At the Government Digital Service (GDS) we want to be a workplace that supports its employees with their mental wellbeing. 

To do this, GDS has a mental health network that is part of its Wellbeing Working Group. The network’s activities include monthly mental wellbeing Q&As on Slack and sending out a dedicated newsletter. There are also mental health and wellbeing champions and trained mental health first aiders – volunteers who listen in confidence and signpost to appropriate help. GDS recently signed the Time to Change pledge which is a commitment to changing the way we all think and act about mental health in the workplace.

In November’s episode of the GDS podcast, Laura Stevens, Writer at GDS, speaks to Ben Carpenter, Inclusive Services Lead at GDS. Ben is co-lead of the Wellbeing Working Group, runs the Slack Q&As and is an active member of the mental health network. Ben speaks about mental health first aiders, how to run a network like this and how it works at GDS. 

The episode closes with Ben’s tips on how to support mental wellbeing in the workplace: be bold, be open, have champions and have a forum to talk.

You can follow Ben on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the GDS podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms.

You can read a transcript of the podcast on Podbean.

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In the run-up to the general election, you may have seen some new kinds of results appearing in Google search.

They look like this:

These are a special kind of Google search result called a OneBox. It’s a recent feature that provides detailed information about a topic directly on the search results page.

These OneBoxes display GOV.UK content, and are powered by open standards markup we’ve added to the site.

What we did

We added what’s known as structured data markup. This allows website publishers to provide detailed information about what specific sections of their pages are for. For example, if you’re publishing a recipe, there’s a standard way of indicating which bit of text is the cooking time.

Sadly, GOV.UK doesn’t publish many recipes, but we do have lots of step by step processes, including things like learning to drive and setting up a company. We’ve added markup to these pages, which allows search engines to provide this content to people in more useful ways.

Learn to drive a car: step by step, shown in Google (left) and Bing (right)

We’re big fans of this approach because it allows GOV.UK content to be used in new ways and on new platforms, without us having to build specific apps for these platforms. As you can see above, both Bing and Google were able to use this markup to provide an improved search experience for our content.

This markup can be used for a lot more than search – one example is voice assistants. In the run-up to polling day, the same markup was used to power election-related answers in Google Assistant.

Google Assistant answers the queries 'How do I register to vote?' (left) and ‘How do I vote?’ (right)

We think this approach has huge potential, and we’re rolling it out across GOV.UK. So far, we’ve added markup to:

• 1,630 high-traffic guidance pages – using FAQPage markup
• 47 step by step journeys – using HowTo markup
• 342,000 navigation links – using BreadcrumbList markup

This builds on our offering of open APIs. For example, our Bank Holidays API, which provides definitive listings for UK bank holidays, is currently used by Amazon to power answers in the Alexa voice assistant, by the Guardian to calculate delivery dates, and by the Ministry of Justice to allow people to schedule prison visits.

Amazon Alexa answers the query ‘When’s the next bank holiday’.

Why we’re doing this

Users expectations of digital services are rising all the time, and we need to ensure GOV.UK keeps pace. As Jen Allum wrote earlier this year in her vision for GOV.UK, one of the ways we plan to do this is by meeting users where they are, meeting user needs at the point of need.

For simple factual queries, like finding the next bank holiday, we want users to be able to get trusted information quickly and easily. Increasingly, the simplest way to do this is to type out a quick search or ask a voice assistant.

We think we can enable many more quick, natural language interactions with government, by adding open standards markup to GOV.UK content and making it available for everyone to use.

All our content will continue to be accessible in full on the GOV.UK website. But keeping pace with users' expectations means GOV.UK needs to be more than a website. We also need to be the trusted source of government information in search, voice, and wherever users take us next.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) collaborates across the public sector to help organisations meet their users’ needs. GOV.UK Notify is one example of how GDS does this. It lets service teams send text messages, emails and letters to their users cheaply and easily, improving the user experience.  

Since its launch 4 years ago, use of GOV.UK Notify has grown exponentially. Today, nearly 500 organisations use it in more than 1,500 public services. In total, that's over 400 million updates, alerts, receipts and reminders sent a year. It is on track to save taxpayers an average of £35 million a year over the next 5 years. 

Organisations that use GOV.UK Notify range from government departments to county councils, NHS trusts to GP surgeries, and fire services to ambulance trusts. It is used in a huge variety of ways, including to alert people to flood warnings, remind soldiers of their medical appointments, update people on their passport applications or inform prison wardens of their rotas. 

We’re now seeing massive take-up right across the public sector. And, we want to keep it growing. 

In this blog post, we’ll look at how GOV.UK Notify is helping the public sector transform, how its use has grown, and how you can start using it in your organisation.

From central government to local government

In 2015, GDS set up its Government as a Platform (GaaP) programme to tackle shared obstacles across government. One of these challenges was communicating with users. So, GDS – working closely with departments – created GOV.UK Notify to offer a trusted, secure, government-branded, reliable and affordable solution. 

In May 2016, GOV.UK Notify sent its first message, and 9 months later it opened to all central government. In August 2017, after a 6-month pilot, it became available to local government. 

Early adopters of GOV.UK Notify included the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency who used it for MOT reminders, Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales for flood warnings and Pembrokeshire County Council for 5 different services. 

By using GOV.UK Notify, all these service teams could send their notifications cheaply and receive detailed performance reports. It also reduced time and hassle for both service teams and users. 

More than half of all councils in the UK now use GOV.UK Notify. For councils, being able to send letters quickly is particularly helpful. Buckinghamshire County Council moved their school admissions correspondence to GOV.UK Notify and recently sent out more than 10,000 letters by simply uploading a spreadsheet. Moving from printing letters on the office printer to sending them through GOV.UK Notify – with just a few clicks – saved them a vast amount of time and money.

GOV.UK Notify in healthcare 

The health sector started using GOV.UK Notify in early 2018. Early adopters included NHS Blood and Transplant, who you can see in the video below: 

Over the past 6 months, we’ve seen a big surge in the use of GOV.UK Notify within the NHS. We now have over 20 NHS trusts and 100 GP surgeries sending messages for 140 different services. These services include NHS England’s Diabetic Eye Screening Programme for appointment correspondence and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust’s remote monitoring to check in with patients after they leave their care.

Nearly all the GP surgeries in the London boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey and Islington use it for appointment reminders and to help people join up their electronic health patient records with their care records. Between them, these surgeries in the North Central London Clinical Commissioning Groups (NCL CCG) have sent nearly 500,000 text messages. Lisa Savage, Deployment Manager at NCL CCG, described how she worked with the team at GDS and helped reduce costs:   

To date, we have used the GOV.UK Notify text messaging service on behalf of nearly 100 GP practices in NCL CCG. The service is simple to set up, and while there is a 1-working-day turnaround time, we have regularly found that the GOV.UK Notify team are far quicker to activate the service. At times, the Notify team have acted on our requests within minutes, and when queries have arisen, they have responded promptly.

