At GOV.UK we have a clear vision for our work: we want to provide a trusted, joined-up and personalised service for our users. I’ve written about our plan before and work towards implementing it is already happening, as you can see in our 2020/21 GOV.UK roadmap.

We have 5 objectives for the year ahead that help us achieve our vision - all of them ensure that we continue to provide the service that people need and expect on GOV.UK.

1. Always be available, accessible and accurate

We support millions of visits every day. We cannot have issues with people struggling to reliably access information or services, or with questions relating to accuracy.

This is really important for trust, and is an absolute necessity given what GOV.UK does. This objective covers everything from our site resilience and security, to the continuous work to ensure that the content we (and the rest of government) publish is maintained and improved.

2. Support the government’s priorities of the day

GOV.UK must ensure that it is responsive to, and highlighting, the issues of the day for the user. Things like Brexit, coronavirus (COVID-19) and the Budget are examples of this.

GOV.UK is the digital interface between people and the government, and the authoritative source of what the government is saying and doing, and what it means for people day-to-day. This means it is imperative that GOV.UK works hard to communicate critical, and often changing, information.

3. Connect insights across GOV.UK to enable joined-up service delivery

This is so government understands its users, and users understand the government. It means we can design for whole user journeys, which move across departmental boundaries, rather than just iterating within our own organisations.

This is really important, given the user needs to join things up, and is an appropriate next stage in our digital maturity, as we start to work more actively across departmental (and service) boundaries. We’re doing this work with data privacy and security in the front of our minds - it’s about understanding aggregate trends and patterns.

4. Provide a personalised and proactive service

This means changing our operating model from one that is reactive and leaves the onus on the user, to one that appropriately uses data and permissions to provide a relevant and low-friction experience.

To achieve this, we’re advancing our work on the GOV.UK Account, and the development of even better notifications. We’re taking a privacy by design approach to our work, meaning we’re thinking about data privacy from the outset. We’re also coordinating closely with our digital identity colleagues at GDS as a critical partnership for this work.  

5. Be channel agnostic

GOV.UK isn’t just a website. Accessing information and completing services is increasingly happening via other channels - search engines, voice assistants and more. We need to design for a world not of flat HTML, but of structured information that can be accessed in multiple different ways. We’re working to be where the user is.

These 5 things are mutually reinforcing - it ensures we can be relied on, are relevant, and are being smart about the work that we are doing.

Some of the work we’re doing involves experiments and prototypes that we can deliver immediate value on, but which more critically tell us what the essential requirements of the objectives above must be. That’s why we’re working on a ‘starting and sustaining a business’ pilot, why we’re doing exploratory work around understanding all the criteria used to assess service eligibility on GOV.UK, and why we’re looking to better understand the data that services use across GOV.UK.

This kind of work, coupled with the longer delivery timeframes around the GOV.UK Account and our analytics development, means we are delivering iteratively, but when combined will permit 10 times more value to meeting user needs. We’re designing for a moving target, so we have to be ambitious!

All of the work we do in GOV.UK supports one or more of these objectives for the next 12 months. We’ll soon be publishing the first version of the 2021/2022 roadmap so you can see more of the details of the work we’re intending to do.

It’s a busy and exciting time on GOV.UK, and I’m looking forward to the year ahead.

GOV.UK Platform as a Service (GOV.UK PaaS) helps public sector organisations to swiftly and securely host their digital services without worrying about infrastructure. It's currently used by 131 organisations, runs 1,652 applications, and recently celebrated passing its live service assessment, providing a joined-up experience across channels.

In this month’s episode of the GDS Podcast, we talk to Clare Barnett and Mark Buckley from the GOV.UK PaaS team, who explain more about how the service functions and how it helps users in government. We are also joined by Himal Mandalia, Head of Technology for GOV.UK, and Colin Saliceti, Lead Operations for Teacher Services at the Department for Education, who share their experiences of using GOV.UK PaaS.

Alex Chisholm, Chief Operating Officer for the Civil Service and Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office, blogged about our appointments to the senior leadership of the DDaT (Digital, Data and Technology) profession in January of this year.

Since we started our respective roles in February, we have done a lot of listening to our teams, other government departments, and other important stakeholders. What we’ve identified is that we all have considerable ambitions for digital products, platforms and services, and for the government DDaT function.

