of GOV.UK, and how much we’ve achieved in such a short time. But an unintended consequence of that pride might be that we sometimes give the impression we think GOV.UK is perfect.

The opposite is true. While GOV.UK has already made things better for lots of users, our ambition remains sky high. Far from patting ourselves on the back for a job well done we’re actively seeking out ways in which to improve what we’ve made, and to build on the foundations of the single domain.

This isn’t the first time we’ve said so, but it’s worth repeating again. We know we need to keep making GOV.UK better. We care about all of its users. We keep listening to what they tell us about the ways in which we’re not meeting all their needs. And every day, we work to improve it.

We know we need to keep making it better

Just 4 years ago, there were 14 people in a room, pondering how to create a single platform for government publishing. As of the end of December, we’ve moved more than 300 organisations’ services and information to GOV.UK, scaling our operations rapidly as we went.

It was ambitious to make so big a change so fast, but moving at speed was the only way to do it – to minimise confusion for users and create the momentum to bring government organisations with us. We did a lot to understand users’ needs and join services and information up as we moved it all to GOV.UK, but doing so properly only really becomes possible now we have everything in one place. That is one reason why we have always said GOV.UK isn’t finished, and never will be.

Pop into our office in Holborn right now and you’ll see a team of people obsessed with making GOV.UK better, you’ll see whiteboards plastered with information about known problems we are trying to solve, and a wall full of improvement plans which describe the vision for GOV.UK as a whole.

I lead the product management team for GOV.UK, and problems are the currency of our job. Mine and my fellow product managers’ focus is on discovering users’ problems with GOV.UK, understanding them as well as we can through research and data, prioritising which problems to fix first and combining the talents of researchers, analysts, designers, content designers and developers to build and test solutions.

We have some really hard problems to solve, and we don’t pretend to have all the answers. So we put changes out there, observe how they’re used and iterate again.

On our Inside GOV.UK blog, we regularly publish a roadmap sharing the prioritised list of improvement work and our longer-term goals, and we blog fortnightly about progress – here’s a recent post. We invite comment from anyone who wants to influence what we prioritise next.

We care about all of its users

A misconception we sometimes hear is that GOV.UK is just for citizens and small businesses, and that the specialist needs of more frequent users are less important. That’s not right.

One of our design principles is ‘be consistent, not uniform’ and we remain true to that. While we are unapologetically unifying and simplifying the experience of interacting with government, it’s not a “one size fits all” approach.

We’ve invested heavily in the past 9 months in meeting the needs of professional users, as content from 300+ organisations transferred to GOV.UK. We’ve built nearly 280 specialist topic groupings and several bespoke filtered search interfaces, all with email notifications to help professional users stay informed; we’ve created new formats including one for HMRC’s tax manuals; and introduced directories of services and information on organisation pages like this one for the Environment Agency. And we put in place redirections for more than 1.8 million legacy URLs to the relevant page on GOV.UK or an archived copy.

There’s loads of room for improvement, of course, and we’ll continue to invest in meeting the needs of frequent users better.

For instance, right now we’re working hard on improvements to search and navigation. The long tail of government information is long, and it will take time to overhaul and re-categorise all of it – but that’s our ambition.

And we care just as much about users of policy and transparency content – people with a need to know what successive governments are doing and to hold them and the civil service to account. So we’re working on improvements to the policy format and ensuring we can preserve the public record in the handover from one government to the next.

Publishers around government are our users too, and we’re continually making improvements to the tools and workflow to help them create and manage content better to meet all end users’ needs.

We are listening to what users tell us

We pay close attention to everything that’s written about GOV.UK online, but the most constructive feedback we get comes to us directly.

In fact, we actively solicit it via the “Is there anything wrong with this page?” links on most pages of GOV.UK. With this functionality, users can anonymously tell us what’s wrong with the site as they interact with it. If they want a reply, users can also send questions using our contact page.

When you look at our feedback numbers, the story of transitioning 300+ organisations’ content and users to GOV.UK is remarkably positive. We receive about 400-500 pieces of anonymous feedback and 300-350 named enquiries from our users each day. These numbers are incredibly low relative to the 2.7 million visits we receive per day.

