Huge thanks to Helen Hardy from HMRC for writing this guest post. Helen has worked in the team managing businesslink.gov.uk since January 2009, and she writes here about the evolution of businesslink.gov.uk and what the site’s closure means to the team.
Much has been written here and elsewhere about Directgov, but today, with thanks to GDS for inviting me, I want to talk about GOV.UK’s other predecessor, businesslink.gov.uk, which came to its contractual end yesterday.
Businesslink.gov.uk was launched by the Small Business Service in 2004, to support the network of Business Link face-to-face advisors established during the 1990s. Over time, it evolved to become the primary government support and information channel for businesses – a remit set by Sir David Varney’s Service Transformation report in 2006.
In 2007, HM Revenue & Customs took on the management of those websites and the change programme that saw the merger of content and services from 174 sites into business-focused and user tested navigational ‘themes’. This was completed in 2011, when the face-to-face service closed in November that year.
The use of the word ‘websites’ above is not a typo – Business Link online was a family of sites consisting of regional elements and distinctly branded and localised sites for each of the devolved administrations. This family also welcomed new arrivals over time, including major services such as the Contracts Finder; the ability for UK and EU businesses to apply electronically for licences from central and local government; and a ‘behind the scenes’ Enterprise Finance Guarantee reporting service used by banks.
So Business Link has always been a highly cooperative endeavour – between off- and online; regional, devolved and national; a vast range of government stakeholders, contractors and partners who have helped to create the content and services; and most recently with GDS.
Replacing Business Link involved far more than migrating a family of websites, which was the main stated objective. This brings me on to the subject of users.
Change in how government has delivered support and information to businesses over time reflects the change in user behaviour and expectations. For example, businesslink.gov.uk saw a huge increase in the volume of users, as well as increased use of search engines to get people directly to the services they need.
Of course, digital services for ‘businesses’ are really digital services for individuals who are looking for simple, clear and fast interaction with government. And yet there are some significant differences in how those individuals approach government when they have their ‘business’ hat on.
The terms users of Business link searched for
Business people who use government websites are likely to do so frequently. As a citizen I may need to interact with government once a year or less, for example to sort out my car tax or passport. My appetite for looking at anything else when I’m there is likely to be pretty low. As a business user though, I may need to browse a site to find out about my options and obligations when starting up. I am likely to return regularly to carry out transactions, such as filing various tax returns, or to find out what I need to do when taking on new employees. Although I may be happy to find a straightforward answer, I may also want to check out specific details to suit my circumstances. All of which means that my journey through the site and the links I choose to follow are equally as important as the page I land on first.
Through feedback and research, users often told us that they rated businesslink.gov.uk content very highly. Good search results saved them substantial time and money. However complexity, alongside rapidly ageing technology and design, were proving costly and making it harder for the sites to meet user needs.
Our ability to deliver better digital services for businesses is dependent on technology and so it was the right time to move to GOV.UK’s new, open source platform to increase flexibility and reduce costs. As the lead for businesslink.gov.uk strategy it has long been my ambition to see how digital services for business will develop on GOV.UK. It has been a great pleasure to work with GDS on those first, critical steps.
Etienne Pollard at GDS has described the enormous task of analysing user needs, which included all the information and data on businesslink.gov.uk . If there’s one thing I’ve learned when bringing citizen and business content together, it is to remember that the needs of business users are distinctly different. Although businesslink.gov.uk has closed, the responsibility to understand and meet user needs, and the links between those of us who do so, has not. Here’s to the next (business) link in the chain.
Helen Hardy
HMRC Business Link Strategy and Communications
While you tuck into your toffee apple and enjoy the fireworks this evening, make sure you save a few oohs and aahs for us. In ten days’ time, on November 15, the first two government departments will move their corporate publishing onto the Inside Government section of GOV.UK, bringing this currently hidden part of the site out of beta and into live use.
Ahead of that, here’s a reminder of what this bit of the GOV.UK project is all about.
Central government in the UK is made up of nearly 400 organisations, each of which continually publishes information to the web about who they are and what they are doing. That’s things like policy, publications and announcements, spread across hundreds of separate websites.
With a few exceptions (more on that in a later post), we’re bringing all of this corporate publishing activity into a new, single place. On GOV.UK, the name of that that place is Inside Government.
It’s a significant transition programme involving people both here at GDS and in each of these organisations, and we’re doing it in batches. Two departments will join in mid-November, and we’ll be bringing more organisations into the site each month.
As with the replacement of Directgov and Business Link websites a month ago, users will experience an orderly transition, and all existing web addresses will be redirected.
It’s the area where anyone with an interest can go to explore how government works and what it is doing. It contains policy, announcements and publications, grouped by topics and organisations. As such, it’s set slightly apart from the mainstream services and information that went live on 17 October, in a self-contained area of the site with its own navigation and more information-rich content formats. You’ll be able to find it at www.gov.uk/government.
Inside Government makes it simpler, clearer and faster to find out:
Like the 7/8ths of an iceberg below the sea level, it is going to be far the bigger part of GOV.UK. To the majority of its users – the regular and frequent consumers of central government information – it’s the part that they need and will use the most.
Those users are:
Because, for the first time ever, there will be a complete list of everything the government is doing, and you won’t need to know which bit of government is responsible for what in order to find out what the government is doing on any given subject. All government policy, announcements and publications will be in one place, grouped by topics as well as by the organisations which produced them.
And, for the first time ever, there will be a comprehensive list of all central government organisations with a short, easy to understand summary of what they do.
Plus, also for the first time ever, government bodies will be sharing a single, cost-effective technology platform which can be adapted quickly by developers working within government to meet changing user needs, rather than spending millions of pounds with hundreds of suppliers on lots of less adaptable versions of the same thing.