The lessons we learned from coronavirus (COVID-19) have shown us that now, more than ever, digital must be front and centre of government’s priorities to meet user needs and this is the perfect time for us to accelerate the digital transformation of public services across the whole of government.

What we’ve been less clear about previously though is that there are 2 quite distinct challenges and opportunities that we need to support:

• leading the cross-government community of DDaT professionals and putting the strategy, standards and assurance mechanisms in place to deliver transformation at scale
• building, supporting and iterating digital products, platforms and services that can be built once and used across government

From today, the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) will lead the DDaT function. This is the next step for DDaT in government, allowing us to go further and faster by strengthening our collective leadership.

The CDDO will lead the DDaT function across departments, setting the strategy for DDaT in collaboration with leaders across government. It will have ambitious goals that get to the heart of digital and technology transformation, and will improve user access and experience of government services and harness the power of data.

Monitoring and assessing the health of the delivery of the government’s major digital and data programmes will be fundamental to CDDO as will tackling big problems like how we engineer for availability, resilience and interoperability, how we embed agile ways of working across departments supported by digital and technology funding models, sourcing strategies and procurement.

Meanwhile, GDS steps into its new role as the centre of the government’s digital transformation of products, platforms and services. The emerging strategy, alongside a clear mandate to address the challenges the government faces, is to deliver the next stage of modernisation by developing our digital products and infrastructure.

We’ll build on our small pilot to create a GOV.UK Account and our work on digital identity, working towards providing the kind of personalised, seamless and intuitive online service and information users should expect from government. We also want to build on the successes of GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay to identify the new common problems that departments face, fixing the basics to give better experiences to our users.

Over the upcoming months, both GDS and CDDO are moving forward with the next phase of digital delivery and transformation. This is essential to the modernisation and reform of government and you’ll be hearing more from both of us on what that looks like in practice.

Celebrated each April, Earth Day is an opportunity for people to come together and show their support for environmental protection.

This Earth Day, we’re joined in conversation by Adam Turner from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and Emily Labram from GDS’s Sustainability Network.

Adam talks us through some of the latest updates to the Greening Government ICT strategy, and together we explore how different parts of digital product teams can do their bit to contribute towards greener delivery.

We also hear how this thinking is being put into practice with contributions from:

• Rosa Ryou - Content Designer, GDS
• Matt Hobbs - Lead Frontend Developer for GOV.UK, GDS
• Mohamed Hamid - Infrastructure Engineer, Chief Digital Information Office at Cabinet Office

Some of the resources mentioned in the episode include the Service Manual, and the GDS Way, if you are interested in looking them up.

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.

One of the Government Digital Service’s (GDS) priorities for the next 5 years is making sure that GOV.UK remains reliable, accurate and continues to meet user needs.

That’s why we’re always looking to improve the navigation on GOV.UK.

GOV.UK is a big site. It’s made up of more than half a million pages, and in 2021 has  averaged 17.8 million users a week. This scale of the site, and the huge range of user needs, means ensuring people can find what they’re looking for is one of the most important things we do.

This isn’t a new or unique challenge for GOV.UK. All large websites constantly need to look at the findability of their content to reflect new technologies and their users’ habits.

There are lots of different strands to our work in this area; recently we’ve improved how GOV.UK information appears in search engine results, trained an algorithm to provide useful related links and made the mobile experience of the site better.

As part of this work on findability, we’ve been looking at how we can improve browsing on GOV.UK. By ‘browsing’ we mean when a user clicks through GOV.UK using menus, topic pages and links.

This is a blog post about why we focused on this, what we learned, and how we’re going to make it easier for users to find what they need from government.

Our discovery

At the start of last year before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, a small team on GOV.UK ran a discovery to understand how the site’s navigation might be improved.

We decided to look in-depth at this area because the way most users browse the site has remained largely unchanged since 2014. Our main navigation elements - our homepage, topic pages and menu bar - have only had minor iterations in this time.

What we learned

Our first step was to validate whether browse navigation was the right area for us to be focusing. We found that while most users start from a search engine, around 15% use topic pages to navigate.

Looking closely at these browse journeys we found a number of specific problems to address.

1. A confusing information architecture

We have 3 different kinds of topic page on GOV.UK. These are pages designed to list the information and services the government provides in a particular area.