Low as this rate of contact is, it’s a rich source of useful feedback. It comes in to a dedicated team who either answer it directly, or route it to the right people in GOV.UK or departments and agencies who can help. Feedback relating to content and functionality gets reviewed and reflected in our improvement plans.

And this feedback is just one form of data we use. We also go out and proactively recruit people to conduct research with, and we study the analytics and search logs to see how the site is used. Combined, these sources of information tell us what’s most important to improve, and how.

A major theme for the coming year is to do more to expose feedback and performance metrics to help us see how well or poorly our content is meeting users’ needs. We’ve made a good start – if you put /info/ before the end of almost any URL on GOV.UK you’ll see data about how the page is performing. We plan to do a lot more in this area this year, and you can keep an eye on our blog if you want the details.

And every day, we work to improve it

GOV.UK’s best feature is nothing we’ve built so far. It’s our commitment to continuous improvement.

We release dozens of incremental improvements every day, and talk about our work openly.

GOV.UK is not finished now, and it will never be – it’s a continual work in progress which will adapt and improve all the time to better serve the needs of all its users.

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You can now make a claim to an employment tribunal online. This is a last resort for people who feel they’ve been wronged by an employer. The digital service now provides  a much simpler alternative to making a paper claim.

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

As you can see, we’ve made the process shorter, from 29 pages down to 12. We’ve simplified a lot of the language. And we’ve made it possible to save a claim to complete later.

This is one of the latest services in the government’s Transformation Programme to pass the live Digital by Default Service Standard assessment. It’s also a vital one. The service can be a last resort for people seeking justice, and they can often be worried or distressed. So it’s really important that the claim is as clear and easy to use as possible.

Here’s the link to the service again: Make a claim to an employment tribunal.

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The government’s new online Visa application service has passed its Digital by Default Service Standard assessment and is ready to go live. In public beta since June last year, the service makes it easier for people in China to apply for a Visa to visit the UK for a limited time.

Here’s a short film we’ve made about the service:

This service is a great example of our fourth design principle: do the hard work to make it simple.

The team at Home Office has done the hard work; user research, translating the application form into simplified Chinese, and improving the service every week based on comments received. Customers are finding the service simple to use, and providing positive feedback.

This improved service should help boost the UK economy by encouraging tourists from China to come here instead of going somewhere else.

The good work being done by this team is part of a wider initiative to provide the technology and information to support the immigration service now and in the future.

Here’s the service link: Apply for a UK visa – mainland China only

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Transcript:

LIVE
Visas: a simpler way to apply for a Visa to visit the UK

Sam Worby Policy Lead, Visas Service, Home Office
The visa service lets you apply for visit visas, overseas, in China, and it’s a new service that’s much easier for applicants than the ones we’ve had before.

Rob Hettrick, Technical Architect, Visas Service, Home Office
The new service is better than the old digital service because it allows people to complete their form more speedily, more accurately. It asks them less questions.

Milan Bogunovic, Service Manager, Visas Service, Home Office
Why is this better? It’s because it is shorter, it takes less time to fill it out, you don’t have to create an account at the beginning, but you can also return to your application when you want.

Nell Mathams, User Researcher, Visas Service, Home Office
For people in China who speak moderate English or no English at all, we’ve produced a lot of help and guidance along the way and we’ve translated each question.

Rob Hettrick
Right at the end of the journey, there’s a declaration section, and that declaration section was a bit of standard text. It was about 700 words, and it’s now been rationalised down to about 70.

The typical transaction time we’ve got for the user is around 20 minutes.

Milan Bogunovic
One of the applicants said, “This is far better to use than Visa4UK. They took me two and a half days to do it there, only took me 30 minutes to do it on the application service.”

China is a massive growth area for the UK. By having a simple way for people who have applied for visas, more tourists will come to the UK and, ultimately, it benefits the UK PLC as a whole.

Paul Leinster, Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, talks about their experience of moving to GOV.UK a year on.

Life continues to change at the Environment Agency since we moved to GOV.UK in April 2014. We have moved from 3 tiers to a national/local organisation as a result of major organisational change.

We have a wide range of customers with diverse needs.  These range from anglers who buy licences to those who operate nuclear power stations. We provide a flood warning information service to the public which helps keep people safe.

