October 12, 2012, 7:26 am
We talk a lot about Open Source at GDS. GOV.UK is built on open source software and, to a degree, built as open source software. It’s a topic we care passionately about because it helps us maintain our focus on user needs by helping us to quickly test and iterate software and systems. The software [...]
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October 12, 2012, 8:54 am
Time for a quick look at some of the things we’ve been up to this week at GDS With just a few days to go before the release of GOV.UK, the Development team switched to ‘skirmish’ mode this week. This means that the team is available to work on bugs and tweaks as they come [...]
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October 15, 2012, 2:13 am
Last week I talked about GOV.UK’s APIs and how we use them to build and monitor the site. Now it’s time to say a little more about what they mean for other developers who might want to use our content and data. As with everything we do at GDS, our approach to APIs is driven [...]
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October 16, 2012, 3:42 am
If you search for Directgov on Wikipedia, or ever happen to browse through our press releases, you’ll see a version of our history that’s based pretty much around landmark achievements and major events. And that’s fine. We are one of the UK’s most-visited websites, after all (slightly larger than Tesco and smaller than Flickr, according [...]
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October 16, 2012, 7:16 am
Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, writes about the release of GOV.UK The release today of GOV.UK, the new home of government services and information, proves that we can deliver digital public services at a fraction of the price of previous government IT projects. GOV.UK will cost taxpayers up to £70m less per year [...]
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October 16, 2012, 7:18 am
We’ve relied on a lot of software to help us build GOV.UK. From tracking the work we need to do in each sprint to managing the logs produced on our servers, we couldn’t build it without using tools that a lot of people have worked hard to make. To acknowledge that, and to give a [...]
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October 16, 2012, 8:57 am
Last Tuesday I wrote about how we identified the things users need from government online, and how that’s guided the building of GOV.UK. Today I’m going to tell you bit more about how that’s helped us ensure that GOV.UK meets the needs of businesses. How Business Link evolved The GOV.UK team at GDS started by [...]
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October 16, 2012, 11:52 pm
On Wednesday October 17th 2012, our new digital service www.gov.uk moved out of public beta development to replace the two main government websites, Directgov and Business Link. It is the first major, full platform release from the Government Digital Service. This release heralds a new approach to digital delivery of public services in the UK. [...]
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October 18, 2012, 7:57 am
GOV.UK is now into its second day as the new place to find government services and information, and I’d like to share some highlights from our first 24 hours. In our first day (Wednesday 17th Oct) we had 1,129,578 visits from 909,706 unique users. This is about the same as the traffic that Directgov and [...]
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October 19, 2012, 8:06 am
The Identity Assurance team have been working closely with DWP on the first identity provider supplier framework for Universal Credit. They also had a retrospective on the development of the IdA ‘hub’ reference architecture and met with Colin Wallis from the New Zealand ID Programme. The Digital Policy and Departmental Engagement team have been getting ready [...]
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October 22, 2012, 7:36 am
We’ve already written about how we’ve worked to identify user needs for GOV.UK, so now I’d like to explain a bit more about what happens next – how does a need become published content or a tool on the site? Broadly speaking a need goes through the following stages before anything is published: 1. Initial [...]
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October 23, 2012, 5:59 am
Last week our new digital service GOV.UK moved out of public beta and replaced the two main government websites, Directgov and Business Link. As my colleague Mike Bracken explained at the time, GOV.UK is focussed on the needs of users, making it simpler, clearer and faster to find government services and information. Today we are [...]
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October 25, 2012, 1:05 am
Local government is facing many challenges in providing digital services to citizens and a significant barrier to that is identity assurance. In order to understand these challenges, GDS commissioned a small sample review. You can read the full report here. Objectives of the Review The aim of the review was to provide an overview of [...]
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October 25, 2012, 5:50 am
Hens and chickens, or breeders and meat? Part of a GDS content designer’s role is to choose the best words to explain what a web page is trying to say. It’s got to be easy to understand, simple to find and, it goes without saying, useful. Working on GOV.UK throws extra challenges into this mix. Firstly, [...]
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October 26, 2012, 12:56 am
As Paul’s explained previously on the blog we worked hard to make sure URLs didn’t break when we transitioned from the Directgov and Business Link websites. Although most people found Directgov and Business Link information through search engines, we wanted to make the transition as smooth as possible for users – and for everyone who’s [...]
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October 26, 2012, 4:30 am
I’ve been at GDS since the beginning. Well, before the beginning, and after nearly two years here I’ve decided to leave. I’m moving on for a couple of reasons; one, because Blaine Cook (the original CTO at Twitter) asked me to join him at an exciting startup, Poetica, to lead on design; and two, because [...]
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October 26, 2012, 9:06 am
Warning: This is a slightly geeky post about agile – the methodology we use to deliver our projects. It therefore features quite a lot of terminology. We hope this will be useful for those of you building projects like these, but if you’re just an interested bystander you might want to start with this quick [...]
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October 31, 2012, 3:23 am
The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Student Loans Company (SLC) team released a new loan application service for part-time students on Wednesday. I wanted to take a minute to congratulate the teams involved, and tell you why we’re especially pleased that it passed the ministerial test. The 2012 Budget statement made a commitment that, from 2014, [...]
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November 2, 2012, 2:54 am
GOV.UK came out of beta just over two weeks ago. In that time we’ve released over 100 updates. I want to talk a little about how we do that, but mainly to focus on why this approach makes for more stability and less risk for the service. Before we begin I just want to say [...]
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November 2, 2012, 8:26 am
Following the successful release of GOV.UK a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to share some of the work we’ve done to support users on mobile devices (smartphones and any other portable devices with a modern web browser). It’s a pretty detailed look at the approaches we’ve taken, and what we learnt along the way. [...]
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