As we mentioned in a recent blog post, the way government thinks about services is changing.

We’re moving from looking at isolated transactions to whole, joined-up, end-to-end services as users understand them. Like learning to drive, or starting a business.

To work in this way, government needs a new service standard that supports and encourages this changing approach to services.

Teams will also need new guidance to help them implement the standard and create and run great services.

This will pose challenges for those of us writing guidance for the Service Manual, which is a collection of guidance for teams building government services.

To work out how best to tackle this challenge, we started by consolidating what we know about our users.

Our user groups

We carried out some user research on the Service Manual in the middle of last year. As you might expect, we found that people need a range of different things from our guidance depending on their level of experience.

People newer to government services or agile ways of working need:

• ways to get up to speed quickly
• information about their role and what’s expected of them
• examples showing how principles have been put into practice

Those with more experience and expertise want to use Service Manual guidance for more complex things like:

• teaching and training other people
• bringing about culture change

This group also said they have to decide how to balance what the guidance says with what their team can realistically do.

Any guidance we write needs to work for both of these groups, as well as nudging less experienced practitioners towards becoming experts in their fields.

Our new guidance model

As a result of this, we’ve come up with a new model for writing Service Manual guidance. It’s a model that we think will meet the needs of all our users, regardless of how experienced or confident they are about running a government service.

We’ve also been thinking about some of the concerns raised by the National Audit Office (NAO) in their ‘Digital Transformation in Government’ report. The report suggested that GDS guidance wasn’t doing enough to help teams implement our standards in practice.

We think our new model goes some way to fixing this for the Service Standard and Service Manual.

The new guidance model is based on a few principles.

Expose the ‘why’

We think it’s a good idea to start a piece of guidance with a summary statement or principle, and to explain why that principle is important.

Something like the following, from our service scoping guidance:

The best way to make your service easy to understand is to frame the problem it’s solving in a way that users understand, using the language they use.

If your service scope is too broad, it won’t be obvious what problem it’s solving. And users won’t be able to get straight to the task they need to complete.

If your service scope is too narrow, it won’t fully solve the user’s problem. So users are less likely to get the outcome they need.

Introducing the guidance in this way works well for a few reasons.

Firstly, this is probably all the detail an expert practitioner needs, so they can stop there. They’ll understand what they’re being asked to do and will likely have a good idea of how best to do it.

It’s also useful for people new to building government services. Understanding the ‘why’ is a crucial step in the journey to mastering a topic and becoming an expert.

It’s helpful for stakeholders, too. Exposing the thinking behind a principle or piece of guidance makes it easier for teams to explain why a certain approach is or isn’t the right way to go.

Provide practical examples

While principles are important, we acknowledge that they won’t provide enough detail for everyone.

People new to government in particular will need more help to implement an approach, or make a decision.

This was one of the criticisms the NAO made: that the high-level nature of GDS guidance "[left] scope for interpretation and disagreement".

There’s an issue here, though. Across government, teams are working in different ways, designing different services for vastly different user groups.

This means that there simply isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to doing a thing. To some extent, the guidance needs to be open to interpretation, so teams can apply it to the context they’re working in.

The National Cyber Security Centre has faced similar issues with people asking for definitive guidance about very nuanced issues.

We can still help service teams make good decisions, though, even if we can’t give them a single implementation model.

By providing a range of models from across government and beyond, we can help teams understand how particular problems have been solved previously. With some context, they’ll be able to see which types of approach have worked in circumstances similar to their own.

It’s fine to ask service teams to use their discretion: we trust them, and it’s part of their job.

Invite people to collaborate

We want to make it easier for people with a lot of experience to share it. We want people to challenge us where they think we could improve things, and pitch in if they’d like to.

And of course, we’ll continue to do research to understand our users’ needs in greater depth.

What about service assessments?

This guidance model should help us move the Service Manual in the direction we think it needs to go.

We believe the manual should serve 2 main purposes:

• help teams build the best possible services for users
• share best practice with people new to government

The manual shouldn’t simply be a resource to help teams get through a service assessment. If you’re building a great service, the assessment will take care of itself.

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The first GovTech Fund competition is open for applications

At Sprint 18 last week, Oliver Dowden MP CBE, Minister for Implementation, launched the first competition of the £20 million GovTech Fund.

The competition, which will aim to address the Home Office’s ‘Daesh’ challenge, is now open for applications. You will find details of how to apply below.

What is the GovTech Fund?

The fund, which was launched in November 2017, helps private sector innovators tackle public sector problems.

In the first call for challenges, the GovTech Catalyst team received 51 submissions from across government departments and local authorities. You can read the full list here.

The winning companies will be awarded up to £50,000 to develop their ideas, with a further £500,000 available to continue development and test solutions. The money for 15 challenges will be available over 3 years.

The first competition: the Home Office’s ‘Daesh’ challenge

Terrorist group Daesh uses both video and still imagery to recruit and radicalise people online. So far, the Home Office has been very good at identifying the video with up to 99.995% accuracy, but hasn’t been able to achieve that with still images.

And with 80% of Daesh propaganda being still media, it’s imperative to solve this issue.

We know we need help from the outside –  from private, innovative tech companies who are able to offer new technological solutions to public sector issues – to solve this and similar challenges.  

That is why the GovTech Fund was set up.

Speaking at Sprint 18, GDS’s flagship event, Oliver Dowden said:

Now that the GovTech Fund, the first of its kind, is active, I am excited to see the difference it is going to make in stimulating this emerging market: helping both the public sector – by solving problems across organisations – and the private sector – by helping innovative companies develop their offers.

How to apply

Companies can pitch using the Innovation Funding Service, which has all the details on how to apply, funding, project scope and challenge context.

Key dates

Here are some key dates for the competition to address the Home Office’s ‘Identifying Daesh still imagery’ challenge:

• 20 June: registration for this competition closes
• 27 June: competition closes
• 31 August: applicants notified
• 30 September: phase 1 contracts awarded
• 30 September: feedback provided

The other 4 winning challenges

At GDS’s Sprint 18 event, Oliver Dowden also revealed the other winning challenges of the GovTech Fund.

The next challenge to be revealed, after the Home Office’s ‘Daesh’ challenge, was from Defra, which wants help in finding a technological approach that could help record, check and track waste.

The third challenge was from Monmouthshire Council, which would like to find a way to spot vehicles with spare capacity to help tackle loneliness and rural isolation.

The fourth was submitted by the Department for Transport and the Royal Borough of Greenwich. They want innovative solutions to cope with road traffic congestion.

The fifth was a joint application from Durham and Blaenau Gwent councils on how they can use service vehicles already in use to help spot real-time issues with smart sensors.

The assessment panel was made up of representatives from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, GDS, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, HM Treasury and Innovate UK.

Key dates for the other 4 competitions

The other 4 challenges will be launched as competitions on the following dates:

• Tracking waste through the waste chain (opening June 2018)
• Tackling loneliness and rural isolation (opening July 2018)
• Cutting traffic congestion (opening August 2018)
• Deploying smart sensors on council vehicles to improve services (opening September 2018)

Companies will be able to pitch using the Innovation Funding Service, which will have all the competitions in due course.

What did people say on Twitter about the winning challenges?

People were very excited to hear the winning challenges at Sprint 18. Here are just some of the tweets posted on the day:

GovTech monthly meet-ups

To find out more about the GovTech challenges and meet up with selected companies, come along to the GovTech monthly meet-ups. These take place on the fourth Thursday of each month and will be a mix of short talks and updates on the GovTech Fund challenges and funding rounds.

The meet-up series is an initiative between GDS Innovation and Digital Leaders, and it will bring together over 200 innovators in the public and private sectors each month to discuss, share, network and collaborate.

The next two meet-ups will take place in London on 24 May and 28 June.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new European law that promotes transparency around the collection, use, sharing and storage of user data. GDS puts user needs at the centre of everything we do, so the opportunity to reflect these changes in our services is huge – and so is the project behind it.

Avnesh Pandya, Delivery Manager

My role as Delivery Manager for GDPR is to plan and co-ordinate our response across our citizen-facing services. I also work with colleagues in Cabinet Office to share what we learn and collaborate across government departments. Everyone at GDS – myself included – is a user too, so we’ve been working on reviewing our internal policies and guidance.

The GDPR project is made up of 19 workstreams in total, and we’ve been working on it for almost a year now. The team is a large one, with specialists from different parts of GDS working on specific areas, getting together regularly to share what we’ve learned.

In this blog post, some of the people at GDS who worked to prepare for GDPR talk about the project and the challenges they faced.

Georgina Grant, Commercial Strategy Advisor

My role

My role is to ensure that GDS’s existing commercial agreements with suppliers are compliant with GDPR. To do this, we have been issuing contract variations which incorporate new clauses and clearly set out the responsibilities for each party.

Why is this important?

Suppliers play an important role in helping us deliver digital services and we need to make sure that they understand what we need from them to meet the new standards.

What’s been the biggest challenge?

Given the volume and variety of commercial agreements held across GDS, ensuring that changes to contracts provide the appropriate level of coverage is the biggest challenge and most important aspect of this project.

Niall Keegan, Information Manager

My role

As Information Manager at GDS, I’m responsible for advising on best practice in information and records management for the handling and processing of personal data. I’m also part of the GDPR core team responsible for drafting guidance, products and processes to enable GDPR compliance. This includes things like consent forms and privacy notices.

Why is this important?

GDPR compliance has real benefits to how we work in GDS. It will ensure we retain better, more accurate information, enabling us to build stronger relationships and increase trust in our services. As an exemplar for digital services across government, GDS has a big opportunity to lead the way in GDPR compliance. This starts with informing staff and putting relevant products and processes in place.

What’s been the biggest challenge?

There have been a lot of competing priorities. It has been a challenge to document all our processing activities across the business. We have been working with teams to review processes and audit files containing personal data, and this has been daunting at times because of the huge proliferation of tools used to store data across GDS.

Chantal Foyer, Product Manager

My role

I'm a Product Manager on the Digital Marketplace. As part of ensuring our service is compliant with GDPR, we needed to update the contracts we have with suppliers who sell services on the Marketplace and get all of those suppliers to accept the changes.

Why is this important?

The Digital Marketplace is where government goes to buy digital services. We need to know that our suppliers understand this change in law and ensure that their services comply with it. Our updated call-off contract templates include GDPR terms to ensure that public-sector buyers can confidently buy through the Digital Marketplace.

What’s been the biggest challenge?