What you’ll see on 15 November is just the beginning. With just two departments live, we will still have a long way to go. But you will definitely see where we’re heading, and the start of a revolution in the way people perceive and experience central government.
I’ve talked before about various aspects of how we build software at GDS, and especially for GOV.UK, but I’d like to take a step back and about one of our early design rules: “tools over content”.
Many of the needs we’re addressing are complicated. If the team building a website only have a generalised ‘content management system’ it can become very difficult to provide people with exactly the information relevant to their situation. As an expectant parent you’re likely to want to know exactly what your eligibility is for leave and benefits. The full details of your entitlements can be very complex depending on due dates, when you started your current job, your employer’s policies and so on. Most users don’t want to consume and interpret all that information themselves, but if the content management tools only allow us to publish text then that’s what users will end up reading.
In building GOV.UK (and establishing GDS) we knew we had to do better than that. We had to do the hard work to make it simple. What is complex as a piece of prose can often be simplified. Asking a few questions can take someone to a very specific and tailored answer. It can also take them directly into the transaction they need to complete. By asking the right questions we can take you straight to what you need to do rather than making you wade through hundreds of words to determine exactly what content applies to you. Even where the answer involves a fair amount of reading we can give people tools to penetrate, navigate and apply all that content. An example of this is our maternity leave planner which will only require most people to enter a couple of dates to find out what leave they can take.
The secret is to have a cross-functional (or cross-disciplinary) team. You need people who understand the needs, the users, the available tools and the creative possibilities. Those people need to be able to challenge one another and collectively refine the solution. If they can do that they will usually come up with something much better than any of them could have achieved alone. That’s been a big part of what we’ve been looking for when we’ve been hiring.
Each of the “formats” we’ve used to shape GOV.UK have emerged out of that cross-disciplinary process. A first iteration of any format or tool is specific to a single need. Future iterations and newly understood needs may identify that format only suits one need, or that there’s scope to clarify and develop it to serve many more needs.
As formats have become more clearly defined we’ve found that content designers drive the formats that are most clearly prose, business analysts drive the smart answers, developers wrangle the more awkward data-driven content and so on. In each and every case, however, it takes a mix of skills to identify what format best solves a need, how we continually refine the formats and when exactly we need to build specific tools.
This morning Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude published the digital strategy, and I wanted to explain why and how it was developed.
The publication of the Government Digital Strategy fulfils a commitment made in the Civil Service Reform Plan (CSRP) announced in June. As the CSRP described, the UK is increasingly a digital nation, one in which people expect high quality, effective digital services.
Currently, too many central government services offer a poor user experience, which leads to low rates of successful completion. To improve quality, those services need to be simpler, clearer and faster, and the Civil Service needs to have the right digital skills embedded at every level to do that.
The digital strategy sets out how this will be achieved.
Since June, the 18 Digital Leaders from across Whitehall departments have been working together to draft the Strategy. It’s not a GDS document; it’s a government-wide strategy. We just held the pen.
The strategy went through multiple iterations, setting out with a shared vision for digital by default (“digital services so straightforward and convenient people prefer to use them”), moving on to a shared high-level narrative and then to a full strategy document. The Digital Leaders network signed off the strategy at the end of September, followed by Ministers giving their feedback and then granting approval for publication.
The strategy contains 14 actions which we have tried to ensure are meaningful and measurable. We recognise that departments are often more different than they are alike, so their departmental digital strategies – due for publication in December – will set out how they will each deliver the actions in light of their own users and services.
We’ll be blogging more about different aspects of the strategy over the next few days. In the meantime, please have a read of the strategy and tell us what you think, either in the comments below, or via @gdsteam.
Creating and agreeing a collective strategy is hard work, but everyone’s contributions have been challenging and constructive throughout. I’d like to thank all the Digital Leaders and their teams for their support. The strategy includes videos of Antonia Romeo from MoJ, and Ian Trenholm from DEFRA, while Phil Pavitt will be sharing some of HMRC’s exciting digital vision on this blog in the near future.
Finally, thanks to the Digital Advisory Board for their wise words of advice, and to the fantastic team at GDS who supported this work.
Back in May, we blogged about the work we were just starting on assisted digital. Today, in the Government Digital Strategy, we commit to taking a cross-government approach to assisted digital, to continuing our work with departments and expert organisations to agree this approach, and to publish it by December.
You can read the details in the strategy and you can see the research we’ve done with people who are online and offline too.
I’ve had lots of conversations about Digital by Default in government and outside. Quite rightly, one of the first things people raise in response to the idea of Digital by Default is that not everyone is online, and that lots of people who are online may not have the skills to do complex things. Here I wanted to say a few things to complement the strategy by putting our ideas about assisted digital in context.
In the case study below, Marketa Mach from Go ON UK talks about what it means to support users while we build digital services.
Some people are offline, but that shouldn’t stop us going Digital by Default.
The definition of Digital by Default in the strategy acknowledges that not everyone is online. In fact, the people who are offline are a big part of Digital by Default.
By Digital by Default, we mean digital services that are so straightforward and convenient that all those who can use them will choose to do so, whilst those who can’t are not excluded.
We think there’s a big opportunity for government to deliver its services digitally to people who are already doing things online – I don’t need to tell you about that again here. But I do want to reiterate that Digital by Default is just that – a default. It’s not ‘digital only’ or ‘100% digital’ for all users and services.
The term ‘assisted digital’ can make people think that it’s another channel, or a new technology. But government already does lots of what, in future, we will think of as assisted digital. We deliver services face to face, for example, in a Jobcentre Plus office or through an intermediary organisation where services are delivered on behalf of government. We deliver services by phone and by post.