Doing the right thing

We want to make it easier for all our customers to do the right thing whether this is buying a rod licence or registering as a waste carrier. By reducing unnecessary complexity and improving our services, we are helping business to operate responsibly.

Online waste carrier service

Our online waste carrier service is one of GDS’s exemplar services. It quickly registers customers online. This helps us target our efforts on those that do not operate within the law and it reduces the administrative burden on industry. There have been over 37,000 registrations, a 95% digital uptake and a customer satisfaction rating of over 90%.

Simplifying our content

Reducing complexity and meeting our customers’ needs was a fundamental part of our move to GOV.UK. Our digital journey was not always easy. Ours was one of the largest and most complex transitions across government. To simplify the content for users, we moved, reviewed, republished and archived a total of 25,000 html pages and over 10,000 documents.

But we completed the move on time and I am proud of the team who guided this through – they have recently been highly commended for a project excellence award because of the standard of project management they adopted. While there have been some pointed comments made about the loss of some of our web based content, the number of complaints about the website has reduced since joining GOV.UK.

Reforming our guidance

We have learnt a lot from moving our content to GOV.UK and we are still learning. As part of Defra’s Smarter Environmental Regulation Review we have been reforming our guidance to reduce duplication and make sure it meets user needs. So far we have almost halved our external guidance. We used to write what we thought customers needed to know. Now we write concise information based on user needs, so that people can understand quickly what they need to do and spend less time reading complex guidance from a number of different sources.

What next

As GDS says, GOV.UK is not finished. We know that some of our customers mourn the loss of access to some technical information which they found helpful.  We are exploring how we bridge this gap by, for example, publishing best practice guidance on partner websites.

We are continuing to use feedback from customers and analysis of web traffic to make improvements to the way our content is organised. By working closely with GDS, we will improve our customers’ experiences and support business and growth by making it even easier to understand and comply with the law and as a consequence keep on creating a better place for people and wildlife.

The Environment Agency home page on GOV.UK is at www.gov.uk/environment-agency, where you’ll find links to our guidance, research, news and contact details.

The Find an Apprenticeship service has passed its live Digital by Default Service Standard Assessment. This simple to use service helps people search and apply for apprenticeships and traineeships, and will go live in May 2015.

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

This is one of the latest services in the government’s Transformation Programme to pass the live Digital by Default Service Standard assessment. The service is currently focused on meeting the needs of users looking for an apprenticeship or traineeship, and those who support them like teachers and careers advisors, but will next move onto redesigning the way that employers and training providers advertise apprenticeships and traineeships.

So far in the public beta, we’re supporting over 85,000 candidates and have already processed around 210,000 applications. When live, we anticipate handling 1.8 million applications a year from around 600,000 users.

Here’s the link to the service again: Find an Apprenticeship.

Join the conversation on Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

Transcript

Live
Find an Apprenticeship

Angela Scale, Product Manager, Find an apprenticeship
The service is called, ‘Find an Apprenticeship’ and it allows candidates in England to be able to search and apply for an apprenticeship or traineeship.

It’s aimed at users of all age. Those who, actually, are interested in wanting to apply and search; those who actually have aspirations to become an apprentice, or want to find out more information.

Before the service existed, we had our legacy system, which is called ‘Apprenticeship Vacancies’. Before, they carried out a similar process of being able to search and apply, but the journey was a lot more clunky, not joined-up and wasn’t very easy to use.

Gary Tucker, Service Manager, Find an apprenticeship
So the new service is simpler, it’s a lot faster, it works on mobile and, again, the old legacy system didn’t work very well on mobile, and 40% of our traffic now use mobile so it’s a key channel that people use to apply for an apprenticeship.

They can search through a keyword, whether it’s a company, whether it’s engineering, or child care. They just put in their postcode and it will tell them where the apprenticeships are in their area.

Sitting down with young people and watching the user testing, you can see how much it can change people’s lives. These are people who are desperate to get jobs, and if I can get people into an apprenticeship, through a very simple online service, then that makes my job worthwhile.

www.gov.uk/findapprenticeship

Yesterday we hosted our first GOV.UK Conference; a chance for all departments and agencies that now provide their information and services on GOV.UK to catch up, share ideas, and work together on our future plans.