We have more than 4,000 suppliers on the Digital Marketplace. We needed all of these suppliers to review the changes we were proposing and accept them. If we had to do this manually, this would have taken a lot of time. Instead, we reused a feature we’d built for an earlier contract, which allowed suppliers to review the variation and accept it in one seamless online flow. This meant that within the first 4 weeks, we had just under 3,500 acceptances.

John Waterworth, Head of User Research

My role

I'm Head of User Research at GDS and also the head of the Cross-Government User Research Community. Respecting the privacy of research participants is an important part of our practice, so GDPR is an important change for us. I’m responsible both for making sure that we do research at GDS in an ethical and legal way, and also for the guidance that we provide in the Service Manual for user researchers across government. My role in this project was to update our processes to reflect the changes, whilst communicating them to our participants in a clear and understandable way.

Why is this important?

Although collecting personal data about research participants isn’t the purpose of user research, we often end up with personal data in the notes, recordings and photos we take during research sessions. Responses to surveys can contain personal data. And participants may enter personal data into a prototype or beta service during a usability test. So we need to carefully manage how we collect and store our research data. We also need to look at how we use any extracts, such as quotes and video clips.

What’s been the biggest challenge?

We know that showing our colleagues video clips, sound clips, photos and extended quotes from research sessions is incredibly valuable in helping teams understand their users. We’ve worked hard to find ways to share these extracts that are simple for user researchers to follow while also protecting participants’ privacy. Researchers can choose to create completely anonymised extracts. This takes a bit of extra work, but means the researchers are free to include those extracts in their findings presentations, and in public reports or blog posts. Or researchers can use extracts where participants can be identified. Then they must tightly control who can access those extracts, and prevent colleagues from copying or downloading them.

Lee Porte, Reliability Engineer

My role

As component lead for GDPR compliance on GOV.UK Platform as a Service, I am responsible for writing the stories and getting them prioritised with our Product Manager in order to feed into the team’s work streams. It is essential for me to liaise closely with the central GDPR team to ensure that the tasks required for compliance are completed in a timely manner.

Why is this important?

This is a critically important role within the GOV.UK Platform as a Service team as we are in a unique position in that we host other services for use by both civil servants and citizens. As a result, we had to be able to provide information regarding GDPR compliance for service end users. We also had to provide our civil servant users with the information they needed in order to ensure their own GDPR compliance was in place in advance of the deadline.

What’s been the biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge has been gathering information for the various suppliers that we use. This has been difficult as they have been going through the same process. And, as a result, the information requested has not always been to hand.

Syed Bokhari, Associate Delivery Manager

My role

I’m an Associate Delivery Manager in the GDPR Programme Team. Over the last 6 months, I’ve been assisting the Delivery Manager with planning on what work will be done and by when.

Why is this important?

With a programme of this size, there are many aspects to what needs to be done, with many teams and people involved. It’s important to work with the teams to understand the challenges they’re facing and how we can support them as a programme team. My role was to help them identify solutions to risks and blockers that could hinder and impact delivery. I also helped them with planning and prioritising their work, better enabling the team to deliver against agreed timescales.

What’s been the biggest challenge?

Most of the 19 workstreams have dedicated teams working on GDPR, made up of individuals with various skills. At GDS, we also have quarterly missions, which means people will leave and join teams each quarter. This means lots of people are involved in what we’re doing! The biggest challenge has been to create a way of working that ensures information is shared through the forums we’ve created and that we keep on track of where we are and come together to solve challenges, whilst reporting our progress to senior stakeholders and wider government.

What’s next

Our approach to GDPR has focused on our existing services and offers, but as these develop, so will our approach to privacy and user rights. At GDS we embed ‘privacy by design’, which means privacy is a consideration as we design the service, rather than something we retrofit afterwards, so it’s something that underpins all of our activity.

As we continue to learn what our users need and the best way to implement that, we’ll also continue to update the Service Manual so that we can share best practice with our colleagues across government.

If you want to find out more about the work of the Government Digital Service, we’re speaking and running workshops at Civil Service Live around the country in June and July and the Public Sector Show in London on 26 June.

Come along to hear from us and talk to us.

I'm a data scientist at the Government Digital Service (GDS) and last month I got the chance to represent both GDS and the Data Science community at TeenTech City 2018 - an event showcasing tech and science careers - at the Emirates Stadium.

Despite 2018 being Arsène Wenger’s worst season in charge of Arsenal, there was certainly no lack of enthusiasm amongst the 540 Year 8 and 9 students from 50 schools at the event.

At the start of our session, I asked them if they could define Artificial Intelligence (AI). The answers I got back were vague and pointed at technologies such as “robots and things” or Alexa.

After speaking with me and my GDS colleagues Ellie King and Nicky Zachariou, and playing some AI games, you will see how their answers differed by the end.  

TeenTech City 2018 at the Emirates Stadium

Preparing students for a digital and inclusive future

TeenTech is a not-for-profit organisation that helps young people understand the opportunities in the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) industries, irrespective of their gender or social background.

At GDS we are home to the Digital, Data and Technology Profession, which ensures government has the people and skills it needs now and in the future. We pride ourselves on diversity and inclusion so we were delighted to be invited to deliver a workshop.

TeenTech City aims to be a positive, hands-on-day led by industry, with challenges and experiments helping them understand the wide range of opportunities in STEM.

Making AI fun with Google’s Quick Draw

I’d previously taught at a secondary school on the TeachFirst graduate scheme, and I felt at home in front of students again, filling them with wonder at how awesome AI is.

Like all good lessons, we started with something to grab their attention. Pictionary.

This wasn’t a regular game, where you normally drawing a crooked horse, only for a family member to insist it’s a badger - instead students were playing with Google’s Quick Draw, an AI that has been trained on a large labelled doodling dataset.

Students were split into two teams and asked to draw from a pre-selected list of items. The challenge was for the AI to correctly guess what the item was - and as fast as possible.

The students were super enthusiastic for the game and as I saw their excitement, I reflected at how when I was at school the internet was not yet mainstream.

AI will impact the lives and careers of these children in much the same way as the internet has shaped mine.

After playing the game we used the thumbs-up-thumbs-down signal to formatively assess prior knowledge of AI applications. This revealed that most students had only considered humanoid versions of AI, such as virtual assistants and androids.

This familiarity bodes well for GOV.UK’s recent development with Alexa.

The GDS artificial intelligence stand at TeenTech City 2018

Pitting human intelligence against AI  

To continue the debate we also asked the students what they thought the nature of AI was. We found these philosophical questions sometimes engaged the students more and led to spirited discussions amongst my fellow data scientists.

The main part of the session was drawing the distinction between problem solving with traditional programming compared to using AI. How best to teach that than by playing a game with an intelligent piece of paper, of course.

The intelligent piece of paper is a game that introduces an algorithm that never loses at noughts-and-crosses. It prompts a discussion on what it means for a machine to be intelligent.  

I set the scene for my students with my story of a legendary piece of paper that I found washed up on a beach, half-covered in sand and plastic. I waxed lyrical about how intelligent this piece of paper is.

Clearly incensed that I would suggest the paper was smarter than them, they were up for the challenge to beat it. They promptly lost a game of noughts-and-crosses against the intelligent piece of paper (52 Wins, 0 Losses, 8 Draws). While playing the game, each pair had to work together to follow simple computer code and consider how knowledge can be enshrined in it.

We contrasted this recipe-like approach to the learning process involved with AI; whether learning from data, like our Pictionary example, or learning from rewards like a dog. Students reflected on the specific intelligence capabilities of AI by watching it beat computer games.

What did the students learn about AI?

After the session, we asked the students again what AI meant? See if you can spot the differences between the answers given before our session and after.

• “Artificial intelligence is a human-made system that learns from input or rewards from its environment.”
• “Machines are nice, don’t be mean to them :)”
• “A system which is programmed to move or do something by repetition and rewards of digital dog biscuits.”
• “An artificial mind that can learn by itself after being given a simple incentive or objective with feedback as how it’s doing.”
• “AI does the boring jobs leaving us with more time to play football.”
• “AI is like a machine’s brain. Like a baby, you help it to learn by giving it a lot of data. If the computer hears you answer a lot of questions or play games, later it can do these things also. But it only knows what you show it and tell it, so it’s not as smart as you are.”

As my job involves automating government statistics production, I’m keen to leverage technology, including AI, to improve efficiency across Government and wider society.

Hopefully the students who joined us at the event will go on to have careers making that dream a reality.

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GDS recently hosted a TeenTech’s Teacher event in partnership with Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

If you work in government you can apply to the Data Science Accelerator programme until 12 June.

GDS is currently piloting an Emerging Technology Development programme - contact etdp@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk for more information.

Portrait of Sally Meecham

I have been involved with GDS, or a forerunner to it, for more than a decade.

Fifteen years ago I was at the Office of the e-Envoy, 10 years ago I was working at DirectGov, 5 years ago I was at GDS – and in April, after period at Defra, Barnardo's and the Crown Commercial Service, I returned as GDS’ interim Chief Operating Officer.

Working both at GDS and other public sector agencies and departments, enabled me to see how critical GDS is to digital transformation across government.

Back to the centre

Coming back into the centre is exciting. Returning to GDS provides an important perspective and knowledge of the obstacles departments can face when attempting digital transformation.

When I was last at GDS, I was a Transformation Lead with the DVLA, working on its end-to-end transformation of services. Back in 2014, I blogged about the then new digital ‘View your driving licence information’ service.

Since then GDS has, naturally, changed and developed.

An awareness of just how demanding transition can be is something which has certainly grown since I was last here. Now there is more appreciation of how the entire organisation - not just a few committed individuals - needs to be on board for successful digital transformational change to happen.

In 2016/17, while I was Chief Digital Officer at Defra, we were able to successfully take its online fishing rod licence service from private to public beta. GDS provided us with fantastic support and they helped us develop positive digital change and deliver on this service.

An excellent service can only be delivered by the right people with the right skills, but also the right finance, right environments etc. in which to work. So that’s why recent publication of the The 7 Lenses of Transformation is really important.

It identifies that in order for brilliant services to be created, the whole organisation needs to think of themselves as part of the delivery.

This leads to one of the things I like most about GDS and something which hasn’t changed: its role in supporting departments. Its position at the centre of government means it can understand the transformational challenges that departments and agencies face and is there to support that.  

A new development for me was the creation of the GDS Academy, formerly the DWP Digital Academy. It is one of the key ways that GDS can support these complex changes across government.

There is an urgent need to build digital, data and technology skills and capabilities in departments and agencies, and the GDS Academy provides support in both basic and advanced digital skills. This will enable places to create their own transformation.