Going Digital by Default challenges us to think again about these channels. If digital services are so straightforward and convenient that the people who can use them choose to do so, and if most people in the UK are online (as our research shows they are), we have to ask ourselves what non-digital users need to use our services. Face to face, phone, post and other offline channels become the ways to access services for people who are offline and people who are online but who have lower digital capability.
Having said that, assisted digital is not just about leaving non-digital channels open. We need to think harder than that for a number of reasons.
First, there is an opportunity to use new technologies to offer other ways to use services or help people who can do some of a digital transaction independently, but not all of it.
Second, there are questions about how we deliver it. Front-line staff will continue to be central to delivering assisted digital. But some departments might also want to bring in other resource or technology, and there is an opportunity to collaborate across services.
Third, there are considerations about consistency of provision across services. Last but not least, other channels can be much more expensive than digital so we need to ensure we are using them as effectively and efficiently as possible.
The most important thing I’ve learned about assisted digital so far it that it’s not a challenge we can solve in the abstract. User needs vary across the 650+ central government transactions (although we do think it will be possible to group the services by their assisted digital needs). The needs depend on the particular users of the service – no one service has the exact same user make-up or numbers of online and offline users. And the needs depend on the service itself – how complex or simple the service is affects the levels of support required.
Remember, in many ways we already do assisted digital, and it’s about reconsidering what’s already there as much as creating something new. So we are developing the approach alongside departments developing their digital strategies. We need to think about how we do assisted digital at the same time as we think about how we do Digital by Default, and we will be publishing a shared approach in December.
That publication will only be the start of the journey, and we will continue to work together over the coming months and years as services are transformed to ensure that no one is left behind by our Digital by Default approach.
As you know, today we launched the Government Digital Strategy. I’m part of the team that was tasked with putting these documents online, and from the outset we wanted to do it in a much more comprehensive way than simply uploading a PDF or a Word document. I’m going to explain a bit about how we put it together, from the perspective of a developer.
We wanted the documents to exist online in a form that was both useful for readers and simple for the authors to work on collaboratively. We quickly agreed that sharing Markdown files would be a good approach.
Our first port of call was Jekyll, which is used at GDS extensively for prototyping sites and products, but it wasn’t quite right for what we needed here. While brilliant for turning Markdown files into a blog, Jekyll was going to struggle with our fairly complex documents. We turned instead to Kramdown, a Markdown parser written in Ruby which supports some useful extensions. Kramdown helped us as it:
The next question was how to share and manage the source documents. As a developer, my obvious first thought for anything to do with version management was using Git, with Github for sharing in public. We didn’t want everyone to have to learn how to use Git, but thankfully Github’s online interface allows Markdown files to be edited and committed from the site, eliminating that concern.
It was an interesting experience to see so many different people using Github’s interface to update the content, from hardened developers like myself to policy experts who were totally new to the service. There were a few bumps along the way, which was expected, but overall it was a really smooth experience.
Having these documents online and in the open is great, and the fact that Github keeps a history of these documents is good for transparency; over time, anyone can track the progress of the documents.
Our build process is quite simple. Each document lives in its own folder as a series of Markdown files. We then build these by merging them into one Markdown file, running that through our very own Markdown pre-processor (which does some extra formatting), before they are finally run through the Kramdown compiler and outputted as HTML. I also built a very simple templating and partials system to avoid repeating content. All of this was integrated into a pretty straightforward shell script, meaning anyone who wants to see how it looks can simply run a small shell script and get everything generated for them. The script also handled our assets and produced a ‘built’ folder with everything neatly packaged up.
We used Sass (the “SCSS” variant) for styling, and RequireJS to manage our JavaScript. JavaScript was also used for the charts on the site, along with some clever CSS by Tim which turns regular tables into responsive bar charts.
This system was produced in just under three weeks. Whilst it’s very much geared to the documents published today, our next job is to extract the system into its own package that can then used by different teams for different documents and open-sourced onto Github.
There’s a fair bit of refactoring and reworking to be done, as there is on any system written in a short amount of time, but we’re looking forward to seeing what uses people find for it.
One of the best things about well-designed digital services – shopping, banking, booking flights – is how much more efficient they are for users. But an equally big plus of digital is the efficiency benefits for organisations providing those services. And for the government in particular, digital has huge potential to help us provide better services for less money.
Exactly how much less money is the really exciting part. The government spends about £6bn – £9bn on transactional services every year. The Digital Efficiency Report, which we published alongside the Government Digital Strategy, suggests that if we made these services digital by default, the government could save between £1.7 billion – £1.8 billion every year.
Adoption curve of digital services
This won’t happen straightaway. There is lots of hard work, investment and development needed to make these savings a reality. But digital can make a real difference quickly. The report estimates that over £1.2 billion could be saved through digitisation in this Parliament alone. Some of these savings will help to reduce the deficit. Others will be passed on directly to users in the form of cheaper services.
The Digital Efficiency Report is not the last word on savings from digital services. Our report is based on historic data; examining the savings that have already been gained from going digital. As we see more evidence of the benefits from the government’s new approach to the web, we can revise these estimates – and we expect that revision to be in an upward direction. Alongside this, departments are working on more detailed analysis for the potential efficiency gains from digital services, putting together robust business cases and understanding what needs to be done to unlock real financial benefits.
Alongside the Government Digital Strategy, this work shows that going digital is good news for the public – as service users, and as taxpayers too.
GDS has published the Digital Landscape Research today alongside the Government Digital Strategy. We want to tell you more about the research, and why we did it.
Our design principles put users at the heart of our work at GDS. So when we started work on the Government Digital Strategy, we went straight to user research.