It’s nearly two and a half years since GOV.UK went live but for many agencies the transition was only completed at the end of 2014.  Yesterday was an opportunity to look at what’s happened so far and talk about what comes next.

What we got up to

The day started with a reminder of the very beginning of GOV.UK from Tom Loosemore, followed by members of the GDS team, and colleagues from across government sharing their own stories from the past few years.

Our thanks to all of them, and to everyone who attended making it such an interesting and entertaining event.

Here are a few photos and highlights:

Agenda, speakers and themes:

Opening remarks and a reminder of how it all began

• Tom Loosemore, Deputy Director of Digital Strategy, GDS

What we have achieved with GOV.UK

• Lindsey Keighley, Programme Delivery Manager, GOV.UK, GDS

How GOV.UK handles big news stories and events

• Anthony Simon, Head of Digital Communication, 10 Downing Street and Cabinet Office

The story of HMRC’s transition to GOV.UK

• Lesley Twitchen, Design Lead at HMRC Digital Services

Standards and style

• Lorena Sutherland, Content Lead at the Office of the Public Guardian

Working with colleagues in your department or agency

• Stephen Hale, Head of Digital at Department of Health

After lunch

Introduction to a group exercise on how GDS can support teams in departments and agencies and feedback on priorities for the year ahead.

• Neil Williams: Product Lead, GOV.UK, GDS

Final session is on:

Looking at the future for GOV.UK; goals for this year and beyond

James Thornett, Director GOV.UK, GDS

There are more photos on the GDS Flickr photostream, and plenty of tweets to explore under the #ourgovuk hashtag.

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The Digital Self-Assessment service has passed its live Digital by Default Service Standard Assessment. You can now access this via your tax dashboard online. It will make self-assessment fully digital for about 10 million people.

The following short film from some of the team looks at how it will work:

This is just one of the services to recently pass the live Digital by Default Service Standard assessment from the government’s Transformation Programme. This exemplar service has been public beta since June 2014 and we have over 1.24 million customers who have opted in for paperless correspondence. So far, we have stopped over 430,000 pieces of post.

You can find the Digital Self-Assessment service here.

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Transcript

Digital Self Assessment

It’s easy for everyone to get wrapped up in the new, shiny services that the transformation programme has brought. Don’t get me wrong: I think we need to celebrate them, because they’re great. The Carer’s Allowance exemplar cut out 170 unnecessary questions, half of the previous total. The Employment Tribunals exemplar took a 29 page application and made it into a slick 12-step online service.

Simpler, clearer, faster.

Nobody said it would be easy. But it’s really the people who make transformation of government happen. This thought keeps coming back to me as I’ve been travelling around the country visiting the different exemplars, and it struck me again when I visited the team making the Redundancy payments exemplar at the Insolvency Service in Birmingham a while ago.

Re-skilling government for the digital age

The Redundancy payments exemplar is in two parts. The first part of it is called RP1, which is where people who have lost their jobs will apply for Redundancy payments. The second part of the service, RP2, is for matching people’s records with the ones that their previous employers have.

Parts of the Redundancy payments exemplar passed its Service Assessment in December 2014, which puts RP2 (the second part of the service) in public beta. The first part of the service, RP1, passed its service assessment by the end of February 2015. An impressive achievement, especially as service manager Giles Ecart and transformation manager Jane Fallon told me it was the first time many of the members of the team, including product manager Elizabeth Bird, had worked in an agile way and actually built a service from the beginning.

One of the real challenges we’ve been working on with the transformation of digital government is in bringing digital skills into government. This doesn’t just mean hiring talented and skilled people – it also means encouraging them to work in an agile way. And it means having people work on projects that are more complex than others they’ve done before, with support from GDS if they need it.

What the service does

Being made redundant is hard for everyone. But it’s especially tough for people who have lost their jobs because their employers have gone bust. Dealing with a liquidation is more often than not a long, drawn out process. If you’re a former employee, you form part of the queue to get paid, alongside all the other creditors.