Equal opportunities in tech

We need to lessen the gender and diversity imbalance that exists across both the private and public technology sector.

When I started out in digital nearly 20 years ago, I was thrilled by the opportunity of technology developing more equal opportunities. I would not have imagined all these years later there would be the disparity we see today.

GDS has a gender-balanced senior management team, but GDS’ Director General Kevin Cunnington and the senior management team are constantly looking to address issues of inclusion and diversity across the whole of the organisation. For example, we have a Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) representative on every interview panel.

Being an interim COO

I am keen to ensure we become better at talking about all the brilliant digital services we help departments to deliver. I want to demonstrate that GDS offers value for money and quality products.

We are putting monthly reporting in place and have built Dashboards to help update our reporting processes. The business operations teams will provide the tools and support to ensure a common way of working across GDS and these dashboards will assist this.

Part of my role is to make sure that the right people have the right support in place to make sure GDS is a great place to work. So, it’s been wonderful seeing familiar faces, but it’s also been a real thrill to see all the new people who have joined GDS and what fantastic skills we have here.

It’s great to be back at such an exciting time for GDS.

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You can talk to tech teams from across government at the Women of Silicon Roundabout conference on 26 and 27 June in London.

Across the UK Government accessibility should be a part of everything we make and we design. Our sixth design principle reflects its importance - “accessible design is good design”.

Equipment in the accessibility lab

We want to make sure there are no barriers preventing someone from using something.

However, user research conducted in 2016 showed that we could improve awareness of accessibility and assistive technologies. Angela Collins Rees previously blogged about it.

To help do this, we created an accessibility empathy lab at GDS, which is open to any government or public sector employee.

The lab began a year ago - when GDS first moved to Aldgate - and has been through several transformations already. 

What is an accessibility empathy lab?

We were inspired in part by Facebook’s empathy lab which shows how people with impairments may interact with Facebook using assistive technology.

However, when building our accessibility empathy lab, it was important to us that it had a dual purpose: To raise awareness about accessibility, but also be an assistive technology testing space.

What’s in the lab?

The lab contains the following equipment. A screen reader converts text into speech so blind and partially sighted people can read web content:

• Windows 7 and Windows 10 laptops with JAWS and NVDA screen readers, Dragon Naturally Speaking (voice recognition and activation) and ZoomText (screen magnification)
• iPhone and iPad (for using the VoiceOver screen reader and other accessibility settings)
• Android phone and tablet (for using the Talkback screen reader - being setup)
• Mac (for using VoiceOver and other accessibility settings)
• 2 switch devices (for demonstrating keyboard-only access on both an iPhone/iPad and Mac - being setup)
• A set of goggles that simulate different visual impairments
• Magnifying glass
• 2 sound defender headphones to simulate loss of hearing
• Television screen playing a visual impairments film

Our experience with empathy exercises has been a positive one, with other government departments borrowing equipment. We have seen an increased awareness of the diversity of users and needs.

Staff using the accessibility lab

Why is the lab important?

We realised that while most people have some awareness of accessibility, most people are not familiar with the different technologies and software that people use to interact with online services. It is really easy for people to introduce accessibility barriers without realising.

People often design for the fictional average user, which is usually based on their specific frame of reference.

This lab does not replace the Service Manual nor an accessibility audit. But it allows people to see the variety of technology that people use and do some basic checking themselves. It will not cover all eventualities, but can potentially identify some easy or common barriers that they can fix.

It can be expensive for individual teams to buy equipment and this can also involve a long procurement process. By opening up this lab to anyone from government we can ease these problems and the lab is regularly included on tours of GDS.

The lab’s iterations (and why it changed)

When we knew we were moving into our current workspace at The Whitechapel Building, I was determined to secure an area for an accessibility empathy lab.

Initially, it was just 2 closed PC laptops with the software installed that were not getting much attention. We then changed this to 2 open and always on laptops with JAWS and ZoomText on display, printed information on the software and put up posters.

The posters include the extremely successful Home Office accessibility posters that have been translated into many different languages.

To grow the lab we added equipment such as the glasses and extra hardware.

Currently, we are working with the design team at GDS to improve the lab’s look. Another next step involves adding specific personas as logins that highlight common barriers users face.

The lab will continue to evolve as needs change amongst the organisation and more teams let us know what works and what they need.

How have people used it?

Many internal and several external teams have used the lab so far including Daniel Wintercross, a Digital Delivery Lead at the Cabinet Office. His team adapted Register to Vote as a result of the accessibility empathy lab.

An accessibility audit was done using the lab, with the product being tested on a range of different software and hardware. The resulting recommendations helped ensure the service was compliant.

“It was a very helpful and important exercise for the service to undergo and we will certainly do another one in the next 6 to 8 months,” he said.

How to access the lab

If you want to use the lab please email accessibility@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.  

Staff member using the accessibility lab

Do you know any other empathy labs?

Accessibility empathy labs are not commonplace. We were inspired by Facebook’s, but we don’t know of many others out there.

Chris Moore, a Digital Accessibility Champion at HMRC in Newcastle, launched a lab in 2017. The equipment there includes vision loss simulation glasses, a Mac for Zoom and VoiceOver testing and 2 Windows laptops with JAWS, ZoomText and Dragon installed.

He encourages every team working on a service in Newcastle to come and try the lab at least once during development.

In an ideal world every team or every department would have something like this to themselves. However, as this is unlikely, we would love for everyone to have one they can get to within a reasonable distance.

Do you know of any other empathy labs? What would you like to see in our lab? Let us know in the comments.

If you want to find out more about the work of the Government Digital Service, we’re speaking and running workshops at Civil Service Live around the country in June and July and at the Public Sector Show in London on 26 June. Come along to hear from us and talk to us.

This week is Digital Leaders Week, created to celebrate and showcase the best digital transformation across the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

One of the events taking place is the DL100 Awards, where our own Digital, Data and Technology Profession team has been shortlisted in the Digital Team of the Year category.

To mark this special week, people from across the Government Digital Service reflect on the role that digital leaders can have in transformation and the qualities a good digital leader should have.

Simon Everest, Service Owner, Standards Assurance

"I’ve been really lucky to work with great digital leaders in my time in GDS. Leadership isn’t constrained to specific roles or grades, but is an attitude and approach to the problems we’re all trying to solve for users of government services.

"The best digital leaders are humble and collaborative, yet ambitious and creative. Paul Downey’s development of GOV.UK Registers, John Abbott’s transformation of HM Land Registry and John Fitzpatrick’s passion and energy at the Ministry of Justice are all great examples of inspiring digital leaders who have made a significant difference in their organisations, for their users.  

"They have vision and a great understanding of user-centred digital service development and agile ways of working. This is combined with an ability to inspire, trust and learn from the teams and specialists around them.”

Emily Ackroyd and Hazel Hobbs, Directors for Strategy and Engagement

“Digital leadership is not about understanding specific technologies, it’s about understanding people. It’s about setting aspirations, creating culture and building capability.

"The leaders we admire and who are transforming services across the public sector - from Universal Credit to our courts and borders - do 3 things brilliantly.

"Firstly they give teams the space to be disruptive and creative: increasingly leaders need to change the organisation around them rather than just work within structures created for a different age. That requires permission to challenge, try new things and learn from when things don't work.

"Secondly they work in partnership with others - the GovTech Catalyst programme is a good example. This is about working with business and tech entrepreneurs to define and solve the most important policy and operational problems, not inviting others in to deliver after the service has been designed.

"Thirdly they are comfortable with ambiguity. What we have realised working at GDS is that digital and data innovation is going to continue at pace. This means being humble about what you don’t know and embracing the need to constantly learn and change.

"And one thing that is critical in the public sector is that we lead inclusively and insist on having diverse design and development teams. We can only serve the needs of all citizens if our teams are reflective of society. We've been inspired in our role as part of the Digital Leaders Advisory Board by the brilliant young leaders who are showing the way on mission-driven ways to give everyone the skills to thrive - and we’re looking forward to seeing their work recognised in the Digital Leaders Awards on 21 June."

Nick Tait, Head of GovTech

“Leadership has little to do with making things go faster, and considerably more to do with doing things better. Better for the people doing the work, better for the broad array of stakeholders and better for the users, whose need is being met by the outcomes of the work.

"Doing things better is hard because it presupposes you know what you are doing and why you are doing it. You have to understand and be clear on your goals and your vision, and the outcomes you want your projects, programmes and organisation to meet. And you have to have the trust and explicit support of everyone around you.

"I have had the good fortune to work with many great leaders. By leader I don’t necessarily mean someone who is at the top of a tree, or a hierarchy. Rather, a leader is someone who is open, honest, kind,  and able to carry and manage risk and uncertainty, and in doing these things inspires people to follow them.

"Remember, great leaders are humans too. Some of them have challenged me to look at how and why I am working on a thing in a different light. They have asked me difficult and often searching questions with kindness and support and have encouraged me to be and to do the best I can.

"Great leaders, digital or otherwise, have a strength of vision, a palpable appetite for considered risk and an approachability that encourages discussion and openness. They know when to ask questions, when to listen and when to stand back and let people forge ahead.’’

Jen Lambourne, Lead Technical Writer

“For me, good leaders are those who know the difference between stepping in and stepping on toes. Many leaders are quick to give advice, but can inadvertently force out ideas or give the impression that it’s their way or the highway. The best leaders I’ve worked with give teams space to experiment and are quick to admit when they don’t have all the answers.

"I’m lucky enough to be part of both the content and technology communities at GDS. Leaders in both of those communities make a lot of effort to be visible, which is so much more than just working in an open-plan office. They are often still practitioners, involve teams in decisions, discuss constraints honestly, and use their position as leaders to advocate for teams and individuals.

"I’ve heard so many organisations insist their leaders do all this, but GDS is one of the very few places I’ve seen it in reality.”

Sally Meecham, Chief Operating Officer

“Good digital leaders come in all shapes and sizes, grades and job roles.

"Some of the best digital leaders I have worked with may have initially described themselves as ‘non-technical/ non-digital’. However, what they did do was create a trusting and open culture; actively encourage collaboration and innovation; empower at all levels and provide the tools, technology and processes to enable agile working and end-to-end transformation.”

Tyronne Fisher, Business Analyst, Digital Marketplace

“I have been working at GDS for almost 2 years now, and I have been fortunate enough to experience a passionate organisation driven by great leadership. Enabling an organisation to feel motivated and integral to helping government transform for the better comes from having a clear direction and focus from leaders.