We started by reviewing existing research to see what insight had been gathered on the digital landscape by ourselves and others. This gave us an excellent understanding of people who are online and offline. But we realised there were gaps in our knowledge.
We needed to understand even more about how people use (or don’t use) government digital services and information. To inform our work on assisted digital, we wanted to look in more detail at people who are offline.
To fill these gaps, GDS’s Usability and Insight team commissioned 2CV to conduct independent research to provide a comprehensive view of UK adults’ use of the internet and in particular, the use of online government information and services.
The research was conducted in two parts. The first part was quantitative and the second part was qualitative.
We used a mixed methodology approach for the quantitative stage, using both online interviews and face to face interviews. We chose to do this instead of all face to face interviews because the objective of the research was to understand what people do online and their attitudes towards it, and not to identify how many people are online or offline. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) produces robust quarterly data on the online/offline audience and it seemed unnecessary to replicate this. ONS’s latest internet population data (Q1 2012) was then used to weight our data so that it accurately reflected the number of people who are online in the UK.
The approach for the qualitative stage involved ethnography sessions, peer interviews, and intercept interviews in relevant locations (like libraries, UK Online Centre, and a Skills for Life Centre) to observe people as they used the internet. This approach was used to give a rich understanding of people’s attitudes towards the internet and digital government services, and it also enabled us to witness the issues and problems people face when using government information and services. The findings from these sessions then informed 2CV’s groupings or typologies of non-users of government online information and services.
As indicated in the previous section on weighting, the ONS’s latest internet usage statistics found that 84% of UK adults have used the internet (including 2% who rarely use the internet), and 16% have never used the internet.
As we believe the barriers to going online are largely the same for those who have never accessed the internet as those who access it rarely, we decided to combine these two groups in our definition of the offline audience, concluding that 82% are online, and 18% are offline. This also meant our estimate of those online was conservative, and we didn’t assume more people used the internet than actually did. Furthermore, as indicated in the groupings, not all of the people who are online will be confident internet users.
It’s important to also remember each government service is likely to have a slightly different audience depending on the service it offers. This research gives an overview of the whole population and will be used alongside user data for individual services.
Important findings from the research include:
You can read the main findings from the research now, and also download the full data tables. You can also see how it is being used to inform the Government Digital Strategy.
When we launched the Civil Service Reform Plan in June, I said that the Civil Service of the future must look radically different and I asked civil servants to work together to deliver change while maintaining our core strengths and values.
Our reform plan also made a clear commitment to improve the quality of the government’s digital services, and to do this by publishing a Government Digital Strategy setting out how we would support the transformation of digital services.
We fulfilled that commitment yesterday with the launch of the Government Digital Strategy, Digital Efficiency Report and Digital Landscape Report and I very much welcome their publication.
Improving digital skills in government is a crucial element of our reform agenda and the strategy makes this explicit. In particular, I welcome the move to improve departmental digital leadership with the inclusion of an active digital leader on all departmental executive boards and a commitment to improve digital capability right throughout the civil service. We need to make sure that all departments have the right levels of digital capability in-house, including specialist skills.
The Civil Service Reform Plan also called for robust cross-government management information. This system will enable departments to be held to account by their boards, Parliament, the public and the centre of government. The Government Digital Strategy has reinforced this message with its call for service decisions to be based on accurate and timely management information. In addition, the Government Digital Service is working with departments to publish cost per government transaction data for the biggest government services before the end this year, all of which supports our reform and transparency ambitions.
The Civil Service Reform plan also clearly stated that the public increasingly expects to be able to access government services quickly and conveniently, at times and in ways that suit them. The recent release of GOV.UK as the single domain for government demonstrates our ability to do that. The production of departmental digital strategies is the next exciting step in the journey to make government Digital by Default and I am sure all departments will work collaboratively with the Government Digital Service to ensure we achieve this. I look forward to reading the detailed implementation plans that will underpin those strategies and to witnessing the transactional transformation in government that will happen over the coming years.
Digitisation of government has a wide range of benefits from driving savings and innovation for government to making things easier and more convenient for citizens. I am keen to embrace the concept of Digital by Default not just because it’s the right thing to do to meet the needs of our users, but because if offers completely new ways of working for civil servants.
In the Civil Service Reform Plan we promised that we would work differently and the publication of the Government Digital Strategy is a good example of how we are delivering on that promise. The strategy is a truly digital document; published straight to the web produced by civil servants who are also software coders, content designers and policy experts. That’s a million miles away from the stereotype of mountains of word documents, with closed PDF’s on publication. It’s a sign of the times and it’s the direction of travel for the future.
Government is a major news source. As central government departments begin the transition to GOV.UK they’ll be publishing their news in a single place, and we have a fantastic opportunity to improve the user experience of this high profile content. Here’s how we plan to start doing that.
The first departments move over to GOV.UK on November 15th, to a part of the website we refer to as Inside Government. It’s the beginning of a shared platform for all government publishing activity, which includes news, speeches, statements by ministers and other forms of announcement.
In presenting this content on GOV.UK we are retaining the best of the current model used across departments’ websites, and introducing a number of innovations that will appeal to existing as well as new and lapsed audiences.
In terms of features at launch, you will see:
How news will look on the new pages
Large percentages of the world’s internet users go online for news content everyday. Here in the UK, 52% of UK internet users regularly go online for news and government departments have responded by stepping up the volume and prominence of news content on their sites that’s designed to be consumed directly by a news-seeking public.
News content is easily the most regularly updated content on a government website (often as many as 5 items a day). ‘News’ features prominently in most top nav bars and news content gets pride of place on the main grids or carousels of homepages.