In addition to the excellent customer service element, the allowance of 25,000 free text messages for each of our GP practices has supported us with the cost-efficient delivery of our project by minimising the need for postage.

GDS continues to collaborate closely with NHS Digital and NHSX, as usage of GOV.UK Notify grows. This helps us understand the specific needs of the health sector and make sure GOV.UK Notify meets them now – and in the future. 

GOV.UK Notify in the wider public sector

Outside of central and local government and the NHS, other parts of the public sector also use GOV.UK Notify. 

The emergency services, including police, fire and rescue teams, and ambulance trusts, use GOV.UK Notify to send a variety of messages. These include command room communications during major incidents and calling up volunteer firefighters. 

GOV.UK Notify is also found in prisons to let prison wardens know their shift timings and locations in advance. 

The tool also helps keep the armed forces healthy. Barracks use GOV.UK Notify to keep armed services personnel updated about their healthcare and dental appointments.

Get involved 

We want to keep helping the public sector transform its services. We also want to continue to work closely with service teams to make sure GOV.UK Notify remains as useful and helpful as possible. GOV.UK Notify is easy to set up and use, and is almost completely self-service.

The final episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast in 2019 is a look back at what has happened over the past 12 months at GDS. 

Sarah Stewart, senior writer, hosts a Christmas quiz for Angus Montgomery, senior strategy adviser and Laura Stevens, writer, that highlights a wide range of GDS’s successes throughout the year. 

Moving chronologically through 2019, the trio discuss work that includes Sprint 19, the GDS unconference and GOV.UK’s new strategy. They also talk about the design work GDS does and common platforms. 

You can also read about what GDS has been doing in the 2019 edition of A GDS Story.

I am the interim Head of Accessibility and Senior Accessibility Specialist at the Government Digital Service (GDS). This means I run the cross-government Introduction to Accessibility training.

In these sessions, I ask people why digital accessibility is important. I often get the obvious answer that accessibility is a legal requirement, but also that it is the right thing to do; that making things accessible for a particular group often helps improve the experience for everyone. 

Imagine you are on a train

Accessibility isn’t just about permanent or even temporary disabilities. Have you ever tried accessing a website on a train?

You might experience situational impairments. Your movement can be restricted. The train vibrates making it difficult to click on links or operate small buttons. Background noise and interruptions can affect hearing and concentration. Sunlight, particularly when the sun is low in spring and autumn, can make things difficult to read.

You can’t stop many of these things from happening, but good accessible design can help reduce the effects.

How do you explain a picture over the phone?

Think about the different senses. The information in a picture can’t be seen by someone who is blind. Images sometimes contain text, but even if they don’t, they often contain important information. Users of screen reader software need that information described in text, as it can be easily converted to speech. The text, known as alt or alternative text, should not just be a literal description of the picture, but should be the information the picture conveys.

Audio content on your pages may not be directly available to someone who is deaf or hard of hearing. Try turning the sound off on an instructional video which doesn’t have captions, and see how much you can understand. Providing captions (or ‘subtitles’, as we tend to call them in Europe) helps many people. A useful side-effect of this is that by providing captions, you can improve your search engine ranking. 

How do you embed accessibility?

One area that has largely remained unaddressed is the accessibility of documents, particularly PDFs (Portable Document Formats). GDS recommends avoiding publishing via PDF whenever possible, because the PDF format was created for printed documents, and therefore lacks much of the built in structure and consistency of HTML and CSS web pages.

PDFs can be made accessible, but require quite a lot of work to do so. Start with accessible templates for all new documents, and use Acrobat Professional to test the accessibility of PDFs (although I acknowledge it is often not an available option because of cost).

How do you test accessibility?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have been used as the base standard for the accessibility of central government services, and they are now part of the new accessibility regulations.

But they aren’t the easiest set of documents to read and understand. We have tried to help by creating a WCAG primer and providing guidance on how to approach the regulations for the public sector and GOV.UK service teams. I also highly recommend the Home Office accessible design posters as a way of explaining good design principles for accessibility.

The minimum requirement for accessibility for the new accessibility regulations is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines v2.1 level A and level AA, but the word minimum is key here. The new regulations don’t replace or supersede the Equality Act 2010, the Disability Discrimination Act (Northern Ireland only) or the Public Sector Equality Duty.

Whilst meeting all those requirements will help make things accessible, it doesn’t guarantee that everyone will be able to access your website or service. For government services we go beyond that standard by requiring testing with commonly used assistive technologies, and testing with older and disabled users, and we also encourage conforming to some of the level AAA requirements.

Make sure the accessibility train doesn’t leave without you. It won’t wait.

Government is working hard on making services work better for their users. Over the past few years, hundreds of services went through user-centred digital transformation and now meet our Service Standard. Thousands of user-centred design specialists are working alongside digital, policy, and operations professionals to make services less complex, easier to understand, and simpler to use.

Services Week is the UK government’s annual event series to celebrate what we have achieved so far and take a look at the work ahead of us. We started Services Week in 2019 and it has been a huge success. Last year, 20 government organisations ran more than 55 sessions in 10 different locations across the country.

Services Week 2020 will take place from 3 to 7 February and gets people from all parts of government to discuss how we can work together to deliver end-to-end, user-focused services.

The User-Centred Design Communities team at GDS is providing some resources, support and a framework for the week, but the agenda and all the events are organised by colleagues from many government organisations, including arm’s length bodies and local authorities.

Join sessions in person or remotely

Over 60 events have been added to the open schedule so far. In South Gloucestershire, Dorset and Westminster, you can join service design drop-in sessions. In Cambridgeshire, you can attend a workshop on the importance of solving the right problem. In Manchester, you can learn about prototyping services with paper and code.

If you work in the public sector, take a look at the growing agenda and find a session in your area that interests you.

Service design training has been immensely popular since we started offering it 2 years ago. During Services Week, you can join the 1-day ‘Introduction to service design’ in Blackpool and Gateshead. In London, we will run the new ‘Service mapping masterclass’.

Not everyone has the opportunity to travel or attend a full-day workshop. So there will be even more remote formats offered this year. Throughout the week, there will be a number of live-streamed sessions, which you can watch and listen to wherever you are.

The week will kick off on Monday morning with streamed short talks and a panel discussion between design directors: Katy Arnold (Home Office), Lou Downe (Homes England), Lynne Roberts (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and Matt Edgar (NHS Digital).

Every day at midday, you will be able to watch a case study via Zoom. These include Mat Johnson from NHS Digital talking about NHS 111 Online and Silvia Grant from the Environment Agency presenting about her work on the flood warning service.

Other remote sessions include a conversation on the future of user research and virtual 15-minute service design clinic sessions offered by the GDS design community. Services Week will wrap up on Friday, 7 February, in the afternoon, with a streamed open show and tell from GDS.

The links to all remote sessions will be published via the UK government Slack and Local gov digital Slack.

Why people are taking part

We asked some of the people organising events during Services Week 2020 what they are doing and why they are getting involved. Here is what they said:

Mark O’Connor – Service Designer, HM Revenue & Customs

The North East digital economy is one of the fastest growing in the UK, so we are gathering together public and private sector organisations from the region to share practices, training and ways of working – all related to providing users with good services.