"I have worked with some great leaders who possess great interpersonal skills which have helped to provide clarity about the GDS vision. I think great digital leaders will not only be equipped with a wealth of digital knowledge, but also strive hard to create and maintain a safe working environment which enables you to thrive and be innovative.

"I have seen leaders in GDS place great emphasis on creating the right culture. This has certainly helped me to become more productive and feel comfortable contributing to changing things for the better, to support government reach its desired goals.”

Holly Ellis, Director of Capability, Digital, Data and Technology Profession team

“A good leader shares their knowledge and expertise to grow the people around them. They provide enough direction but allow teams to make decisions and empower them to deliver. The best leaders I have worked with are those that I have learnt from - that haven't shied away from giving feedback when it is needed in the spirit of helping me grow.

"Strong leaders have courage in their convictions, front up to the big challenges, and navigate and unblock organisational 'systems' to help their teams achieve their objectives. They listen, they support their teams and they lead by example. They also get their hands dirty and get stuck in, in whichever way needed, to achieve success.”

Daniel Sintim, Early Talent Recruiter

“I feel that in the digital age, a leader needs to be comfortable and confident with the constant change and evolution of the digital sphere. A successful digital organisation is only as good as the executive chosen to lead the transformation. I think as a digital leader you really have to recognise the power of technology and be able to put tangible plans into action.

"In my opinion, the great digital leaders in the world know how to tap into a diverse range of highly skilled individuals. A good digital leader must also take on the role as a mentor. They should naturally position themselves as an influencer. And above all, their enthusiasm for digitalisation needs to be contagious!”

If you want to find out more about the work of the Government Digital Service, we’re speaking and running workshops at Civil Service Live around the country in June and July and at the Public Sector Show in London on 26 June.

We're also hiring! To find the latest roles at GDS visit Civil Service Jobs.

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The GOV.UK Design System is now ready for teams across government to use.

The Design System contains styles, components and patterns to help teams in government create user-centred digital services. It brings together the patterns and code found in the Service Manual, GOV.UK Elements and elsewhere.

We’ve developed the Design System by working with teams across government. We’ve also been building a cross-government community of Design System users and contributors who will help to maintain and develop it.

Below we’ll look at how we developed the Design System and why we think it will make things easier for government service teams.

Benefits of the GOV.UK Design System

Every aspect of the Design System - from the way it is structured to the things it contains - is based on rigorous user research and designed with the needs of the community it’s designed to support in mind.

Here are 4 of the main reasons to start using it:

Everything in one place

Until now, design patterns and code have been spread out across the Service Manual, GOV.UK Elements, the GOV.UK Prototype Kit, GOV.UK Template, the Frontend Toolkit and Dropbox Paper. This meant that users could often struggle to find what they needed.

By bringing these resources together in the Design System, we’re making them much easier to find, use and contribute to. Among the things you will find on the Design System are:

• GOV.UK styles for things like typography, layout and colours
• components like checkboxes, buttons and form inputs
• patterns for common tasks, like asking users for an address or helping them check a service is suitable for them

We’ve also iterated the site’s navigation based on several rounds of user research, to make sure we’re organising things in a way that helps users find what they’re looking for.  

Teams can now quickly and easily access consistent solutions to common challenges. This means they can focus their efforts on the unique aspects of their work and on designing great end-to-end services.

Easy to use

All of the examples, code and guidance in the GOV.UK Design System have been designed to be as easy to use as possible.

Guidance on using components and patterns now follow a simple, consistent format based on task-based research into what users need in order to follow and trust an approach.

You’ll find live examples supported with code so you can see how components and patterns work and paste them straight into your application. You can also use them in prototypes - you’ll just need to make sure you’re using version 7 or later of the Prototype Kit.

Robust, accessible code

The components and patterns in the Design System are built using a new codebase called GOV.UK Frontend.

To make it easy for everyone to start using GOV.UK Frontend code, we’ve designed it to work alongside existing codebases, including GOV.UK Template and GOV.UK Elements. This means you can import Frontend into your project and it shouldn’t interfere with your existing CSS and JavaScript.

All the components and patterns have been rigorously tested with the most commonly-used assistive technologies and built to meet level AA of the WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards.

By making these resources accessible by default, we can help teams design and build services that are inclusive from the very beginning.

Fully supported

Previously, because they were hosted in a number of different places and there was no single team responsible for them all, the design patterns and code GDS provided was not always fully supported or maintained. We know that this can make it really hard for users to trust them, or know whether they’re up to date.

The Design System and all of its contents are now fully supported by a dedicated team at the Government Digital Service (GDS). There will be someone to talk to if you need help and a number of ways get in touch - including a dedicated Design System team email address and Slack channel - to offer suggestions for making things better.  

The team will be working closely with the cross-government community of users to grow the Design System and build on the work done so far.

Staff at a cross government Design Systems meet up

Community driven

Government is big, with hundreds of multidisciplinary teams working on hundreds of services - and the Design System needs to reflect that.

We want this to be a Design System for the whole of government, with a strong community behind it. It needs to incorporate the latest research, design and development from the whole community to make it more representative and relevant for all teams across government.

We’ve created a community backlog where teams and individuals can propose new styles, components and patterns, contribute to existing ones and see what others are working on. It’s currently in GitHub and we’re looking into ways to integrate it more closely into the system itself.

While we were testing the Design System, we piloted a contribution model using a multi-disciplinary working group of representatives from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Home Office, GDS, Department for Work and Pensions and the Environment Agency. This group met every month, for 3 months, to review and quality assure new components and patterns for publication into the Design System.

The group approved 6 new contributions from people across government, which are now available to use in the Design System. They are:

• New guidance on error messages
• Page not found pages
• Service unavailable pages
• There is a problem with this service pages
• Asking users for telephone numbers
• Tabs

We’ll use this contribution model to look at all new things coming into the Design System and we’ll keep building on it in the coming months.

What happens now?

The design patterns that used to live in the Service Manual have now moved to the Design System.

GOV.UK Elements is still available for teams already using it, but we’ll only be fixing major bugs and security issues.

The GOV.UK Design System will now be the place to find all patterns and components. We’d love you to start using it straight away and tell us what you think. You can comment below or you can email us at govuk-design-system-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

If you want to get involved in creating styles, components or patterns for the Design System, find out how to contribute.

GOV.UK is the single website for all central government services and information. Since launching in 2012 it has replaced nearly 2,000 government websites with just one.

GOV.UK has been viewed more than 14 billion times since it went live. It gets an average 3.6 million visits a day. It has won awards - including a D&AD Black Pencil and a Design Museum Design of the Year award. And it has influenced governments all over the world from Australia to Israel.

You probably know about most of this already because we’re rightly proud of it and we’ve talked about it a lot.

But GOV.UK is much more than just a website for government - it’s the online home of all of government’s content and services. It's the digital interface for millions of people interacting with central government.

So that means we serve a dual role:

We help people understand government by making content simple and user journeys intuitive. And we also help government understand people as GOV.UK serves millions of users every day. This gives us - and departments - incredibly valuable insights on what people need to do and how we can better serve their needs.

To keep playing this vital role we need to make sure GOV.UK can keep pace with the technology people want to use. We need to prepare for a world where people might not access GOV.UK through their computer or smartphone, but could be using Alexa, Google Assistant or some technology that hasn’t even been created yet. We need to make GOV.UK understandable by humans and machines.

Here’s how we’re doing that:

Structuring the content

As a foundation for everything else we need to do, we first need to make sure our content is properly structured. This sounds pretty obvious - but it’s also really hard.

When we launched GOV.UK, we brought all government’s content - created by hundreds of different organisations - into one place. We launched GOV.UK very quickly with a relatively small team and we didn’t have the time or the opportunity to look properly at how all that content fitted together.

Because each organisation’s website moved on to GOV.UK separately, content came onto the site siloed and remained siloed. There are now more than half a million individual pages on GOV.UK.

So, after we’d brought all government’s content on to GOV.UK, we set up the Finding Things team. Their job was to work with departments to tag every item of content by topic. The team started with the ‘education’ topic and last year launched a new taxonomy and navigation.

An example of one of the new topic pages

But while this work was progressing well, we also realised it was hugely labour-intensive - both for us and the departments we were working with. So we turned to robots to help us. More specifically, to supervised machine learning.

Supervised machine learning is an automated process where an algorithm learns patterns from data so that it can classify or organise content.

We already had some content tagged to our legacy taxonomies which we split into two groups: the training set and the test set. We used the training set to teach an algorithm to learn what pages were about, based on the text within them and its attached metadata. Then we used the testing set to check the algorithm was giving the right answers before using it to tag new things.

By using supervised machine learning we’ve been able to tag most of the content on GOV.UK to a subject-based taxonomy in just 6 months. If we’d done this manually it would have taken years at best. At worst, we might never have been able to do it.

Now we have a first version of a complete taxonomy, we’ll keep iterating it until the whole site can be powered by it so our algorithm can reliably suggest relevant tags for new content. We’re also improving the publisher process to help people make better choices about how and where they publish and to improve the quality of content through live feedback.

From back to front-end

Doing this deep, structural work means we’re now able to improve the front-end of GOV.UK - the bit that users see and interact with.

We’re working to make sure this improved data structure is reflected on the front-end navigation and in our APIs. And we’re also making sure it’s pushed out to search engines, so users can find the right content for their needs, on any device.

As well as creating a single taxonomy of everything, we’ve replaced dozens of separate page templates with one universal layout.

Our vision is to have a single, consistent domain model which links up all the related concepts of government easily and helps both humans and machines explore related content and related concepts, such as the machinery of government - ministers, organisations and policy change over time.

Building end-to-end services into GOV.UK

On top of all our work to structure content, we’re also working to join up and simplify information and services for the things that people need to do. We’re building end-to-end services into GOV.UK.

Kate Ivey-Williams wrote about this last year, when we launched our first end-to-end service page - Learn to drive a car.

Since then we’ve launched more end-to-end service pages, including how to get a Blue Badge and (my personal favourite) report treasure, wreck material or archaeological finds.

Finding our voice

To our delight, we found that structuring our content in this way allows Google Assistant to understand a series of voice commands. For example, asking: “How do I learn to drive a car?” and “When can I start?” returns results from GOV.UK.

It’s worth noting we did not do any extra work to allow this to happen. It’s a natural consequence of structuring the content on GOV.UK well. It proves by sorting out the fundamentals we can make government understandable for humans and machines.

But it doesn’t mean we’re not also actively looking at voice interactions on GOV.UK. Measurement company ComScore suggests 50% of web searches by 2020 will be through voice interaction, so clearly this is something we need to focus on.