To inform the features that will support departments’ news on GOV.UK, we’ve been avidly analysing the usage and user needs for the news on existing government websites and what we found was fascinating.
Given its importance, throughput and high visibility, we expected that the majority of traffic on department’s sites would be to the news content. When the Inside Government team looked at the data, we found that that isn’t the case. Some organisations were getting as little as 2% of their site traffic to the news, and few were getting much more than a third of their users going to the news.
Why is it that so few users of government sites are going to the content that departments value so highly? How might we make news on GOV.UK more useful and engaging?
We ran a user survey on 12 government sites (10 departments and two agencies) between 25 June – 25 July 2012 and received 606 responses.
60% of respondents said they used government news for professional purposes, while 40% had a personal interest. More than half of respondents (56%) visited government sites daily or weekly for news. Respondents were asked how many government websites they visited for news. Just under half (49%) said they visited between 1 – 5 sites, 35% said they only ever visited one, while 16% said they visited more than five.
Asked why they visit government websites for news content, 54% said that the sites were one of a range of sources they used for news about the government, and 24% said it was because the information was not available elsewhere. For 40% visiting a government news site was about getting the government’s unmediated voice.
Finally, we asked what they would change about the news on government websites. Half of respondents suggested simple improvements to content filtering and search functionality, 35% wanted clearer featuring of key content and 22% wanted simpler page layouts. A quarter of respondents stated that no enhancements were required.
Our survey suggests that there’s a hardcore of users who like the government’s online news. But based on the stats, the majority of users aren’t seeing the relevance and are bypassing the news pages and going to other things. They’re almost certainly missing out, because the content is also about the things they do come to read.
How you’ll be able to filter announcements from across government
Publishing news on their corporate websites is one way government departments manage media relations activity. But as an increasingly important component in that enterprise, we want the transition to GOV.UK to mark a step change in the performance of news content.
We are very excited about working with departments on that challenge. We will pay close attention to the metrics for the news format on GOV.UK, conduct regular user testing, collate feedback and turn this input into regular product iterations.
We will learn from others who are recognised as doing well in this space, such as the White House, as well as paying close attention to other new initiatives, like the work Made by Many has been doing with ITV.
This is one of the exciting areas of government digital publishing in which we think we can make some quick and significant improvements, starting with the release on the 15th. There’s more to come, and we share the details of that on Inside Inside Government tumblr over the coming weeks and months.
I’m Andrew Francis and I’m a policy professional. So is my colleague Sheila Bennett. You might not have heard much from our profession here on the GDS blog recently, but its worth pointing out that the past few weeks have been a real milestone for us: we’ve been coding.
Those of you that have read the recently released Government Digital Strategy will know that it has a clear action to develop digital skills and awareness across all grades within the civil service.
Well at GDS we try to practice what we preach, and the development of the strategy itself provides an example of how some ‘traditional’ civil servants are already learning new digital skills, and crucially, different ways of working.
Sheila and I are not exactly digital novices – Sheila spent many years in senior management roles at Bromley Council where she was responsible for their website (amongst other things) while in the past I managed the UK website of a UN agency. We’d written for websites or about the use of websites, but neither of us had hands on experience in the construction of a website – such as determining the layout, formatting, links etc. We’ve always relied on specialists for that.
However, this strategy has been different. As Sir Bob Kerslake wrote in a recent blog post, digital by default requires civil servants to work in completely new ways. This includes publishing strategies, such as the Government Digital Strategy, as a website rather than published on a website.
One of the most important reasons for that is so that government documents can become part of the web. That way, people can link directly to what we’re saying, rather than forcing people to download long PDFs that aren’t easily incorporated into the wider web.
To make this happen we had to develop new ways of working and eliminate the traditional gulf between ‘policy’ civil servants and the designers and developers. As Jack said in his blog post, we had to work together across disciplines to ensure that the strategy would be presented in a way that would meet user needs.
Sheila and I we were both involved in the lengthy drafting process and in shaping the strategy. Much of the drafting was done via shared Google Docs. But when it came to producing the master version, we sat down with developers like Jack and learnt how to use GitHub.
We edited the document in Markdown, a simple markup language used on GOV.UK. This allowed us to add the copy with some simple additions (bullet points, links, etc) without having to worry too much about formatting it. This was exciting for us because we had already seen the GDS team’s great work on publishing for GOV.UK. This was our opportunity to learn how it was done.
An example of the markdown text edited in Github
Although we were a bit apprehensive at first mastering it didn’t take long, and from this point on we made all the necessary iterations to the strategy in the code itself. This included adding and styling text, changing layout and adding links before merging the text using Git. In fact, Sheila and I became so comfortable using it that we wound up making more edits to the online version of the strategy than anyone else in the team!
This hands-on collaborative approach was critical to making the web publishing approach a success. It saved us time. Rather than spotting something that needed changing and then shouting ‘help’ at busy developers we could log on and simply make the edits ourselves. We were able to try out ideas on text presentation and preview it instantly. It also reduced the likelihood of mistakes when making changes because nothing was lost in translation.
Writing in Markdown and using Git wasn’t hugely complicated, and it bridged the gap both Sheila and I usually experienced between policy and development teams. In addition it helped us to think clearly about how these documents would ‘live’ online.
I suspect departments will increasingly publish their own documents online in a similar way ie as web documents. The experiences of Sheila and myself could just be the start of what will be a new trend in the civil service.
And policy advisors shouldn’t be scared – we can vouch for the fact that in this digital age mastering the skills needed to publish a strategy directly online is pretty straightforward and really worthwhile.
One of the tools we’ve created on GOV.UK is the Trade Tariff tool. It contains up-to-date and historical information on the duty you have to pay when importing and exporting goods outside the UK and the EU. The tool lets people find what the codes are and duty rates for their goods, and you can read more about how it works in this blog post by Matt.