Our focus for Services Week will be on how we are working across departmental boundaries and how we can improve collaboration in providing user centric services. 

We have curated a rich diverse mix of sessions across the North East, from case studies and workshops, to training for service design and an introduction to agile ways of working. 

Laura Stevens and Charlotte Downs – Creative content producers, GDS 

We’re running a workshop to help people who have an idea for a blog post, but aren’t quite sure how to make it a reality.

Writing a blog post about your work helps to share knowledge and ways of working, shows your organisational culture, and connects you to other public servants. Participants will come away with the confidence to write a clearly structured blog post that answers their user needs.

Participants will write a structure for their blog post, think about different audiences, evaluate other attendees’ ideas and learn how blogging helps government.

With a new Services in government blog created, and the popular Design in government blog, as well as individual organisation blogs, there’s lots of opportunity for blogging to happen for anyone involved in services.

Take part

There’s still time to propose your own event for Services Week 2020. We have suggestions for formats you can run. You can add your event to the open agenda and promote it using the editable poster template. You can also print our prepared posters to let your colleagues know about what’s happening.

We have also prepared presentation slides you can build on to create your own presentations – both in a longer version and a shorter version.

And wherever you are, you can use and follow the hashtag #ServicesWeek on social media to share your experience and follow others.

Accessibility has always been part of the Government Digital Service’s (GDS) work. GDS founded the cross-government accessibility community and the Head of Accessibility for Government sits at GDS. It's also enshrined in the Government Design Principles: "This is for everyone".

What is new, however, are regulations that mean public sector bodies have a legal duty to make websites and apps accessible. The regulations are called ‘The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No.2) Accessibility Regulations 2018’. They aim to ensure public sector websites and mobile apps are accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.

As monitoring and reporting of these regulations begin this year, the January episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) podcast focuses on accessibility. Chris Heathcote, Product Manager and Designer, and Rianna Fry, Senior Campaigns Manager, discuss how the regulations make services better for everyone.

Chris heads up the monitoring and reporting function for the regulations and Rianna leads the accessibility campaign. The pair speak to Laura Stevens, Creative Content Producer, about where to find accessibility guidance and what motivates them both to work in this space.

At GDS our ambition is to make services as accessible and inclusive as possible, to ensure there are no barriers that might prevent people from interacting with government.

Where we’ve been

We’ve grown the cross-government accessibility community to over 1,000 members and established an Accessibility Leaders Network.

Awareness of accessibility across government is growing: we’ve set up an accessibility empathy lab and delivered training courses to hundreds of civil servants.

We’ve recently built a service to monitor the accessibility of public sector websites as well as ensure that all of our own products and services at GDS meet international standards.

Now we’re looking for a new Head of Accessibility to build on this work and help make the UK government a world leader.

Where we’re going

GDS needs a thought leader and champion of accessible and inclusive services. We need someone who can continue all of the amazing work we’re doing to support digital transformation, keep building a culture around accessibility, and lead the community on to new challenges.

We need an experienced practitioner to design and deliver an accessibility strategy for whole services that are end-to-end, work across all channels, and are fully inclusive.

They will need to be comfortable working with a wide range of stakeholders, be able to quickly build credibility and lobbying groups inside and outside of government.

Working in the Service Design and Technology Standards area, they will support GDS’ 2030 Vision of a government that is joined-up, trusted, and responsive to all users’ needs.

The rate of technological change means that a government in 2030 will be operating in a very different context and with different user expectations and interactions. The Head of Accessibility will need to look ahead and keep pace with changes in technology, and support government to meet the most complex needs.

‘This is for everyone,’ is one of the government design principles. It means that from the start, we will design for the people who need our services most, but find them hardest to use. We’re looking for someone to carry the message that accessibility is equally everyone’s responsibility and work to embed it at the heart of government service design.

How to apply

You can find more information about the role and how to apply on the GDS careers site.

Applications close on Tuesday 25 February 2020 at midnight.

GDS have partnered with national and state governments in 5 emerging economies to make procurement more open and effective, with the end-goal to tackle corruption. We are the Global Digital Marketplace Programme and we work with governments in Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico and South Africa.

We are building upon the work delivered by GDS over the last 8 years. For example, the Digital Marketplace has transformed the way the public sector buys digital and technology. GDS also developed and iterated spend control and assurance processes to ensure that technology is bought and digital projects are delivered effectively.

Building roadmaps

Following last year’s discoveries, the Global Digital Marketplace Programme is now in the alpha phase. We worked with stakeholders in overseas governments to prioritise the opportunities we found in discovery and co-developed alpha roadmaps.

Our team developed interactive and engaging sessions to help our stakeholders articulate their priorities and define our delivery activities. Some of our ways of working were new to the participants, but by the end of the day, everyone was actively building their own roadmap using post-its.

The alpha phase is about testing our riskiest assumptions, challenging the ways things are done at the moment and exploring new approaches. By the end of alpha, we want to be in a position to decide which of the ideas we’ve tested are worth scaling during the beta phase.

Sharing GDS ways of working

To complement our roadmapping we shared with the teams how we do things in GDS. We spoke to them about agile ways of working, user-centred design and the importance of standards to assure spend. Standards & Assurance. We made sure to keep these sessions fun and focussed on what that looks like in practice.

We developed a game to show how standards & assurance processes can help organisations save money. Teams are given toy money to invest in projects. Players have to make a series of choices, which will affect the outcome and the money they will have spent by the end of the game. Players are encouraged to consider the Technology Code of Practice and the Service Standard, when making their decisions. To find out more about the game please contact our Standards & Assurance Lead Tony Richards.

One of the participants told us:

“We treasure your contributions and time with us, as we have come away with useful insights on how our team works and profitable ideas. Putting these into practice has already made a substantial difference to our productivity as a team"

Zatil Hidayah Binti Mohd Rifai at the Malaysia roadmapping workshop

Getting stuck in

Once roadmaps are established and refined with our partners, we’ve kick-started delivery. Our first alpha activities have revolved around helping teams understand their users better.

For example we facilitated a design sprint with the Digital Agency of Public Innovation from the City of Mexico. Focussed on their new procurement platform Tianguis Digital, we helped the team review and test a new component with real users. The team has since conducted their own user research, and iterated the service based on what users told them.

We also engaged with digital teams and their users to map their journeys around planning and procurement. Through these sessions the teams learned about the challenges their users face. More importantly, they realised how easy it is to reach out to their users.

The Tianguis Digital team mapping the procurement journey in Mexico City, with the help of Digital Marketplace Senior Developer Ben Vandersteen

What’s Next?

In 2019 we learned a lot about our partner governments, developed plans with them and kick-started the first alpha projects. We will continue to help our stakeholders engage with their users when they build products and services that form part of the end-to-end procurement lifecycle. This may be through more hands-on workshops, in-depth user research, technical expertise and hands-on support. We will continue to engage with UK digital and tech suppliers to help us deliver the programme.