But what if you need to get paid quickly? The Redundancy payments service gives former employees a way to access their payments as soon as possible.  As soon as you know you’ve lost your job, you can apply for redundancy payment, as well as any other payments you might be owed. People who have been made redundant can also get compensation for not having received notice that they were going to be made redundant.

That means that part of what the Redundancy payments service does is process claims from employees for something called statutory redundancy pay, which is paid from the National Insurance Fund, but it’s a complicated process. (Employees can also calculate how much redundancy payment they are entitled to using a tool on GOV.UK.) About 100,000 people each year apply for redundancy payments.

Making things better for users

Before we started the exemplar, applying for redundancy payments was an offline process, involving long forms full of complicated language. Some were up to 14 pages long. They then needed to be optically read, which costs more and adds more opportunity for error. It was also unnecessarily draining work for the people dealing with the forms.

We design to meet user needs, not government needs. That’s why we’ve done lots of user research about how people apply for redundancy payments. It’s a highly emotional situation for a lot of our users. Think about it: the company they work for has gone bust, they find themselves without a job through no fault of their own, and they want the money they have a right to. The least we can do is make sure the service works for them, and luckily about 80% of users have relatively straightforward needs from the service.

The team had to quickly build a picture of those users needs.  The Redundancy payments service had relatively little contact with users until they submitted their paper form.  Now they were designing a digital service people would start using the minute they are told they have lost their job.

Jane Fallon, the GDS Transformation Manager said:

What struck me most with this team is how quickly they got to grips with the rigour of two weekly cycles of user research, and crucially taking on board that feedback.  Sometimes just really basic stuff.

Jude Rattle, a GDS user researcher who has been leading user research on the Redundancy payment exemplar said:

We realised that a lot of users, especially those who aren’t very confident using the internet, feel more comfortable using the service if they’re told up front what documents they need to supply through the application.

The team of developers quickly learnt not just how to built a digital service, but how to design a secure service.  Andy Price, a developer, explained how the service would be using GOV.UK Verify, so only real applicants can make claims.

Similarly, he mentioned that we know that some people will be using libraries and other shared computers to file their applications for redundancy payments, so keeping it as secure as possible is really important. Also, about 40% of these users are filling out the forms on their phones, so the design needs to work well on a small screen.

The team have also worked closely with the liquidators (also called insolvency practitioners). They’re the people who go in when an employer goes bust. They are usually left to tell employees that they’ve lost their jobs. That makes them the people who will be telling people about the service.

Many insolvency practitioners provide a lot of support to users, even going so far as helping users complete their applications. They’ve been a fantastic source of insights and feedback for the team working on the exemplar. Working with one or two, the team at Redundancy payments were able to put the service out in a private ‘smaller’ beta.  That’s one of the things I mean when I say that it’s people who make transformation happen. Real users, in real situations, driving iterations in design, to make things better.

Insolvency practitioners also use the service themselves, providing a lot of the additional information needed to validate a claim.  Even though the team have started off by focusing on the aspects of the service that employees use, they’re working on improving the part aimed at insolvency practitioners too. It’s a tricky job, with a lot of complicated legislation, but I’m excited to see what they do with it.

What the users say

Feedback from the users has been really positive so far. Here’s what some of them have said:

For me, it’s a no brainer, brilliant to do online rather than on paper.

When there’s money involved it’s quicker to do it online.

You get an acknowledgement straight away but with post you wouldn’t have.

Or, my favourite one:

Can’t remember too much about it, which is a good thing. Painless process.

That’s what we’re here to make.

People rarely choose to interact with government. In most cases, particularly regarding redundancy, it’s something they have to do, and at a difficult time in their lives. The least we can do is make sure that it’s easy to use. Sometimes the laws and processes involved are really complicated. As I said, we always knew it wouldn’t be easy. But having the right people on the ground, bringing digital skills back into government and by listening to our users, we can begin to change things. The exemplar programme is the beginning of transforming government – and it’s people who make that change.

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Walking around the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) in Birmingham, it struck me that this is digital transformation done right. There’s an alchemy that makes great teams better than the sum of their parts. When you talk to the digital team at OPG, you can see that dynamic at work.