Last week Mark (the team’s delivery manager), Matt and I went to Southend for our monthly meeting with the Tariff Team. We’ve been meeting with several teams dealing with the tariff since we began work on it, but in particular we met with the Tariff Management Team (TMT) and the Tariff Classification Team.
The view of sunny Southend from HMRC
We’ve met with the Joint Customs Consultative Committee, run by HMRC, who are our expert users, and this has led to many potential features and changes that we could include in the tool. We’ve prioritised requirements to implement based on user feedback and the needs of the HMRC teams. The TMT update the tariff and make sure the print and online versions are correct, and the classification team help traders to find the correct code for their items and provides Binding Tariff classifications.
Designing the Trade Tariff was hard. It needs to cater for many kinds of users – notably those whose job it is to use the tariff constantly (including the classification team) as well as those who only use it once or twice, such as SMEs or personal traders. We err on the side of helping those new to the tariff, but need make sure it’s detailed enough and fast enough for those who use it every day.
We’ve been through several iterations during the beta test, but we’ve already got a backlog of further potential improvements that we’ll implement over the next few releases. These include making clearer the distinction between the GOV.UK search and the tariff search box, letting you specify the trading country to make the data more useful, adding in indents/dashes to help expert users navigate pages quicker and including duty and VAT rates on the heading listing pages to make it easier to compare commodities.
Our analytics tools show that we’re getting similar numbers of users of the electronic tariff compared to the previous Business Link tariff. Those users are going to more pages, but spending less time on the site. We think that means that the system is quicker to use, and that people are encouraged to browse more. We’ll be doing more analysis of use, as well as talking to more users of the system to see what we can change to make it better.
We’ve also heard from the classification team that some of them have moved from using the paper version to the new online system, which is great news, but we want to make sure that we keep improving it and making it more useful as we get more data about how it’s used.
It’s been a big week at GDS, thanks to the release of the Government Digital Strategy, but that’s not the only thing the team has been up to. Here’s a quick round-up.
Last Sunday the businesslink.gov.uk website came to its contractual end, which Helen Hardy from HMRC wrote a guest blog post about, and lots of work was done ahead of that to make sure all of the redirections were in a good shape. The team responsible for those have also been busy making sure we can do the same job for departmental websites as they make the transition to Inside Government over the coming months.
That was followed on Tuesday with the release of the Government Digital Strategy, the Digital Efficiency Report and the Digital Landscape Research. A few of the team have written about their experiences producing it, but it’s been particularly good to see write-ups from developers and policy specialists, who worked together to make the strategy part of the web, not simply on the web.
The GOV.UK team have been continuing support of the site following its release, and pushed out an updated version of the Child Benefit Tax Calculator this week.
Screenshot of the Child Benefit Tax Calculator
On Wednesday the Communications team met with central government departments to update them about analytics, Inside Government and how the reporting system is working. These workshops are a really good chance to find out things we need to improve on. We’re going to be paying a lot of attention to the feedback process for departments over the next few weeks as a result of those conversations.
The Usability and Insight team had a lot of work ahead of Tuesday making sure the Digital Landscape Research was in a good shape. They’ve also been following up with teams throughout GDS to compile a list of what we need around User Research, to make sure we get the best out of our testing sessions.
And, something that slipped off these notes a couple of weeks ago, we helped the Cabinet Office compile and publish a list of central government websites. On October 22nd there were about 350 out in the wild, down from 371, which is important to bear in mind as we help central government departments make the move over to GOV.UK. You’ll hear much more about that next week.
In several recent posts about the upcoming release of Inside Government we’ve linked in passing to this little blog on the side – a Tumblr where we, the product team building the Inside Government section of GOV.UK, publish updates about the finer points of what we’re working on.
It’s called Inside inside Government (geddit?) and you can find it here: http://inside-inside-gov.tumblr.com/
I thought I’d say a few things briefly about why and how we use this blog.
A quick recap for those who don’t know. Inside Government is the bit of GOV.UK which will bring together all the corporate and policy information currently published on separate websites by hundreds of government organisations. We’re also building the publishing tools that these organisations will use to create and manage both their Inside Government and detailed guidance content.
As such, we have a lot of stakeholders: many thousands of people working in the hundreds of departments, agencies and other bodies whose websites and content management systems this product is replacing.
We release updates continuously, so there’s a lot of changes to keep these stakeholders informed about. We could be meeting this need by email, but we much prefer to publish than to send, because:
But, most of all, we do it to build trust. We’re working in (agile) ways that are unfamiliar to most of the civil service, and it’s often frustrating for stakeholders that we can’t give them hard dates by when certain features will become available. So we blog to build trust in the process, by demonstrating that:
While it’s the first place to hear about new features we’re adding to Inside Government, posts on the blog will typically go into a lot of detail – of considerable interest to people who will be using the publishing tool but unlikely to interest most readers of the GDS blog. Hence doing this off to one side.
We’ll still write about major releases and our wider thinking here on the main blog, so if that’s all you need you can give Inside Inside Government a miss.
Today we’re releasing an updated version of our Performance Platform dashboard, the tool that shows analytics data about how GOV.UK is being used.
Today’s updates focus on improving the usability and readability, building on prototypes that were built through the summer, and I want to tell you a bit more about why we’ve made them.
Hover detail revealing GOV.UK’s most recent week of visitors
With today’s release, we’re introducing interactive hover overlays that allow a user to inspect the the data behind the graphs. These allow you to get the numbers being shown, rather than approximating from the scale.