GDS’ Time To Change commitments

Physical and mental wellbeing is vital for people to be happy and productive in their personal and professional lives.

In August 2019, GDS’ Director General, Alison Pritchard, signed a Time To Change pledge, aiming to change the way we think and act about mental health and wellbeing.

The pledge includes several commitments.

Create a mental health first aid service

There are currently 12 mental health first aiders at GDS, and we are working to recruit and train more - we need around 17 mental health first aiders to get to our target ratio of 1:50. 

We’re working to raise awareness of GDS’ mental health first aiders, and we work alongside the rest of the Cabinet Office’s mental health first aid provision.

More importantly, we are working with the mental health first aiders to help them have the guidance, code of conduct, support and resources they need, and to get a better idea of whether that ratio is sufficient.

Make wellbeing a leadership priority

We have made wellbeing a recurring issue for GDS’ Executive Team, who, for example, agreed to a package of tailored wellbeing support for teams working on EU Exit. This included workshops around wellbeing in high-pressure environments and sharing stress measurement tools.

Around 99% of GDS senior civil servants undertook training to better understand and define psychological wellbeing, and how they can empower people to take personal responsibility for their wellbeing. In November, we set standards for senior civil service performance expectations that enable inclusive culture. This includes expecting senior leaders to visibly prioritise the health and wellbeing of their team, and foster a culture that promotes physical and mental health and wellbeing. 

Improve our working environment

We will be carpeting the metal-floored desk areas at GDS, to make them quieter and less glaring places to work. 

We have written and shared case studies of workplace adjustments, covering physical and mental wellbeing related adjustments.

Train line managers in wellbeing

We have run wellbeing training for line managers, helping them identify when someone is struggling, and how and when to offer support. 

We will help line managers to capture information to help GDS understand staff’s mental health needs.

We will ensure line managers are aware of the support Time To Change now offers to those championing wellbeing

Communicate to staff about wellbeing

We publish a short newsletter every week, highlighting that week’s events, activities and opportunities, and a more in-depth monthly edition. We include links to resources in the GDS all-staff weeknote, and run a monthly anonymous mental health Q&A. There’s a fortnightly lunch club where people watch and discuss an online wellbeing-related talk while eating their lunch. 

We also talk about wellbeing-related issues and work at all-staff events and have started running monthly drop-in sessions to get mental health first aid.

Create a WorkWell Ambassador role 

Samantha Kirkland is GDS’ new WorkWell ambassador, working to join GDS up with the Cabinet Office’s wellbeing activities. 

Samantha will support GDS’ wellbeing approach by creating events and activities, and signposting staff to the resources available.

Create Fair Treatment Ambassadors

GDS has 7 Fair Treatment Ambassadors and is recruiting and training more. 

The Ambassadors offer a non-judgemental, empathetic, confidential, and informal listening and signposting service for anyone concerned about bullying, harassment, or discrimination. They also run workshops on recognising bullying, harassment, and discrimination; creating a positive environment; and differences between good management and bullying behaviours.

Support working practices that promote wellbeing

We give staff the flexibility to work in a way which best meets their needs, including having meetings off-site, taking regular breaks, participating in physical activity, and eating well. Staff can join the GDS circuits club, craft and knitting club, board game club, and even our very own chocolate club. 

Measure wellbeing

We are rolling out regular all-staff surveys, to try and measure wellbeing, and identify things we might be able to improve. These include ways to anonymously share challenges and concerns directly with senior management, and get a direct reply.

What’s next?

We’ll continue to work to fulfil our pledges, and are setting up ways to review and make sure they’re maintained. We’re making great progress, with just over 50% of the actions completed since Alison signed the pledge 6 months in. 

We’re also going beyond the pledges and taking a user-centred approach to providing the signposting and support for staff wellbeing. We’re undertaking and reviewing research and insights, to better understand what information and support colleagues need. We provide regular newsletters; a dedicated Slack channel for mental health-related topics; access to trained mental health first aiders, speakers and events; and regular anonymous peer-led mental wellbeing Q&As.

The GOV.UK Design System is a collection of tools and resources that helps teams across the public sector deliver better services. Service teams across central and local government use its styles, components, and patterns to develop accessible and consistent services.

Tim Paul, Head of Interaction Design and Product Manager of the GOV.UK Design System at the Government Digital Service (GDS), helped launch the design system back in July 2018. Since then, it’s had a significant impact. The code base is found in more than 300 services on GOV.UK, website traffic has grown 250% since launch, and it’s estimated to save the government £17 million annually.

For February’s episode of the GDS Podcast, Tim talks to Laura Stevens, Creative Content Producer at GDS, about how the GOV.UK Design System works, who uses it, how to measure its value, and other design systems across government. The episode also features 2 users of the design system: Adam Silver, Interaction Designer at the Department for Education, and Emma Lewis, Lead Frontend Developer at the London Borough of Hackney. 

Emma Lewis speaking on the GDS Podcast

You can subscribe to the GDS podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms.

You can read a transcript of the podcast on Podbean.

The gender pay gap is the difference in average hourly pay between men and women. All organisations with 250 or more employees have been legally required to report their gender pay gap annually since 2017.

In January 2020, the Cabinet Office reported its median gender pay gap as 8.8%, which means that women in the Cabinet Office earn 91p for every £1 that men earn.

With GDS accounting for just over 10% of the Cabinet Office headcount, the GDS Women’s Network wanted to know what the GDS-specific gender pay gap or problem areas were. We can’t change the gender pay gap across Cabinet Office, but we can work to address disparities within our organisation through improving our policies, ways of working, recruitment and employee retention.

The GDS Women’s Network promotes diversity and equality in the workplace. As part of this we have working groups to tackle specific areas, including career progression, training and mentoring, and pay transparency. 

There is a general consensus that the median gender pay gap is more representative, as it is not skewed by a small number of individuals with particularly high or low salaries

Uncovering the GDS gender pay gap 

Our Pay Transparency Working Group decided to investigate, alongside the GDS People Team.

Our aim was to identify the biggest contributors to our pay gap and areas for improvement.

With the help of the GDS Operational Data & Tools team, we combined data from a centralised Cabinet Office database (gender, salaries, allowances, and pay bands) with more detailed information about individuals’ roles from a GDS database, looking specifically at:

• the number of employees
• the mean and median gender pay gaps
• the percentage of employees with allowances in each gender

We then looked at how these figures varied by pay band and directorate and whether or not the employees were in the DDaT profession. We also considered the relevant community of practice such as software engineering or user research. 

Gender pay gap dashboard

We built a gender pay gap dashboard using Python to make our analysis more reproducible, using the dash package to allow users to filter the data and select what dimensions to split it by. We modelled it on the gender pay gap service, which showcases the most effective way to present the gender pay gap.

As pay is a sensitive subject, we also made sure the dashboard only reports gender pay gaps for groups with at least 5 people in each gender, so that individual salaries could not be worked out from the pay gap data.