We need to approach voice services in a consistent and scalable way. So rather than write code for a specific platform, we’re working on the best way mark up our site so any voice service can use GOV.UK as a source of simple, speakable answers.

We’re also talking to the teams that build the knowledge engines behind services like Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and Siri. We want make sure they can use the canonical open data that we publish. We’ll blog soon about how we’ve been approaching this work.

The systems common voice services operate with

Helping government understand people

As well as making it easier for people to do what they need on GOV.UK, we’re upping our game on generating user insights from it. This is data that can help government improve content and services.

We’ve built a data warehouse and for the first time we’re starting to combine different types of data including:

• user feedback
• traffic
• search queries
• publishing activity
• measures of content quality such as length and the reading age someone would need to have in order to understand the content

Using our single taxonomy of everything, we’ll also soon be able to generate data reports by whole topics, or specific sub-topics like “having a child, parenting and adoption”. These can tell us, publishers and senior leaders in Whitehall about where users are succeeding or failing and where the gaps are in our service provision.

Future proofing government’s content

As I said at the start of this post, GOV.UK is more than just a website - it’s the home of government’s content.

Our core business is organising, unifying and simplifying government services and information so users can find and understand what they need, in whichever way they need: from our website, other sites and apps using our API, email, voice or whatever technology comes next - and making sure government can best serve these needs.

The work we are doing now is preparing for how people will interact with government, future proofing its content and making sure we will always be able to serve user needs.

Neil Williams is the head of GOV.UK.

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GDS is here to help government build services that are effective to use and cost-effective to provide.

In this post, we’ll talk about how we’re making sure government services are as inclusive as possible so that no users are excluded.

Focusing on users across the whole service

GDS has always worked to make government services user-centred and inclusive, focusing on accessible online transactions with offline-assisted digital support.

We’re now looking at how to apply these ways of working to whole services, because users care less about doing things online than about doing them as easily and effectively as possible.

As the 2017 government transformation strategy says, scope of service transformation must expand to:

...recognise that government delivers services through a variety of channels (including online, telephone and face to face) [and] ensure government can provide content and services, and run projects across organisational boundaries.

A fully inclusive service is one that can be accessed and successfully completed by all its users. They will be able to interact however they need to, regardless of their personal characteristics, situations, capabilities or access needs.

Researching with government teams

Last year we carried out some research to find out the challenges government teams faced when building effective services for all users of all channels and how we could best support them.

We spoke to a number of people across departments and professions who were involved in designing and delivering government services, interviewing 17 directly across 11 departments and surveying 76 more online.

We asked what they were working on and to what extent they felt able to build services to work for all users.

We found the offline and non-government parts of users’ journeys were far less likely to be user-centred, because often they were not based on good research and testing.

We also found service teams needed help to:

• join up online and offline interactions into a coherent service
• design offline channels to be user-centred
• avoid KPIs that conflict across channels
• measure the quality of multi-channel services
• collaborate with the right people across organisations and professions, particularly those interacting with their users offline

We need to understand how user-centred design techniques and the digital practices, cultures, processes and technologies of the internet era can be applied to the full scope of end-to-end services. We’re examining how GDS products, tools and services can best support government to build inclusive services across all channels.

User journeys can be complex and include a range of offline channels including telephone services

Matching design scope to users’ scope

Service inclusivity is firstly a challenge of scope and scale.

Services built without understanding the full context of users’ complex, multi-channel, multi-organisation and end-to-end journeys - nor the various ways in which they interact - are more likely to be exclusive and cost more to run.

Service teams agree that inclusivity isn’t just about making websites accessible, providing assisted digital support, or only thinking about users with certain characteristics. Although of course these are vital components.

In practice, delivering an inclusive service means:

• including non-transactional elements - for example verbal, information, content and campaigns
• delivering online and offline
• collaborating across government departments and professions, as well as non-government organisations
• seeking to understand and remove barriers for all users

Our research identified the tools available to service teams - including guidance, patterns, support, measurements, assurance models and communities - are currently insufficient to build in this way. The key reason for this is because they are products with a narrowly scoped approach to user-centred service design.

Thinking outside government

We’ve also been working with Citizens Advice, the UK’s largest independent advice provider. They give advice face-to-face, over the phone, by email and through web chats.

Together, we’ve analysed data on their advice and created a set of dashboards to help government understand users’ end-to-end journeys and the real-world issues they experience.

We are also starting to analyse the feedback we received from the GOV.UK satisfaction survey, to help us understand where else people go for help.

Some 23% of people completing the survey between 31 January 2016 and 22 May 2018 required help from a non-GOV.UK source to do what they needed to do.

Other sources they used for help included:

What we’re doing next

Our plans include:

• creating new guidance on designing inclusive services for everyone, including users with protected characteristics. This guidance makes clear the risk of excluding users is reduced when government understands all the steps and channels users need and designs services around the reality of their lives
• making assisted digital guidance clearer that it is just one part of approaching service inclusivity
• working with government’s user research and service design communities to create a model for service teams to better understand the reasons why a user can face barriers to government services - this will go beyond segmentations of assisted digital, digital inclusion and accessibility

We’d love to learn more about what other teams across the public sector are doing to make their services more inclusive.

If you have examples of designing more inclusive services that you’d like to share, please do post them below.

Ben Carpenter is Inclusive Services Lead at GDS. Follow Ben on Twitter and don't forget to sign up for email alerts.

If you want to find out more about the work of the Government Digital Service, we’re speaking and running workshops at Civil Service Live around the country in June and July. Come along to hear from and talk to us.

The UK’s local authorities are crucial providers of public services. From keeping the streets clean or dealing with planning applications, to providing support for isolated or vulnerable people. Local authorities are often the front line of public service provision, helping people do the things they need to do.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has shown how the application of digital culture, practice and technologies to central government can make government work better for users. This has often involved close collaboration with local authorities who share many of the same organisational and delivery challenges.

That’s why GDS is proud to be a co-publisher of the Local Digital Declaration, which launches today. This is a set of guiding principles that will help support local authorities of all sizes or capabilities to deliver digital services and platforms that meet the needs of citizens.

The 5 principles

The Local Digital Declaration is a joint initiative from GDS and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).  There are more than 30 co-publishers ranging from local authority influencers to central departments. In particular, GDS has worked closely with Crown Commercial Service.

The declaration talks about what good digital transformation looks like and contains 5 principles that describe what organisations can do to achieve this.

The principles are:

• we will go further to redesign our services around the needs of the people using them - this means continuing to prioritise citizen and user needs above professional, organisational and technological silos
• we will ‘fix our plumbing’ to break our dependence on inflexible and expensive technology that doesn’t join up effectively - this means insisting on modular building blocks for the IT we rely on and open standards to give a common structure to the data we create
• we will design safe, secure and useful ways of sharing information to build trust among our partners and citizens, to better support the most vulnerable members of our communities and to target our resources more effectively
• we will demonstrate digital leadership, creating the conditions for genuine organisational transformation to happen and challenge all those we work with to embrace this declaration
• we will embed an open culture that values, incentivises and expects digital ways of working from every member of our workforce. This means working in the open wherever we can, sharing our plans and experience, working collaboratively with other organisations, and reusing good practice

Over the summer we'll be taking the declaration around the country in roadshows and in the autumn all local authorities will have the opportunity to sign up.

How the declaration came about

Chris Ferguson (left), GDS Director for National, International & Research and Paul Maltby, MHCLG Director and Chief Digital Officer, were part of the team that developed the declaration

The Local Digital Declaration has been written in partnership between central and local government and stems from research carried out at GDS.

Last year the GDS National, International and Research team ran a discovery project in the regions outside of London. This looked into what public services around the country wanted and needed in terms of digital support.  

While some local authorities are leading the way with forward-thinking digital transformation programmes, others are more isolated and have had less access trusted guidance and support to match their digital ambitions.  

So, working in partnership with MHCLG, we started to develop the Local Digital Declaration. A number of workshops took place all over the UK over six months and several drafts of the declaration were circulated, commented on and then revised.  

The result is a co-authored, co-published document which we hope many local authorities will sign up to with confidence, knowing it has been developed within their community.

What GDS will offer local authorities

GDS has been participating at the current Local Digital Roadshows to help explain support provided

Over this summer, the Local Digital website will be developing to include case studies, best practice, templates and other practical tools for local authorities to access. GDS will complement this by providing practical examples, content and links which will provide centralised access for local authorities to GDS tools and services.  

In particular we will:  

• make our messaging and payment platforms - GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay - available for local authorities to use
• raise awareness and offer training in best practice procurement and showcase the Digital Marketplace
• consult on and rework the Digital Service Standard to be applicable to local authorities
• make access to Open Standards easier and create a register of Open Standards
• link GDS Academy training opportunities to principles of the Local Digital Declaration
• consult local authorities in the creation of attribute exchange standards

Support for local authorities when and where they need it

We have also recruited two new regional relationship managers, one based in Leeds and one in Bristol. They'll be building relationships in their regions and provide a route to GDS support based on public service sector needs.

They'll also listen to wants and needs and then link local authorities to the relevant teams in London, or send the teams out where needed.

In the same way that GDS is here to support central government departments in their digital transformation, we want to be here for local authorities too. We want to offer them the support and guidance they need so that, working together, we can make things better for users.

Chris Ferguson is the GDS Director for National, International & Research.

Read the Local Digital Declaration in full and sign up to help improve local services.

You can also find out when the next roadshow event is and register to attend.

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The Government Digital Service (GDS) is here to help government work better for everyone. That means helping departments transform digitally, making services work better for users and saving money for taxpayers. As previously announced by Minister for Implementation Oliver Dowden, from 2016 to 2017 GDS helped departments save £450m through our engagement.

We do this by visiting numerous departments around the UK - and we achieved around 800 visits last year. It’s an easier way to help the build of digital services by seeing how they're built first hand and enables us to appreciate and understand the barriers and constraints, and sometimes the opportunities on site.

Change is often hard and takes time. Since 2016 we’ve blogged on how we’ve been working with departments to make things better on two of the biggest delivery barriers in every large organisation: governance and financial approvals.

We set ourselves the challenge of embedding governance and approvals to enable better and faster delivery outcomes. The recently published Cabinet Office spending controls guidance helps simplify governance based on standards and peer reviews. But what does this mean for government and the user?

Solving the hardest problems

The last time we spoke about the value that Standards and Assurance brought, we announced the amount government departments saved. Savings can be achieved in a variety of ways, but we’ve been listening to feedback and looking at how to make digital services simpler, clearer and much faster.