The hovers are important for us to enable our Design Principle #4: Do the hard work to make it simple. We’re designing our graphs to be simple, clear and concise; we’re avoiding ‘chartjunk’ that invades so many graphs. Having hovers allows us to achieve this, yet still provide the detail when you need it.
Example of hover on our daily visitors graph
There’s another bonus to having these hovers – they encourage people to interact and actually explore the data. See something interesting in one of the graphs? Hover over it to find out more.
We’re hoping this will help people start to get a ‘feel’ for the data and thus a deeper understanding of what it describes. For future iterations we’re looking at ways of layering additional contextual information about why something might be interesting.
For our graphs, we’re labelling the data itself, rather than relying on a legend. We think this is the right way for us to approach making data accessible to a wide audience because the direct labeling is easier to read and has a closer relationship to the data it represents. Using the same colour for labels and hovers as the data means that the relationship to the data is further strengthened.
For the technically minded, you can get the source data we’re using to draw the graphs as json.
The feeds are here:
(Note on these urls: these are the internal urls we use, and are subject to change. ‘Format success’ in particular is an evolving concept, and our ‘success’ criteria for this may be updated as we learn more about actual usage.)
Besides these raw feeds, we’ll look to providing a more accessible output of our source data soon.
We’ve already had some great feedback on the dashboard, which we’re listening and responding to. Since launching GOV.UK we’ve had a large amount of web analytics data, which we’re interrogating in order to surface the most useful information.
We’re rapidly iterating on what we have, focusing on better mobile support, and giving easier access to data. We are also preparing some new stuff to go along side the launch of Inside Government. Using the d3.js library we can produce some really interesting visualisations, which will help our users better explore the data, and these hovers are just the first step.
We’d love any feedback you have on what we’ve done so far. You can also follow our twitter account @gds_datashark
Getting departments and agencies ready for the move to GOV.UK isn’t just a job for GDS. John Ploughman, Digital Communication Manager for the Driving Standards Agency, talks about what it’s been like from their perspective.
Making the move to Inside Government has been a pretty big undertaking, and being among the first people in government to do it has meant that both ourselves and GDS have learned a lot. We’ve been working hard to make sure none of that learning goes to waste.
Working with people who know what we’re trying to achieve means that, in a sense, a lot of the work has already been done for us. In the past, when we’ve had to source external suppliers, we’ve had very long conversations detailing specifications and requirements, things that every single department and agency has had to do separately until now.
In this case, the team at GDS came to us knowing a lot of what we needed to be able to do, so we could focus on the specific things that we needed that they hadn’t thought about.
We were involved early enough that we could ensure the various content types on Inside Government were fit for our purposes, both for the work we do and for the Department for Transport on a wider basis.
We publish a lot of statistics about the work we do, and about driving tests, and in the original offering there wasn’t anything that could handle statistics as a distinct content type. We were able to raise that really early on, and work with GDS to build something that will do that for us.
Having people like Will Callaghan from the Inside Government team come out to talk to us meant we could explain that face-to-face really paid off for us. The biggest benefit of all of this has been that my team have been able to focus on writing useful, user-centred content, instead of learning about a brand new set of tools.
Having the content management system evolve alongside these discussions has meant that it’s stayed fast and really easy-to-use. But where we have raised concerns, or asked Will and the others questions about how it works, the questions haven’t stayed within our teams.
It’s been a learning experience for all of us. Going earlier than a lot of other departments and agencies meant that we knew we’d be facing a lot of questions and bumps for the very first time, particularly things like importing data into the publishing system. But the publishing guide that the team produced for us contains answers for just about all the questions we’ve had, and that guide is available for all the other departments to use. All the learning has been documented, and it’s there for those who come next.
Giving GDS feedback to fold into the platform has been really good, and it’s nice to know that someone else might benefit from that further down the line.
At GDS we intend the web to be the primary platform for publishing things like policy, speeches and detailed guidance, with any print documents taking a supporting role. As a consequence legibility online becomes hugely important, because the reader will be using these texts to either implement government policy or form opinions about it.
At the very least the material needs to match the legibility of the printed or pdf documents it is replacing – a job which webpages don’t usually manage. Generally the internet has favoured universal access to material over the quality of that material, but at the moment here at GDS (like many other publishing organisations) we’re wrestling over how we can combine the two.
“The designer should not be looked upon by companies as a means of accomplishing a purpose, but as a meaningful mediator between the maker and the user, between company and product. In the near future the surveying of man’s real necessities will become increasingly important: to understand what man really needs”
- Dieter Rams interviewed in Domus, April 1984
In designing these long-form documents for the web, it has been helpful to step back from thinking about the traditional elements of design, focusing instead on the core function – publishing meaningful words.
Working through our 30+ page templates for Inside Government, I wrote an example of each document type as linear plaintext in IA Writer, including all document chrome and metadata. With this Neil, Pete and myself could quickly discuss, edit and refine the content in a way that was true to both the act of authoring and reading text documents.
It has the added advantages of both encouraging natural-language interactions and producing an artefact which is very close to being an HTML outline – keeping the design process in-tune with the construction material without yet being bound by its constraints.
Photograph of an annotated document
We divide navigation-focused pages into two categories:
By separating the function of page-types in this way, we can concentrate on only providing relevant information – reducing distraction to help the reader with focus and comprehension.
Of course when designing for legibility, the greatest contributing factor is the writing itself. At the point of reading, a reader makes no distinction between the visual appearance of words and their content. Dense texts filled with long, elaborate sentences make things difficult in even the best-designed documents.
Whilst our content designers (editors focused on style) have done a wonderful job setting the initial tone of Inside Government, this is a publishing platform for the breadth of government, where ultimately each department will be responsible for writing much the content themselves.