A screenshot of part of the GDS gender pay gap dashboard

Tackling the gender pay gap

At GDS the median gender pay gap was 7.8% as of December 2019 - which means that GDS women earn 92p for every £1 men earn. One reason for this is the fact that women at GDS tend to be in more junior roles (and therefore lower pay bands) than men, despite GDS having 48% women at senior civil servant level.

Guidance from the Government Equalities Office (GEO) on how to understand our gender pay gap and actions to close the gender pay gap helped us develop a gender pay gap action plan. This plan sets out steps GDS has committed to taking to reduce our gender pay gap, including:

• improving processes to make taking parental leave easier
• promoting flexible working for all genders
• reviewing our recruitment and talent processes to attract and retain women in digital roles

Our new Gender Pay Gap working group, with members from the GDS Women’s Network, heads of community and the People and Recruitment teams and supported by senior leadership at GDS, have been tasked with implementing this plan.

What’s next?

We have a first version of our action plan, but there is still work to be done: 

• looking at the data in more detail
• measuring the effectiveness of our actions
• coming up with new ways to address the gender pay gap

We also still need to analyse the bonus pay gap and look at the percentage of men and women in each pay quartile.

Research has shown that other protected characteristics, such as ethnicity or disability, affect pay. In future we want to analyse the pay gaps for different underrepresented groups, taking inspiration from organisations such as The Environment Agency.

GDS is a great place to work, but we want to make it even better. Our work will help us achieve this aim.

Further reading

The Civil Service, like many other organisations, is working to close the gender pay gap in order to make it a brilliant place to work for all genders, where people have fair and equal opportunities for jobs, career progression, and pay.

The Government Equalities office commissioned this report looking at how different ways of presenting gender pay gap figures affect understanding and attitudes.

You may also be interested in this toolkit for employers looking for advice on how to understand and address their gender pay gap.

International Womens’ Day (IWD) is celebrated worldwide on 8 March. For 2020, the theme is about equality: “An equal world is an enabled world. How will you help forge a gender equal world? Celebrate women's achievement. Raise awareness against bias. Take action for equality”.

To mark IWD at the Government Digital Service (GDS), we interviewed 9 people from across the organisation for March’s episode of the GDS Podcast. We asked 3 questions based on IWD’s theme:

• Which woman inspires you in digital government and why?
• Can you tell a story of gender equality in the workplace?
• What will you do this year to make GDS a better workplace for women?

We spoke to:

• Laura Flannery, Senior Product Manager
• Jennifer Marks, Digital Delivery Advisor
• Eliška Copland, Security Analyst
• Leena Taha, Senior Content Designer
• Jen Allum, Head of GOV.UK
• Joanna Blackburn, Deputy Director of Strategy and Engagement
• Charlotte Downs, Graphic Designer
• Liz Lutgendorff, Senior Research Analyst
• Sanwar Boparai, Executive Assistant

Hear their responses by listening to the GDS Podcast on IWD. 

GOV.UK Notify – the government’s messaging platform – is available for all public sector organisations to use for emergency staff communications and business continuity messaging. This is particularly relevant in the ongoing situation with Coronavirus.

With such high unpredictability around Coronavirus and the measures organisations may need to take to protect their staff and the public, it's critical we are prepared to quickly and reliably communicate important messages.

GOV.UK Notify is completely self-service. Teams in public sector organisations can create accounts and start sending emails and text messages within minutes.

Public sector organisations include:

• central government departments and agencies
• local authorities
• NHS Trusts, Clinical Commissioning Groups and other regional NHS bodies
• GP surgeries 
• emergency services
• government-funded schools, colleges and universities

You don’t need any technical expertise to use GOV.UK Notify. Simply create a templated message, upload a spreadsheet with contact details, and press ‘Send’. You can upload the spreadsheet in advance or when you’re ready to send.

It’s also possible to integrate your back-office systems with GOV.UK Notify if you prefer.

If you need people to acknowledge your messages, you can specify an inbox for email replies to go to, and GOV.UK Notify will collate text message replies for you.

Sending emails with GOV.UK Notify is completely free. Each team also gets an allowance of free text messages – beyond that each text message costs 1.58p + VAT. You can see more details on our pricing page.

GOV.UK Notify lets central government, local authorities and the NHS send emails, text messages and letters to their users.

We usually send between 100,000 and 200,000 text messages a day. It’s important for services using Notify that they’re able to quickly and successfully send text messages to their users.

Those services rely on us to send important messages, for example a flood warning or a two-factor authentication (2FA) code so their users can sign in to another service. We design and build Notify with this in mind.

Using multiple text message providers

When a central government, local authority or NHS service wants to send a text message to a user, they ask Notify, either manually through our web interface or using our API, to send it. We then send an HTTP request to a text message provider to ask them to deliver the message. No provider will be working perfectly 100% of the time (nor should we expect them to be). Because of this we have 2 different providers, so if one encounters any issues we can use the other provider to send the message.

Our original load balancing design

Originally we sent all text messages through one provider, say provider A. If provider A started having trouble, Notify would automatically swap all traffic to provider B – a process known as a failover. We used 2 measures to decide if a provider was having problems and failover. We measured a:

• single 500-599 HTTP response code from the provider
• slowdown in successful delivery callbacks (a message back from the provider to say it had delivered the message to the recipient)

To determine if callbacks were slow, we’d measure the last 10 minutes of messages being sent. We’d consider callbacks slow if 30% of them took longer than 4 minutes to report back as delivered.

We could also manually swap traffic from, say, provider A to provider B as we wanted. We did this often, maybe once a week, to try and reach a roughly 50/50 split of messages sent between each of our providers. If we ended up sending only a small number of messages through one provider over the long run, they might not be massively incentivised to be a provider in the future.

A problem with our original design

One day, towards the end of 2019, we had a large spike in requests to send text messages. We sent all these requests to one of our providers but it turned out they couldn’t handle the load and started to fail. Our system swapped to the other provider but it turned out that sending a large amount of traffic out of nowhere caused them to start returning errors too. It was likely that our providers needed time to scale up to handle the sudden load we were sending them.

How we improved our resiliency

We changed Notify to send traffic to both providers with a roughly 50/50 split. When a single text message is sent, Notify will pick a provider at random. This should reduce the chance of giving our providers a very large amount of unexpected traffic that they will not be able to handle.

We also changed how we handled errors from our providers. If a provider gives us a 500-599 HTTP response code, we would reduce their share of the load by 10 percentage points (and therefore increase the other provider by 10 percentage points). We will not reduce the share if it’s already been reduced in the last minute.

We also decided that if a provider is slow to deliver messages, measured in the same way as before, we would reduce their share of the load by 10 percentage points. Again, we will not reduce the share if it’s already been reduced in the last minute.

It’s important that we wait a minute before allowing another 500-599 HTTP response code to decrease that provider’s share of traffic again. This means that just a small blip, for example five 500-599 HTTP responses over a second, doesn’t switch all traffic to the other provider too quickly.