At the same time, we want to help solve the hardest problems and show what good looks like, often through collaboration across government and across sectors globally.

We help departments through digital service assessments and spending controls. In alignment with the new pipeline approach we spoke about recently, the hope is to bring the conversation forwards in terms of thinking and design. The approach has already demonstrated extra value to departments in its adoption and engagement.

How spending controls enabled DWP’s digital transformation

Since the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) implemented the new pipeline approach, thousands of team hours spent navigating the previous spending controls process have been returned to where they belong – delivering transformation.

DWP is the UK’s largest IT estate and as it’s transforming at a pace, it was a natural early partner to re-imagine its governance and financial approvals.

DWP Digital implemented the new spending controls and digital pipeline process in April 2017 as part of the pilot. Straight away, we developed a real partnership through open and transparent engagement and by working closely across government. GDS colleagues have open access and our digital delivery teams welcome feedback as an opportunity to iterate and learn.

We’ve implemented a Digital Assurance Board and Joint Assurance Review meeting as part of our governance controls where we discuss the Digital Pipeline with the Cabinet Office and Her Majesty’s Treasury. We also welcome digital colleagues from other departments to provide updates at the Joint Assurance Review meeting on how their transformational project is progressing.  

To ensure we’re continuing to learn from one another, we provide spend control updates to DWP. Through this we’ve also developed close working relationships with other government departments where we can share experiences and continue the learning journey.

'Given thousands of hours back'

The overarching benefit to DWP Digital delivery is the reduced overhead and time costs of governance and assurance for our digital teams. That enables faster achievement of business outcomes, accelerates digital transformation and crucially creates a collegiate learning culture.

The pipeline approach enables learning from other departments by sharing visibility of their planning and including their representatives on our decision making boards.

The DWP has been pleased with the implementation of the new process, with Digital Director Tamara Bruck praising how much time had been saved over the past year.

She added: “This time last year, we were spending time in numerous governance reviews. The implementation of the new Cabinet Office spending controls process has given thousands of hours back to colleagues so we can focus on delivering for millions of people who use our services.”

The next time you think about the value of good assurance, think about what £450m in savings could mean to your department!

Chad Bond is GDS' Deputy Director for Standards Assurance, Chris Marks is a DWP Portfolio Manager and Chris Francis is a DWP Senior Portfolio Manager.

We’ll be sharing further information with the Standards and Assurance community on the rollout and how it may affect them and their individual departments. If you work in government, you can join the GDS Advice and Assurance community.

Are you working on how to manage the process, governance and data around digital spend within portfolios? We’re working on procuring a tool and would like to talk to people who we could share it with.

We are particularly interested in local and devolved governments (we’re already building for the user needs of central government). We've already started conversations with a few organisations about whether we can share, but we'd like to talk to more.

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The work of GDS has - and continues to - influence digital governments around the globe. Our commitment to openness, enshrined in our Digital Service Standard, our blogs, our ways of working and coding in the open, have played a huge role in amplifying our impact.   

Thousands of miles away we have 2 GDS alumni in Canada and 2 more in Australia - below they share what they’ve learnt from working abroad, what they’ve contributed and discuss GDS’ impact.

Canada

The nation may be a parliamentary democracy like the UK, but it’s 41 times the geographical size of Britain with half the population. The country also operates bilingually, both in French and English.

The newly set up Canadian Digital Service (CDS) has been creating user centric government services since its launch in July 2017.

Ross Ferguson - Head of Product at CDS

Ross was here at the beginning of GDS and after a short advisory visit across the Atlantic, he was excited to join CDS at the same early stage of their development. His experience as GDS' Head of Product Community has been helpful to in growing CDS's product workflows.

“It’s the same but different,” he says. “It is familiar, but there is quite a lot which is unique and stretching.”

For example, in Canada driving licences are issued provincially rather than nationally, which leads to a more complex user journey. Ross jokes confusion abounded also, until he realised that in Canada the “pavement” refers to the road where cars drive.

He says the UK can learn a lot from Canada’s multilingual government operation to help our offerings in Welsh and English: “Perhaps they’ve not got the experience that we do of digital service delivery, but multilingual service delivery is something that they’ve been doing forever”.

Olivia Neal - Executive Director for Digital Change, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

Olivia is one year into a 3-year secondment to Canada and loves her work in Ottawa. “My job has been brilliant - it’s been broad and varied," she says.

Previously responsible for the Digital Service Standard and Spend Controls teams at GDS, she’s been able to use her experience to change cultures, advise and develop services.

Small cultural changes include making the work environment feel more collaborative. She was the first person to turn down having her own office, which she jokes “people didn’t really know what to make of!”.

Olivia says GDS could learn from the Canadian way of engaging with civic tech groups. In Ottawa there’s more association with “civic tech groups and people on the outside, who want to get involved and make government things better”.

She emphasises the power of GDS’ sway globally: “What GDS does is hugely influential and I think it’s really important that GDS keeps being open about what it's doing - because it’s not just about UK government, it’s being used by people around the world to change things.”

Australia

In 2015, the government announced a new Digital Transformation Office (DTO) to improve how it delivered services online and is now known as the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA).

Jordan Hatch - former Senior Digital Adviser at DTO

Jordan moved to Australia in 2015 when DTA was being set up and he blogged about his approach after he’d been there 15 months.

He had been at GDS since 2011, and was excited to help recreate a version in a different country.

“Everything we did was in the guise of GDS,” he describes the approach. The team was able to use GDS’ user research and experiences, meaning it could “really stand on the shoulder of giants”.  

For example, the work on the digital marketplace used the source code from the UK and enabled quick delivery.

Jordan says GDS’ work meant the team could invest their time more smartly in Australia specific work.

Annette Sweeney - Head of GDS Academy

Annette heads up the GDS Academy in London, but a holiday and career break led to a job in Australia as an International Digital Expert.

She’s been developing a Leading Digital Transformation training course which is aimed at senior leaders and is a great way to help change culture at an organisation. It’s run by the Australian Public Service Commission, which prepares its workforce for the future.

“What they’ve done around the leadership programme is pretty impressive,” she says. The course aims to build a capable and competent workforce for the digital age and help departments create digital futures.

Annette has also encountered the positive influence GDS has had in Australia. “I think a lot of people are in awe of GDS and how it’s engaged with departments and agencies and worked with them.”

If you are Civil Service staff and want to find out more about overseas secondment, you can read more on the Cabinet Office Intranet.

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"Content designers translate difficult concepts into easy to understand content."

"We help people get the information they need, in the way they need it."

"Without content designers, government would be impossible for people to understand."

These comments are how content designers participating at #ConCon7, the seventh cross-government content conference, describe their value to government. Their job is to make government services and information simpler, clearer and faster for citizens and businesses.

We made the quotations into a set of posters to inspire colleagues across the content community and wider government.

According to feedback, ConCon7 was the best, most inspirational and widest ranging event yet. We had presentations from 14 organisations across government and 86% of attendees said they saw or heard stories that inspired them. We’ll dive deeper into the feedback further down in the blog.

Sessions covered everything from a content designer’s role on a multidisciplinary team, to how content is evolving with the use of voice search to technical guidance, design patterns and data dashboards.

Participants took part in visual impairment simulations to highlight accessibility requirements and workshops on how to create data-informed content to meet user needs. They also had the opportunity to listen to some prison radio adverts - created by content designers and recorded by prisoners to raise awareness of the new prisoner money service - and discover the impact it’s had.

“I didn't know how many different types of content designers work within government, so it really opened my eyes to what future possibilities for work could be”, one participant said of the event.

Keynote speaker Catherine Miller, Director of Policy at DotEveryone, shared the results of the Digital Attitudes Report and spoke about our role in producing responsible technology.

Those attending on the day enjoyed the range of work on show, with one delegate saying: “It’s given me greater clarity over the breadth of what content professionals do and how big the network and profession is.”

Another added: “I've gained more appreciation for the impact that content design can have on users.”

Participants took part in visual impairment simulations

A vibrant community of practice

Some 260 people gathered on the day, which was co-created and run by more than 80 people. 80% of attendees said they learned a new skill or technique. This is testament to the power of peer learning in a vibrant cross-government community of practice. Here are some of the other positive comments from the day:

“I got some good ideas on how to approach some problems I have and I am sharing them with my team.”

“Great to see how different people approach their work, with both common and unique challenges.”

ConCon7 in numbers

In comparison to ConCon6, the number of organisations that showcased their work increased by 40% - from 10 to 14. This was largely through showcasing work from a pilot peer learning programme that ran earlier this year.

The number of organisations which participants came from also grew 20% from 56 to 65 after we introduced a lottery system for fairer ticket allocation.

The percentage of participants who said they heard something inspiring increased from 74% to 86%. Specific mentions went to the keynote, the real-world impact of good content and the range of content work demonstrated by their cross-government peers.

The number of participants marking the event 7/10 or higher increased from 85% to 90%.

“This is an important, well-run event that helps us all learn and get new skills, and feel part of a community”, one of the content designers said.

Content design as a career path

We are currently reviewing the content design curriculum, to make sure we’re still offering the right learning opportunities to meet the needs of GOV.UK publishers and the cross-government content community.

“I didn't realise how many content designers there were across government, and that there are career options within government,” one attendee said.

We hosted a stand at ConCon7 to ask people what good learning looks like to them, where in the UK could we host learning opportunities, what their main challenges were and what level of peer support they had access to.

People said they wanted their learning experiences to:

• be closer to where they are based
• use more digital tools
• include more time working with peers
• include opportunities to co-design the curriculum
• have a good balance of theory and practical
• include opportunities to discuss real world problems

So we’ll be working to factor that into the design of future learning products and programmes.

Thank you to everyone from the content community who made the day possible.

Laura Billings is a content community manager at GDS. You can follow Laura on Twitter.

Read the ConCon7 full feedback report and see the ConCon7 schedule.

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An online service is an important part of someone’s experience when they interact with government, which is why GDS created the GDS Service Manual.

We don’t want users to have to know which part of government is responsible for what they need. We just want them to be able to get what they need quickly and easily.

Currently, the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) content in its end-to-end service - from text messages to leaflets - can be produced by different teams. These teams often work to different guidelines and can sometimes produce a disjointed experience for users.

We held a one-day workshop in Leeds to talk about how GOV.UK content designers could work with DWP to fix this. It was encouraging - everyone in the room wanted to improve the way we work together and how we create content.

Defining the problem

We wanted to explore the problem and agree on why it needed fixing. Two GOV.UK senior content designers joined the workshop with DWP colleagues from operations, strategic communications and digital publishing.