Before the exemplar programme kicked off in 2013, the OPG had no online presence. They’ve not only delivered a great exemplar, the Lasting Power of Attorney digital service, but also put digital at the heart of what the agency does. As service manager Kit Collingwood-Richardson says: “We’re not just the digital people sitting in the corner; comms, digital and tech sit in the same place as the strategy team.”

Indeed. That’s the best part of digital by default.

Working in co-located, multi-disciplinary, agile teams like that is part of what helps an agency reap the benefits of digital transformation. Beyond that, though, there are a couple of other important lessons that I’ve seen around the country during my visits to the exemplars that OPG have done very well.

What they’ve built

There’s a long list of what the team at OPG have built. The Lasting Power of Attorney exemplar is live, and being continuously updated.

They’re replacing their existing case management system with an internal digital service based on open standards and open source technology. This will give their staff the same great user experience they give their external users.

They’re launching an alpha of a second digital service, for the deputies they supervise, and they’re planning a third external service in summer 2015. No surprise that their GDS transformation lead Mark O’Neill looks so relaxed; they’re well on their way to not needing his expertise anymore.

Being an informed customer

One of the things I often hear about working in an agile way in government is that you risk costs running away with you. The first argument against this is that you run the risk of big costs and failures with waterfall projects too – you just find out about those failures when it’s too late to fix them.

Simon Manby, product owner, showed me a case management system that OPG digital have built in-house. Doing things this way means getting away from proprietary software and licence costs, bringing great skills into government, and writing code that we in the rest of government can use to solve similar problems. At the same time they’ve reduced the running costs of their business by working with SMEs, taking control of their own software, hosting in the cloud and enabling continuous deployment.

But agile governance is also about knowing how to fail fast, rather than sticking to a supplier or idea that doesn’t work. We still have to deliver services to users, but we can make sure that we don’t fall in love with past ideas or projects. This depends on government being a better, more intelligent commissioner of digital skills and services from outside.

For example, few things are more heartening than hearing a service manager say: “If someone tells me that this service should cost tens of millions to build, tell them they’re wrong – we can do it ourselves at a fraction of the cost.” That sort of know-how is invaluable. We can’t build everything in-house, but we owe it to ourselves and the taxpayers to fail fast, fail small, and to know what we’re buying.

Visionary leadership

You can’t build great things without a great team, but great teams deserve visionary leadership – people that believe in them and help clear the way so they can get on with their jobs, rather than get in their way.

You have a couple of great examples of that at OPG. First, you have the Public Guardian himself, Alan Eccles, who early on saw the potential of digital and who has smoothed the way for the digital transformation of OPG and been a real champion of agile ways of working.

Then there’s Kit Collingwood-Richardson, who has built a team of immensely dedicated people. That comes from having a clear vision of what they’re doing and how, and working with and for someone who shares that with her team. Recruiting digital talent is a challenge that everyone faces, but it was heartening to see that Kit and her team have brought in people who have backgrounds working in operations, like Kaz Hufton, who used to work in OPG’s contact centre, came in for some user research, impressed the team by finding a bug in what they’d built, and who in the last few years has become the product owner of LPA. In OPG, the product development people and the people in charge of running the services work together. By committing to give internal staff the best possible user experience, Kit’s team is showing that digital is not just an external channel. That’s what running a digital service is all about.

They’ve also put this down in writing. OPG’s digital strategy is just 9 pages long. That increases the likelihood that people will actually read it, think about it, and do something about it. It includes 8 actions, 4 of them effective cultural values. They say that they’re “open by default”, which lines up with the design principle “Make things open, it makes them better.”

You also see this sort of leadership with people like Lorena Sutherland, the head of content, who explained to me that they’ve adopted a plain English policy across the OPG. But they haven’t just written this policy: they’re living it, delivering ‘Get It Write’ plain English workshops to every OPG staff member. Getting the message across that “it’s not dumbing down, it’s opening up” takes time, as teaching people new skills and changing culture always does. But they’re turning the tanker, and that’s great to see.

Small, but scaleable

One of the criticisms you might hear about doing great work at the OPG is that it’s easy because it’s a smallish agency. While that’s true, everything they’re doing is scaleable – the lessons learned at OPG can be used across government. That’s something OPG’s digital team is already doing – sharing with other agencies across government – and that means we can all benefit from their journey.

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