Equally balancing our traffic

We still had the manual task of equally balancing our traffic if we no longer needed to push that traffic towards one of the providers. We decided that, if neither provider had changed its balance of traffic in the last hour, we’d move both providers 10 percentage points closer to their defined resting points.

This means our system will automatically restore itself to the middle and removes the manual burden of our team trying to send roughly equal traffic to both providers. We can still manually decide what percentage of traffic goes to each provider if we want to, but this is something we anticipate doing rarely.

We did consider trying to overcorrect traffic to bring the overall balance back to 50/50 over, say, a month. For example, if provider A has an incident and receives no traffic for 24 hours, we could give it 70% of the traffic for the next few days to overcorrect the traffic it lost. We decided doing this would only bring a small benefit and would increase the complexity of our load balancing system. Keeping things as simple as possible won the argument in this case.

How the service is doing now

The following graphs show the number of text messages we sent to each of our providers per second.

On the morning of 26 January one of our providers ran into problems and we reduced their share of traffic down to zero. Every hour for a while after this you can see us give them 10% of traffic to see if they have recovered enough, but they hadn’t so it got reduced back to 0% again. 

Finally the next afternoon their system improved and we moved back towards a roughly equal split of traffic.

What’s next

This fix works for us now. As we continue to grow we'll do more stuff like this to make sure we're providing the best performance, resilience and value for money to Notify’s users.

An example of GDS Standards Assurance & UKEF Digital team collaboration

At GDS, we’ve written about how the standards assurance team helps government departments deliver better services and technology, including working with capability leads to do so. We have previously said that we saved the government an estimated third of a billion pounds in 2019/20. There are different ways of measuring and delivering value not always captured in such publications. In this blog we’ll show how we’ve achieved this with UK Export Finance (UKEF).

UKEF is a small, yet important, government department, helping exporters win contracts, fulfill orders, and get paid. Its mission is “To ensure that no viable UK export fails for lack of finance or insurance, while operating at no net cost to the taxpayer.”

UKEF is on an exciting transformation journey, and we want to share insights learned. They’ve done great work so far but their journey has not been straightforward.

Understanding the background

Our journey with UKEF began at a time when GDS was seen as a disruptor across government. In mid-2018, thanks to efforts from both UKEF and GDS, we re-engaged with the UKEF digital team to understand what problems existed and how we could move forward.

Understanding the history behind a digital service’s evolution is important and at GDS we need to understand the reasons that informed those decisions. Meeting stakeholders and rebuilding the relationship with UKEF was key to get us where we are today. Once we reached a shared understanding about how to bring the service in line with GDS standards, we were able to identify what kind of support we’d need to provide.

Checking if the service meets the government service standard

GDS set up a workshop to review UKEF’s service against the service standard. Getting a deeper look at the service was critical. This gave the UKEF digital team evidence to ask senior leaders for more investment and resources to develop and govern the service in line with the government service standards.

Bringing in the support, guidance and expertise from GDS has helped validate our thinking and provide evidence for change

- Arwen Robertson - UKEF Head of Operations 

GDS and UKEF worked together to understand the technology that underpinned the service and how it aligned to the technology codes of practice. This also provided GDS with an informed view of the technical architecture across the UKEF service landscape. Understanding what can be reused or absorbed allows departments to make strategic technology decisions. We both wanted to make sure we understood the opportunities that currently existed inside UKEF before looking elsewhere for potential solutions.

Dealing with change

We focused on governance, programme management and accountability next. Collectively, we had to be confident the right governance was in place to scrutinise and oversee important decisions the service was making. 

Historically, UKEF were using Waterfall and traditional IT methodologies, which are very different from Agile and user-centred design principles. When new service team members started at UKEF, things began to change. There was a willingness to challenge the culture and ways of working to allow for more collaborative and iterative methods focusing on:

• continuous learning
• prioritising user needs 
• learning from best practices to achieve the best outcomes 

With technical and strategic support from GDS, regular project assurance meetings were set up as part of an ongoing review process. And UKEF connected with other government departments and cross-community Digital, Data and Technology networks to take part in discussions about best practice and techniques.

Working through the ‘as is’

Breaking down GDS feedback into something tangible that your organisation can use to improve a service can be a daunting task. UKEF broke down the workshop feedback into a 52-point plan grouped by the following themes:

• people
• strategy
• design
• technology 
• data

Whilst this was a good start, prioritising where to start was still challenging.

Although UKEF had pockets of digital talent, it was clear they did not have sufficient capabilities to deliver the recommendations - there was no multidisciplinary team to focus on the service. 

Through a series of meetings; workshops; and reviews of the business case, action plan and service standard feedback, GDS and UKEF identified what kind of capabilities could complement existing resources to deliver the plan. 

Getting approval for a short discovery phase

GDS and UKEF worked together to advise key stakeholders that a short discovery was needed. It would focus on producing a service action plan including:

• a validated library of user stories
• a detailed cost model
• a product backlog 
• an independent review of the current service with the service standards recommendations
• an initial plan and service delivery approach
• a recommended team

UKEF brought in an external team of digital experts via the Digital Outcomes and Specialist framework, to carry out this work.

Reevaluating the current direction

At the beginning of the discovery, the team analysed the outputs and offered recommendations from the initial beta workshop. They used this as a basis to build on the 52-point plan.

The team reviewed current UKEF strategy and priorities, and potential challenges they faced; the discovery highlighted the need for a different approach, and ultimately supported the reworking of the business case with us, giving UKEF a way to rethink what was possible.

This enabled the team to produce an evidence-based business case that clearly articulated the need to develop a multidisciplinary service team and transform the service.

Embarking on a new approach

Changing course is not without its own challenges. To achieve change, a team needs to be empowered to make transformational decisions.

The service team made their case to the UKEF board, taking care to address the concerns of internal stakeholders. 

It was clear from the beginning that building the right team was the most important thing to do. UKEF needed to build an internal team that would be receptive to and contribute directly and efficiently to their transformation agenda. 

The next step was to reflect the team-building needed in the business case and support the UKEF team at board level meetings. This would help them make a robust case for investing in capability as opposed to buying this externally. It was important to demonstrate to the UKEF board that GDS fully supported the approach, lending the team credibility in front of the board.  

Having GDS engaged made the spend controls process easier and efficient as they were very much a part of the discovery journey with us.

We’re not there yet

Building a service team came next. The core team comprised of civil servants and, with the support of GDS, went through 2 rounds of procurement to stand up a team with the full complement of capabilities, buying in Service Design and Development resources. It’s a bit of a catch-22 when buying in resources: how do you judge the capabilities of a job that you don’t do yourself? This is where the UKEF team leveraged GDS, having a Consulting Technical Architect and Senior Developer join them to provide insight, technical scoring techniques and advice. This left no stone unturned: skills, business acumen and cultural fit were all assessed. 

Now, with a service team in place, UKEF begins the phase to fully transform their service and build the stable foundation for a sustainable and agile service ready to enable the long term vision of UK Export Finance. 