After splitting into smaller groups to get everyone’s views, we defined our problem statement establishing:

• we’re creating multiple solutions for the same problem
• we have multiple standards and style guides and we don’t agree on which we should work to
• this is more important than ever - the amount of people creating content in DWP is increasing and we’re creating content for millions of users

When users get the help they need quickly and easily, we can save government money. We’re determined to fix this!

Identifying past and present challenges

After constructing our problem statement, we held a retro on the experience of working to DWP guidelines. There was a good range of skills and experience in the room.

There are multiple obstacles for iterating and improving content: old technology, legacy content and the lack of a system capturing changes to offline content such as letters. Changes can also be hard and expensive to make.

Colleagues at DWP told us there had already been attempts to standardise guidance for people creating content but it had not worked. We highlighted the need to work closer day-to-day and involve content designers early - as well as valuing their role in planning and managing content - to make it succeed this time.   

There were positives to cover too! We all felt it was important that GDS and DWP were coming together. GOV.UK content designers shared their process for agreeing evidence-based changes to content and publishing guidance, including regular reviews of feedback and discussion on updates. We acknowledged our collective willingness to work together on this to improve the outcome for users.

Overcoming organisational boundaries will mean a big change to how DWP works and a crucial step in its transformation. By making our content consistent we can better meet user needs.

Teams left immediate positive feedback at the end of the workshop.

Our plan

We’ve agreed that we need to create a single, evidence-based style guide for DWP to bring a consistent user experience.

We have started to collate and rationalise the style guides we have, checking they are up to date and comparing their language. After comparing it to GDS style guidelines, we’ll be looking at how to avoid duplication.

We also need to discuss and establish what constitutes ‘evidence’. Each of our teams uses a different type of research to make decisions about content – from academic papers to focus groups and user research. We’ll work with our research specialists to identify a standard of evidence the style guide will be based on.

Charlotte Knaggs, who leads DWP’s Customer Communications and Accessibility team, has praised GDS and DWP coming together to develop the guide.

She said it would “improve the consistency and clarity of the communications and information we provide to our customers and service users”.

This will not be a quick thing to address, but it's worth the investment and is a crucial step towards true end-to-end service design.

Helen Nickols is a senior content designer at GDS and Melanie Cannon is the Head of Content at DWP Digital. Follow Helen and Melanie on Twitter.

You can read GDS guidance on planning and managing digital content to meet the needs of users of GOV.UK.

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GOV.UK exists to make government services and information as easy as possible to find and use.

For that reason, we're not huge fans of PDFs on GOV.UK.

Compared with HTML content, information published in a PDF is harder to find, use and maintain. More importantly, unless created with sufficient care PDFs can often be bad for accessibility and rarely comply with open standards.

Many departments are doing great work to move away from them. For example, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) blogged about how it created and published its strategy in HTML and Public Health England has written about its work to move away from PDFs. 

Content managed by the GOV.UK team in GDS is entirely in HTML and the training, guidance and tools we provide for publishers encourage HTML by default. However, we still have around 200,000 PDFs on GOV.UK and we’re publishing tens of thousands of new ones each month. We’ve heard from GOV.UK publishers and we know there are pressures that can make it difficult to avoid using PDFs.

The default should be to create all content in HTML. If you can’t avoid publishing a PDF, ideally it should be in addition to an HTML version and the PDF must meet accessibility standards and archiving standards. We hope this post will help publishers explain the problems with PDFs to their colleagues and support moving towards an HTML-first culture.

Problems with PDFs

They do not change size to fit the browser

On a responsive website like GOV.UK, content and page elements shift around to suit the size of the user’s device and browser. However, PDFs are not designed to be flexible in their layout. They generally require a lot of zooming in and out, and scrolling both vertically and horizontally. This is especially troublesome with long documents and on small devices like mobile phones.

They’re not designed for reading on screens

People read differently on the web, so it’s really important to create content that is clear, concise, structured appropriately and focused on meeting the user need. A PDF document that was created for offline use will not suit the context of the web and is likely to result in a poor user experience.

It’s harder to track their use

We cannot get as much information from analytics about how people are using PDFs. We can get data on how many times a PDF has been downloaded from GOV.UK, but we cannot measure views of the file offline.

In addition, we cannot get data about how users have interacted with a PDF – for example how long they’ve viewed it for or what links they’ve followed. This makes it harder to identify issues or find ways to make improvements.

They cause difficulties for navigation and orientation

Depending on the user’s device and browser, PDFs might open in a new browser window, new tab or a separate app. Sometimes they automatically download to the user's device. Whatever happens, the user is taken away from the website when they open a PDF. This means they lose the context of the website and its navigation, making it harder for them to go back if they need to.

This is even more of an issue if the user goes directly to the PDF from a search engine. Without the context of the site the PDF is hosted on, they can’t easily browse to related content or search the website.

It’s also worth remembering that although many devices and browsers have PDF viewers built-in - and they are freely available to download - there are still users who do not have them, or cannot download them.

PDFs generally require a lot of zooming in and out and scrolling to read the content on a mobile phone

They can be hard for some users to access

The accessibility of a PDF depends on how it was created. For example, it needs to have a logical structure based on tags and headings, meaningful document properties, readable body text, good colour contrast and text alternatives for images. It takes time to do this properly.

Even if this work is done according to best practice, there’s still no guarantee that PDF content will meet the accessibility needs of users and their technology. Operating systems, browsers and devices all work slightly differently and so do the wide variety of assistive technologies such as screen readers, magnifiers and literacy software.

Some users need to change browser settings such as colours and text size to make web content easier to read. It’s difficult to do this for content in PDFs. You can magnify the file, but the words might not wrap and the font might pixelate, making for a poor user experience. Locking content into a PDF limits the ability for people to make these kind of accessibility customisations.

It’s our responsibility to ensure that our users can access the information we publish. Plus, publishing content in HTML will also reduce the need to supply alternative formats on demand to users who can’t access a PDF.

They’re less likely to be kept up to date

Compared with HTML, it’s harder to update a PDF once it’s been created and published. PDFs are also less likely to be actively maintained, which can lead to broken links and users getting the wrong information. This can be especially problematic if a document has been published in multiple formats. Any changes need to be made to all the versions, meaning more work and more opportunities for error.

In addition, users are more likely to download a PDF and continue to refer to it and share it offline. They may not expect the content in the PDF to change and might not check the website to get the latest information. HTML documents encourage people to refer to the website for the latest version.

They’re hard to reuse

It can be very difficult to reuse content from a PDF by copy and pasting it. The design and layout of the PDF can produce unexpected results, particularly if it has multiple columns, hasn’t been structured correctly, or uses incompatible fonts.

We’re also working on tools to extend the use of our web content - such as a new content API and ways to measure the quality of content. These tools will not work with PDFs. Publishing content in HTML means it will work with new developments like these - and for whatever platforms we might use in the future.

Similarly, users cannot use browser extensions and add-ons such as Google translate on PDF content.

Why do people use PDFs?

Despite all this, there are understandable reasons why PDFs remain popular in government. Below are some of the common reasons for creating PDFs and the counter-arguments GOV.UK publishers may find helpful as they help their colleagues make the shift to HTML.

They’re quick and easy to create

PDFs may seem to be the fastest option because they can be easily created from popular applications that people are already using to author and share documents.

Converting content into HTML takes a bit of time. However, as explained earlier, creating a fully usable and accessible PDF from a source document requires specialist knowledge and can actually take longer than creating the content in HTML.  

Control over the design

Authors and publishers have more control over the layout, design and branding of a PDF. This can be especially important when there is a need to include complex tables and charts, which are sometimes tricky to create in HTML. However, the downside is that there will be people who do not or cannot access the content. Plus, the content will not benefit from the simple and consistent design of GOV.UK that’s been tested and optimised for users and is trusted as a credible source of information.

The DVSA designed and published its strategy in HTML

They’re easy for people to download and print

While this is certainly true, you can print HTML web pages just as readily. And modern operating systems and browsers also make it easy to download or save web content. And as mentioned earlier on, it’s not ideal for users to download documents as they can quickly become out of date.

They have the feel of a stand-alone product

We know from GOV.UK publishers that they’re often sent content for publishing that is already in PDF format. This might happen because authors want control over the final content and design - and PDFs are easy for them to create.

It can also be because the document was primarily created for offline use - after all, government is still very paper based. There’s a common feeling that a PDF publication is a more tangible and credible ‘product’ compared to a HTML publication.

These are understandable reasons, but they’re an outcome of an ingrained print culture and outdated content production processes. Government is transitioning towards a digital first culture, but old habits and ways of working take time to change.

What we’re doing to help

We'll continue to improve GOV.UK content formats so it's easy to create great-looking, usable and accessible HTML documents.

We also intend to build functionality for users to automatically generate accessible PDFs from HTML documents. This would mean that publishers will only need to create and maintain one document, but users will still be able to download a PDF if they need to. (This work is downstream of some higher priorities, but is on the long-term roadmap).

We cover the main problems with PDFs in the training that all GOV.UK publishers have to do. Discussion about these issues continues on the government content community’s Basecamp and at community events.

Neil Williams is the head of GOV.UK.

We want to hear from you. If you’re a GOV.UK publisher and have any suggestions for improvements that would help you to publish in HTML rather than PDF, please let us know.

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Earlier this year we hosted an industry engagement event for the Global Digital Marketplace. The event showcased our plan to work with UK suppliers to transform government procurement in emerging economies and create new opportunities in overseas markets.

Since then, we have visited 6 countries to assess the feasibility of working with them, and we discussed our ambitions with digital, data and technology professionals across the UK government at Sprint 18.

We’re now ready to open our first opportunity for suppliers, so we want to share what we’ve done so far and tell you how you can take part.

Early market engagement

At our first Open Procurement for a Digital Government event last September, we introduced the Global Digital Marketplace project and the work we’re doing to develop an international procurement reform playbook - a working practice document - with other collaborating governments, supported by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

At our follow-up event in April, we hosted a full house of 50 guests representing a diverse range of organisations from large suppliers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to management consultancies, academic institutions and international bodies.

We also heard from leaders in the fields of digital transformation, digital government, international collaboration and international trade.

Digital Marketplace Director Warren Smith speaks to delegates about his ambitions for the programme at a market engagement event in April

Our guests echoed the value of sharing between governments to learn from each other’s experiences and stimulate emerging technology markets. They also highlighted the importance of capability building for procurement professionals to ensure the success of any procurement reform project.  