This is where our typeface New Transport makes such a difference. For those living in the UK, the typeface Transport is such an omnipresent part of our environment that we don’t really notice it anymore. So much so that it’s easy to overlook the Department of Transport’s consistent and functional restraint with language on road signs, a writing style that is indelibly linked to the typeface.
When we discovered Henrik Kubel was redrawing the typeface with variants appropriate for longer passages of text, I hoped that by using it we would somehow be able to piggyback on those pre-existing language conventions to encourage more straightforward writing.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised to hear that (at least anecdotally) this is the case. Texts which would previously have seemed respectable in traditional document fonts like Times are revealed as opaque and clumsy in Transport. People have then rewritten these, un-prompted, after writers has seen them on the site.
The affect of typefaces on sentences
Good writers – like designers – understand the value of consistency, so establishing that link with the stellar information design from the Department of Transport is encouragement in the right direction.
GDS has 10 design principles, but above all there is a single defining idea; ‘Digital by Default’. When talking about long-form writing this is more revolutionary that you might initially think, as even commercial publishing industries (newspapers, books etc) still treat the web as a supporting platform to their printed documents.
We hope that by focusing on the content, and by using typeface, layout and style to shape the tone of each page, we can make the web the native home for all of the information people will find on Inside Government.
As one of the editors working on Inside government, visiting departments to introduce people to the platform can be really rewarding. Last month I went to the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to help them with their final preparations for the move of their website to GOV.UK.
Working closely with GDS, the digital team in DCLG has been toiling hard for several months to complete the migration of most of their site. They now need to make sure that everything is in place so the ‘hop’ from one publishing system to another goes smoothly, leaving everyone looking as unruffled as possible.
With their existing site, the DCLG team is currently hunkered over an unwieldy off-the-shelf CMS. Pages cannot be dynamically updated and are all fixed to a tree structure. This means there are often several layers between users and the information they need to find. Just adding a set of related documents can be a slow process involving multiple browser windows and placing heavy demands on an editor’s short-term memory.
The editors I met were ready to embrace something a lot more lightweight and adaptable to host their hundreds of publications, guidance documents and data sets. We’ve worked really closely with them to make sure that the tools we’ve been building for them are fit for purpose, and meet their users’ needs.
As with any migration, the editors had the make sure the pages were in a fit state after the transition. One big plus is that we made sure it would be easy for them to make improvements as they moved their content across.
We also made sure that the information architecture would be simple and quick to master. Editors can quickly ‘tag’ content to different categories or topics. Tools under the hood of GOV.UK do the rest.
Editors found the publishing tool easy to use – we’ve heard a few appreciative gasps as some of the more intuitive Markdown commands are demonstrated.
Usually it takes only an hour to train editors thanks to Will Callaghan’s excellent manual. The manual is a short, visual tour of the publishing tool which handily doubles up as a slide presentation. The editors can then discover the rest for themselves, or review the training session in their own time.
The editors I trained are already ‘dual publishing’ (that is, publishing both to the current DCLG website and to Inside Government), making sure their new pages will be populated with up-to-date news when they go live next week.
Hopefully they’re looking forward to saying goodbye to their old CMS on the 15th.
As departments move from publishing on separate websites to publishing on GOV.UK, each of them will be contributing to a comprehensive set of web pages that explain government policies clearly, consistently, and all in one place. Doing this is difficult, but we think it’s important.
To get a comprehensive understanding of any policy area now, you need to know which government departments are involved. Often you will need to review more than one department’s website, and refer to a range of different types of documents (including business plans, speeches, announcements, policy papers and web pages).
You can’t be sure you’ve found everything that’s relevant, and it can be difficult to tell which information is the most definitive and up to date.
The result is that it can be difficult for people to find out what the government is doing about any given issue.
On the Inside Government team, we are definining a policy as ‘a statement of the government’s position, intent or action’.
Each policy is named according to the outcome the government wants to achieve. For example, there will be policies on making roads safer, increasing the number of available homes, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transport.
We’ve developed a template – a few simple headings – that will be used for all policies on GOV.UK. Each policy has its own page which explains the issue, actions and background, gives further detail about the actions for those who are interested, and includes a feed of announcements and publications so that users can keep up to date.
We tested this approach earlier this year and have been working with departments to refine it, ready for the first two departments to launch their policy pages when they move to GOV.UK on 15 November. We’re aiming to have a complete set of pages, representing the work of all government departments, by March 2013.
Where more than one department is taking actions to achieve the same outcome, there will be one policy which includes the actions of all relevant departments. The number of these will increase as more departments transfer their sites to GOV.UK.
We expect there will be around 250 policies in total, associated with about 40 topics (broader themes like climate change, transport and national security).
Policies are complicated things, and many people who visit departmental websites are interested in the detail of what is being done, when and how. We’re not losing the detail or necessary complexity, but we are working with departments to provide clear, succinct information.
The default language of policy – non-specific, overly complex and adjective-laden text – isn’t just unpleasant. It is confusing, impenetrable to non-experts, and open to misinterpretation. So we’re applying the GOV.UK design principles to policies, expressing them in clearer, more specific and plainer language. We’re cutting out metaphors, and trying to make paragraphs and sentences shorter and more specific.
We hope this will make policy information more accessible to a wider audience, and more useful for experts. It should provide a clearer basis for civil servants to work with others to develop policies, and a useful context for the huge amounts of data and information that departments publish.
By doing all this, we’re hoping to make it much easier for people to find the information they are looking for on any policy issue.
As ever, we are learning as we go. We’re keen to carry on improving the way we present policies on GOV.UK. If there’s anything you think we can do to make policy pages clearer and more useful once these pages are in the open, please let us know.