Lessons learned

The process was not rushed, nor forced, but executed at the right pace - one the service team were comfortable with - to show the investment in their discovery and drive, and to improve their service for all involved. The work not only sets the stage for their service transformation, but is an example of a brilliant way to approach legacy technology transformation via discoveries and charting a course forward directly with the relevant users. This has been a valuable learning process and something that GDS would like to see replicated across government. 

This allowed GDS to see how we can better influence decisions made, and reflect on how we support service teams, by standing with them, offering our advice in a progressive manner, and visibly supporting the departmental responsible senior leaders.

Working collaboratively with GDS gave UKEF the reassurance that challenging and changing our approach was the right thing to do. Pausing, rethinking and realigning is daunting, but sometimes necessary.

- Dan Bowden - UKEF Head of Digital Operations

Last year, we piloted an ‘Introduction to Content Design’ course on FutureLearn with 100 learners from across government and the public sector. 

We learned a lot from the pilot, and we blogged about some of it last year.

Next month, we’re launching the second iteration of the course. This time, it will be an open course, which means there will be no limit on the number of spaces. More than 500 people applied for the pilot last year, which showed us there is demand and need for more training in content design skills. 

The 4-week ‘Introduction to Content Design’ online course starts on 18 May and you can register now. 

Who is the course for?

The ‘Introduction to Content Design’ course is for new content designers or those who work in other roles that involve content design. 

Our community work has shown us that not all organisations have roles that focus just on content design. For example, you may be working in communications and doing content design as part of your role, alongside other things. If that sounds like you, you can sign up for the course to develop the skills you need to do the content design part of your role. 

What will you learn?

You will learn about a range of topics, including: 

• what makes good content, what skills you need as a content designer 
• user needs, user research techniques, prototyping 
• designing accessible content
• writing in plain English 
• testing and evaluating the success of your content 

Our aim is to equip you with the knowledge and skills to enable you to design content that’s clear, user-centred and accessible to all – content that gives your users the information they need quickly and allows them to reach their goals.

Why online?

We’re not delivering this training in person. Our aim is to build learning experiences that are scalable and adaptable. We want to serve the entire community and we want to be able to respond quickly as learning needs evolve. 

Using FutureLearn to create a self-paced course that people can join online and complete in their own time allows us to do that. 

We also want to make sure we’re using our time wisely. We’re a small team supporting a growing profession across the country. 

You can imagine the impact we can have by delivering an online course that can be taken by thousands of learners at the same time is much bigger than what we could do in person, delivering the training to individual teams.

Social learning

Learning online does not mean learning by yourself. At least that’s not how we want it to work. 

FutureLearn, where the course is hosted, is a social learning platform. Interaction between learners is built into the platform’s functionality. It’s also something that our team of educators, who will be moderating the discussions throughout the duration of the course, strongly encourage. 

When we ran the pilot last year, there were more than 1,000 comments on the course from learners sharing knowledge and ideas with each other. 

Getting learners involved also allows us to get useful insights into what their needs are, what their strengths are and how else we can support them – either with future iterations of this course or with other learning products and programmes our team builds.

We’re hoping to get even more insights with this iteration of the course. The pilot only included 100 learners so we’re expecting even more feedback and comments this time round.

Our work continues

Last year, we blogged about the work we’re doing to develop a new learning approach for the content design profession. 

The ‘Introduction to Content Design’ course on FutureLearn is only one of many ways in which we’re supporting our community. Our work continues – we will keep learning, iterating and creating new opportunities to equip content designers with the skills and knowledge they need.

April’s episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast is about the GOV.UK team’s initial response to the coronavirus (COVID-19). GOV.UK is the online home to government content. Millions of people visit it everyday for information, advice and support.

Leanne Cummings, Head of Product for GOV.UK, and Markland Starkie, Head of Content for GOV.UK, talk about the team’s work in March. Working at pace, the team created products and services to support people through the pandemic.

The pair tell Laura Stevens, Creative Content Producer at GDS, about creating the coronavirus landing page; building 2 of the new services - Get coronavirus support as a clinically extremely vulnerable person and Offer coronavirus (COVID-19) support from your business; and streaming the government’s daily press conferences live from GOV.UK.

Since going live, these products have been continually iterated and scaling up continues.

Accessibility is considered in all aspects of the Government Digital Service’s (GDS) work. Whether it’s testing on assistive technologies, using persona profiles to simulate different users or providing subtitles for films; GDS works to the sixth Government Design Principle of ‘This is for everyone’.

Everyone must interact with government, there is no option to shop around for a different provider. This means it’s critical that we remove as many unnecessary obstacles as we can. Public sector organisations also have a legal duty to make sure websites and apps meet accessibility requirements.

One way to make services as easy to use as possible is to raise awareness of accessibility. This is why we’re celebrating the ninth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on 21 May 2020 with a whole day of virtual activities. Alongside this agenda, we’re encouraging people to raise awareness within their organisations by hosting their own internal events, so we’ve created a downloadable resources pack to help you promote and deliver training sessions for colleagues on the day.

What we’re doing on the day

On the 21 May we’re hosting a number of webinars. These sessions are for digital professionals, anyone working in the public sector, suppliers for public sector organisations and those interested in digital accessibility. Registration closes at 5pm on 20 May, however some sessions have limited capacity so may fill up sooner.

Here’s the agenda for how GDS is celebrating GAAD:

9.30am to 10:30am

An introduction to digital accessibility regulations

Richard Morton, Head of Accessibility for Government, and Joseph Jones, Policy Officer at GDS, will talk you through the accessibility regulations and how they may impact your work.

Register for the An introduction to digital accessibility regulations session

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11:00am to 11.45am 

How to avoid common accessibility statement fails

Join Chris Heathcote, who is running the team responsible for the enforcement of accessibility statements, to learn more about this requirement. Plus, Accessibility Consultant at the Home Office, George Rhodes will discuss his extensive research into this subject which highlighted some best practice examples and easy-to-avoid mistakes.

Register for the How to avoid common accessibility statement fails session

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12:30pm to 1:30pm 

How to carry out basic accessibility checks

During this interactive session, Beverley Newing (Frontend Developer at the Ministry of Justice) will introduce you to the fictional ‘Record a goose sighting’ service their team created and demonstrate how it can be used to develop the skills to carry out basic accessibility checks. Plus, Head of Accessibility for Government, Richard Morton, will be on hand to answer your questions.

Register for the How to carry out basic accessibility checks session

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3:00 to 3:30pm 

Making accessibility accessible: the secret to engaging your workforce

In this session, Helen Wilson (Digital Designer at Worcester County Council) will share the framework she developed to help successfully engage Worcester County Council’s workforce on digital accessibility. Plus, she’ll reveal how you can use it to empower your colleagues to improve the accessibility of content on your website.

Register for the Making accessibility accessible: the secret to engaging your workforce session

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4:00 to 4:30pm 

What would Marie Kondo do? How to clear your website of inaccessible PDFs

Leeds City Council reveal how they have taken inspiration from popular tidying philosophies to prepare for the accessibility regulations. Content Strategist Lammy Jones and Website Project Manager Sally Boyes will share how they’ve cleared their site of more than 3,500 PDFs in the past year and the lessons they’ve learnt along the way.