We discussed the opportunity to use case studies, where similar measures have been implemented successfully elsewhere. For example, the ProZorro platform in Ukraine and Open Contracting in Mexico. Some suppliers also offered to share their experience of using the Digital Marketplace in the UK with their counterparts in emerging markets.

Several challenges were highlighted which we need to address. Most notably, the upfront costs of working abroad could be a barrier to SMEs seeking to participate. GDS will need to take an active role in making new opportunities discoverable to suppliers who are yet to break into emerging markets.  

We want to make this an inclusive project from start to finish, so we will hold further industry events as the work progresses. The feedback that we capture from suppliers through these engagements will continue to shape our approach to delivery.  

How can suppliers take part?

The first opportunity for suppliers to take part in the Global Digital Marketplace programme has now been published.

We are also looking for a small team to help create content for the launch of the playbook, to be showcased at the annual OECD conference in October in Seoul. The playbook will also be delivered to other governments as part of the Global Digital Marketplace programme.

If you’re a supplier on the Digital Outcomes and Specialists 2 framework and interested in taking part in this exciting project, you can find out more about the bidding process, ask questions and apply on the Digital Marketplace website.

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I’m the Community Manager at GDS and my role is to look at how we use our different social media channels.

GDS is very active on social media. We use it to talk to people about what we’re doing - working in the open, to listen and engage with people online and to tell stories or publish content that would work better on these channels than in a blog post.

Our main social media channels are:

• Twitter - where we post regularly and talk to our followers
• LinkedIn - which we use to talk about job opportunities at GDS as well as give updates on our latest work and events
• Instagram - where we post images of our projects and show what it’s like to work at GDS

Our Twitter and LinkedIn channels are reasonably well-established and the platforms are quite mature. Instagram, by contrast, is fast-growing . It hit one billion monthly users earlier this year. And new features such as Instagram TV offer lots of different opportunities for people to use it.

I wanted to share with you a bit about how we use Instagram and why we do it.

It’s a visual channel

This is an obvious but very important point. The content on Instagram is predominantly photographs, graphics and video. This means that the types of things we post about tend to be visually led.

For example we post a lot of our graphic design work, such as these posters we made for the ConCon7 event:

And films about our events and projects - like this film about Sprint 18 from earlier this year.

We’re very fortunate to have an in-house creative team who work on photographs and films for us. You can see some of their work on our Flickr and YouTube accounts.

But even if you do not have this resource, good content can come from anywhere. Alex Torrance, one of our designers, took this photo of one of his early sketches for GOV.UK.

And while images are obviously very important on Instagram, do not forget the power of words too! It’s very important that each post has a clear and descriptive caption and we’re using the right hashtags to make sure our posts can be seen by as many people as possible who might be interested in them.

It helps us showcase events

At GDS we organise and speak at a lot of events, and we find Instagram is a really useful channel to help us showcase these events.

For example, it helps us to promote events we run, such as Sprint 18, and it also helps us showcase what we’ve done at them.

We often produce collateral for events and Instagram helps us shine a spotlight on them. Many of these posters and stickers can be downloaded from our Tumblr account and reused, so Instagram is a good way of showing people what’s available.

We recently posted images of the posters we created for the International Design in Government conference.

And Instagram also offers a great way for people to continue conversations after events or to revisit what was said. Hashtags, like #Sprint18, can gather together all the conversations around an event.

We can go behind the scenes

With any channel you use, it’s worth thinking about what particular type of content suits it best. With Instagram we find we get a lot of engagement (likes and comments) on behind-the-scenes type posts.

These show what day-to-day working is like at GDS or show the work that has gone into a project. Successful posts have highlighted internal events that we’ve held such as a BAME Network lunch.

Or even just what people have drawn on the walls:

This is the type of content that might not work quite as well on Twitter or might not be substantial enough to write a whole blog post about. But for a short, visual post on Instagram it’s perfect.

We use it with other channels

I’ve talked about how we can use Instagram as a standalone channel, but it’s also really important to think about how it links to your other channels. Just like our blog posts or any other form of communications, Instagram posts are often just one part of a bigger, multi-channel campaign.

For example, when GOV.UK marked its fifth birthday last year we ran Instagram posts alongside lots of other content such as Tweets and blog posts. There were also articles in the press.

If you’re running multichannel campaigns it’s important to think about what content you’re using where and also the hashtags you’re using in each place. With Twitter there are obvious restrictions on the number of hashtags you can use because of the word count, but on Instagram there is opportunity to use more. We used quite a few to talk about Sprint 18.

We can have a conversation with our audience

Instagram - and in particular the Instagram Stories feature - gives you the chance to talk to your audience and for them to talk to you.

We’re currently using Instagram Stories to host a series of conversations about what it’s like to work at GDS. The people taking part in this are service designer Kate Ivey-Williams, technical architect Maisie Fernandes and senior developer Ruben Arakelyan.

Anyone on Instagram can ask questions about their work and they'll then take to Instagram Stories to record a short film answering them.

Readers can ask our team questions to find out more about their role.

You can follow this series on the GDS Instagram page. 

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Three years ago there were just a handful of service designers working in the UK government. Now, there are around 50 working across different departments.

Service designer is now a recognised job title in government and organisations across the public sector realise the value that a user-centred approach to whole services can bring.

At the Government Digital Service (GDS) we now have 12 service designers working in various areas, including GOV.UK, GOV.UK Verify, the GovTech Catalyst and Service Communities. We meet as a team for lunch every Wednesday to talk about our work, discuss ideas and spot opportunities for collaboration.

To build on this, we’ve set up a community of service designers working across government. The aim is to further embed service design – and service designers – into everything government does.

Here’s how we set up the community and what we’ve done so far.

Kicking things off

In June 2017, the heads of design and lead service designers from a number of  departments and agencies – including myself – got together to talk about how service design worked in their organisations.

We looked at challenges and successes and talked about the similarities and differences in our working practices and structures.

A half-day workshop helped us understand how we can work better together and what service designers at GDS can do to help colleagues in departments.  

Starting meetups

A few weeks after that we ran the first cross-government service design meetup at GDS.

Twenty-five service designers from 8 departments came together to discuss their work with colleagues and explore what service design means across government.

We found that lots of the attendees work independently of other service designers. Sometimes they are the only service designer in their entire location, or even department. Because of this, they were glad to see they’re part of a bigger change in how government operates and becomes more user-centric.

The service design meetup is a smaller spin-off from the bigger design meetup, which runs every 6 weeks. With a narrower scope and fewer participants, it allows a more personal exchange.

We ran our second meetup 3 months later. This time we had a specific theme about measuring good services and service design, and discussed things like how to evaluate service outcomes, not just design outputs.

Making meetups regular and more open

From the first 2 meetups we ran, we saw a real value in having a regular face-to-face exchange for service designers around government. So we decided to turn the meetups into a quarterly event.

We held the first 2 meetups at the GDS offices, but after feedback it was being perceived as a GDS-run event only for service designers - which was not what we intended - we made some changes.

We decided to:

• run the meetups across the country, not just in London
• co-organise each meetup with a different department, so it wouldn’t just be GDS running it
• open the meetup to everyone involved in designing services – not just people who had a service designer job title

We have run 2 more meetups since then.

We partnered with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on a meetup in Leeds, which looked at policy and service design and how these areas could work better together. And we partnered with the NHS to run a meetup looking at how service design and operations overlap.

We also discussed the criteria for what good service design looks like – which you can contribute to using this open Google Doc.

Setting up new service design training

Something the meetups confirmed for us was that service design is not always a well-understood term and there was a lack of knowledge about what it really meant. While service design is covered briefly in the 3-day design training we run, we had never offered dedicated service design training before. So we decided to set this up.

In January this year, we launched a one-day Introduction to Service Design training course. This is aimed at people who work in or with services teams and are interested in service design.

We took an active learning approach to develop and run the training, and participants are introduced to a range of topics, concepts and skills. We discuss what a service is, what service design in government entails, how service designers work with other disciplines and what they do.

We run the training in London every other month and, thanks to colleagues in DWP and the NHS, it’s also available in Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle. You can sign up to our next courses in Blackpool on 23 August or in London on 6 September.

In addition, we are currently trialling a shadowing programme for people interested in picking up more service design-related skills.

We’re also working on a mentoring scheme for people who’ve taken the training and want to either become service designers or apply service design-related techniques in their current role. We’ll be blogging about both these things soon.

How to be a part of the community

If you’re interested in any of this, there are 3 main ways to be part of the cross-government service design community:

• come on the Introduction to Service Design training course
• join the #servicedesign Slack channel and the next peer support call on 15 August
• come to the next cross-government Service Design Meetup in Bristol on Friday 31 August

Martin Jordan is the Head of Service Design at GDS.

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Since we created the GDS Social Media Playbook, the number of users on social media has grown exponentially.

In 2015, Instagram had 400 million worldwide users. Today there are 1 billion Instagram users. YouTube also has more than a billion users - about one-third of all people on the internet.

All these users, plus the new features many of the platforms have developed, meant the playbook was due another update.  

We deliberately kept this published as a playbook, “a notional range of possible tactics in any sphere of activity”, so we can regularly update it to reflect the constantly evolving social media landscape.

It’s our way of promoting best practice and our recommendations, but it’s not intended to be an exhaustive guide for all public sector organisations.

The key changes include updates to our Instagram and YouTube guidance, scheduling, referencing tools and video content, which you can read more on below. Lots of the original advice remains relevant - including the objectives and community management section - and has merely been refreshed.  

Instagram

We have started to experiment with Instagram Stories to allow our audience to find out more about our staff

One of areas we focused on updating was our Instagram channel @gdsteam. The platform’s Stories feature is something we're newly experimenting with. We’ve found it a successful way of engaging potential future GDS employees to ask questions on what working here is like.

The Playbook has screenshots of what works well for the GDS Instagram audience and advice such as posts should ideally have 9 hashtags.

YouTube

Our refreshed YouTube channel

GDS’ YouTube channel has undergone a revamp, which will be blogged about in the coming months. It has a new look and feel, and we are taking a more strategic approach to creating content.

In addition to the 8 top tips which still hold true, we’re focusing more on analytics and optimising the video descriptions for search engine optimisation (SEO).

Other updates

While the entire Playbook has been given an update, these other sections have particularly been given an overhaul:

• video and audio content
• community management
• creating an editorial calendar
• social media listening and setting up a new channel

The GDS Social Media Playbook is designed to evolve and adapt based on trends, user needs and the feedback of those who use it.

We’re also keen to learn about the work other public sector organisations are doing in this area so please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Louise Mullan is the Community Manager at GDS.

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