Register for the What would Marie Kondo do? How to clear your website of inaccessible PDFs session

How to get involved

There are 3 different ways to join GDS in its GAAD celebrations. 

Firstly, join a webinar session from the above agenda. We will be running them through Zoom, which you can join via your preferred internet browser.

Secondly, host your own celebrations. Some ideas to promote accessibility within your own organisation are: run a virtual drop-in session, show how an assistive technology works or present an introduction to accessibility. We’ve created a downloadable resources pack that has a presentation deck and promotional assets to get you started. 

Thirdly, share your activities on social media. Use the hashtags #AccessibilityRegulations and #GAAD so we can connect with each other on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

GOV.UK Verify is the government service that helps people prove who they are online.

People can create a digital identity account and use it to access 22 government services, like applying for Universal Credit, checking their State Pension or requesting a basic Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check.

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, about 35,000 people created a GOV.UK Verify digital identity in a typical week. Since 16 March 2020, over 640,000 new accounts have been created. This correlated to the increase in new Universal Credit claims as people sought crucial financial support.

Delivering this huge growth was vital to making sure thousands of people could access services they urgently needed to support themselves and their families during this public health crisis.

23 March was also the first day of remote working for the GOV.UK Verify team which, as most of the country is experiencing, brings its own challenges. 

Here’s how we managed the record level of traffic.

We worked really closely with the identity providers

The key thing we needed was for our identity providers, Digidentity and Post Office, to scale up their systems to handle the huge increase in traffic. We had daily stand-ups with them to identify the main challenges and develop solutions. 

The identity providers, particularly Digidentity:

• put an online queue at the start of their sign-up journeys, to help them stagger the use of their services 
• scaled up their infrastructure rapidly and significantly, so that more users could go through the identity check at once
• brought forward the launch of a new identity verification method which lets users download an app to scan the chip from their passport, reducing the need for manual checks
• trained an extra 70 team members to carry out the manual parts of the verification process - drawing in people from Digidentity's parent company to help

Together, the identity providers were initially able to accept around 25 people per minute into their services. Within a week, this had increased to 200 people. A month on, they’re up to 400 people.

Their rapid work meant that the online queues at the start of the sign-up journeys, which had peaked at 155,000 people, disappeared after 7 days.

For a proportion of users, the identity provider needs to complete a manual check of their identity documents. The wait time for these checks peaked in late March and is now down to a few minutes. 

You can read about the identity providers’ changes in more detail in a blog post from Digidentity. 

Throughout this extremely busy period, the GOV.UK Verify hub and the Document Checking Service (which enables identity providers to check the validity of users’ passports or driving licences) stayed resilient and ran smoothly. This helped us focus on the work with our identity providers and the needs of our partner government services.

We balanced traffic between the identity providers

We changed how we directed people to the identity providers during this period of scaling up. 

Previously, people could choose between the identity providers that they were eligible to use. We temporarily changed this approach so people would only see one or the other. 

This reduced the risk that lots of people would choose the same identity providers and create a queue, while leaving the other with spare capacity.

We monitored the identity providers’ capacity closely and changed the proportion of people sent to each one when needed. We also made sure users who failed to verify with one identity provider were shown the other if they chose to try again. 

This approach gave the identity providers room to continue their work to scale up. We stopped splitting traffic on 23 April as we were confident that they could handle all of the traffic at once.

We methodically prioritised work based on the most common pain points

During this peak, it was more crucial than ever that we focused on the most pressing user needs. 

We analysed user support tickets and comments on Twitter every day, and used analytics to spot changes in user behaviour. For example, we saw unusually high traffic to a couple of our error pages, plus user support tickets about things going wrong at different points in the journey. 

We worked out that some people were timing out part-way through their journey because of the wait times. Other users were successfully verifying, but then getting an error. This was because the flow of messages - between connected services (like Universal Credit), GOV.UK Verify and the identity providers - was interrupted by the queueing system. We added more specific content on the error pages to help these users get back on track.

We also introduced a new ‘identity provider hint’, initially to test whether it would make a positive difference. This page appears at the beginning of a Verify journey and means that users restarting their journey get a shortcut to the correct place. It also helps returning users who have forgotten they’ve used GOV.UK Verify before, reducing the number of people who try to create an account again unnecessarily.

We’d already designed this page and it had tested well in labs, so it felt like a high-impact, low-risk change. We’ve just completed our test analysis and the results show that the hint makes it easier for users to sign in. We’ll be rolling the hint out to all users in the next few days.

We worked closely with Universal Credit

We changed how we worked with Universal Credit, given the number of people using this journey. By working more closely with the team at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) we improved and accelerated the end-to-end journey. 

The GOV.UK Verify Team:

• regularly updated our content that tells people how else they can prove their identity for Universal Credit if they cannot use GOV.UK Verify, to stay in sync with Universal Credit’s process changes 
• passed on our findings from user support tickets 
• made a giant journey map and reviewed the end-to-end journey when something changed in the Verify or Universal Credit process, to make sure there were no unintended consequences that needed addressing
• shared our map with Universal Credit and worked together to identify improvements 

Things that helped us respond to this challenge effectively

Here are 3 things that we found to be particularly important when working quickly in an emergency.

Firstly, it’s essential to have a good relationship with stakeholders, especially if you don’t have control over the whole user journey. A user is not interested in which team or department a problem technically lies with, they just want to complete their task. Just fixing the bits that we ‘owned’ was not going to be enough - we had to work together to think about the journey end-to-end. For example, Universal Credit stopped running face-to-face appointments so we had to reflect that throughout the journey.

Secondly, we had to accept we couldn’t do everything at once. Initially, we thought of lots of improvements which all seemed to be a priority - but this made it more likely that we’d rush things and make poorer decisions. Stepping back, planning our work properly as usual and still taking the time to think ‘what does good look like?’ meant that we only worked on the crucial things and we’ll be able to know if they were successful.

Finally, user support teams are a crucial part of the user journey, and have been an integral part of our response. The GDS support team dealt with the increase in support tickets, helped our users when things have gone wrong, and provided us with valuable insight into the problems people were facing. It’s much better for users when service teams and user support work together.

We’d like to thank all of our stakeholders and partners, especially the identity providers, for their support and collaboration during this exceptional period.

What’s next

These have been some of the most time sensitive and important tasks that the GOV.UK Verify team has worked on.

With social distancing measures in place, it's critical to be able to check someone's identity digitally, as the face-to-face aspects of government services are currently not possible.

Between 16 March and 26 April, the Verify performance dashboard shows that 640,289 people were able to create a new identity account. 746,827 used an existing identity account. In total over 1,387,116 people have been able to access the essential government services they need during this time.

We're not stopping our work on iterating and improving capacity. We need to keep queue times short so people can access vital services quickly and securely.

We’ll continue to improve the end-to-end journey, working closer than ever with the identity providers and individual services to make it as successful for as many users as possible.