• Mainstream topics: a set of around 200 topics meeting users’ most frequent needs that you see on the GOV.UK homepage such as voting, driving licences and benefits
• Specialist topics: a set of around 400 topics for specialists, often people who need detailed information from government as part of their job, such as commercial fishing, climate change agreements and HGV tests
• Taxonomy topics: a set of around 4,000 cross-cutting topics to which all content on GOV.UK is tagged, such as transport, environment and welfare

This triple-system, which has substantial duplication, causes confusion for users who can easily find themselves in the wrong part of the site for their needs.

It also makes things difficult for publishers, the civil servants who write the content on GOV.UK. They currently need to tag their content to multiple topics, and to multiple topic systems, without a clear indication of how this tagging affects where their content will appear.

2. We need to improve how our navigation works on smaller screens

The devices used to browse GOV.UK have changed a lot since 2014, with most of our traffic now coming from smartphones. Our work on coronavirus navigation exemplified the value of a mobile-first approach to design, and we know there’s potential to improve GOV.UK’s mobile experience sitewide.

3. Navigation feels overwhelming for some, limited for others

In our user research sessions some people told us they felt lost on GOV.UK, overwhelmed by the volume of content and number of options available to them. Equally, users looking for specialist content struggled to find this using GOV.UK’s primary navigation system.

What happened next

The discovery work wrapped up in February 2020, and then the team pivoted to help with the coronavirus response. This meant we could apply some of this early thinking to gov.uk/coronavirus, which was designed to be mobile-first, and used expanding sections and carefully curated content lists to avoid overwhelming users.

One year later, with the GOV.UK team growing, we’re excited to have sitewide navigation on the roadmap again, applying the lessons we learned during the pandemic.

We’ve now been able to move into the Alpha phase of this work, building prototypes to test out ideas for how to solve these problems.

Ideas we’re testing

We’ve still got more research to do, but wanted to share some of the ideas we’re working on that are looking promising.

1. A consistent sitewide menu bar

GOV.UK today
Our prototype

Currently GOV.UK has 3 different menu bars depending on what kind of page you are on. In our prototype we’re testing a simpler but more versatile ‘megamenu’ pattern that would provide consistent navigation on every page of the site. This would provide clear routes to browse by topic, department or content type.

2. A unified topic system

We’re in the early stages of thinking about how we might bring together mainstream topics, specialist topics and the taxonomy into a single tagging system. We’re keen to provide a system that’s easier for users to navigate, and for publishers to tag to.

There are no plans to change the ownership of these topics, but our research findings suggest that aligning and de-duplicating these systems will provide a better experience for users.

3. An improved topic template

Drawing on the insights from the coronavirus and Brexit landing pages, we’ve redesigned GOV.UK’s topic page template, the underlying page design for every topic on the site

The new template groups sub-topics into a grid, and the categories below into expanding sections called accordions. The aim here is to provide simple, clear navigational paths without overwhelming users with options.

Topic page

Sub-topic page
Another new idea we’ve been exploring is providing 2 tabs on each topic page.

The first tab labelled ‘Topics’ provides a curated view of content to help users get to guidance and services quickly and without distraction. The second tab (shown below) enables users, for the first time, to find things like the policy documents and statistics relating to that same topic.

Our hypothesis is that the simple curated view will provide speed and simplicity for most user journeys, while the second tab will provide routes to greater depth for those who need it.

Government activity tab

4. Mobile-optimised components

We’ve been working closely with the GOV.UK Design System team to test new designs for a number of GOV.UK components including topic links and accordions. With mobile and tablet users in mind, these new designs significantly increase the size of the tappable area around links, making interactions easier and more accessible.

Our next steps

This work is currently in alpha phase, which means we’re evolving it rapidly based on findings from multiple rounds of research.

Once we’re comfortable that this system of new elements is accessible and working well for users, we’ll move into beta phase. This would involve an incremental rollout of these new elements across the site. We’re likely to do this using A/B tests to assess whether the improvements we’re seeing in research are replicated at site-scale, building in time to iterate as we go.

We know any information architecture changes we make could impact the way that departments curate and tag content. We’re committed to working closely with departmental content teams should any changes be needed, and ensuring these don’t add to their workload. For this reason, any changes we make need to represent a simplification of the content tagging and topic curation process, as well as an improvement to user experience.

Our purpose

At GDS, our mission is to build a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone. Using our unique position at the centre of government, we will develop services that just work for the user, however complex the underlying systems.

The journey to today

Ten years ago, the UK government had an organically grown online presence with each government department, agency and arms-length body having their own website. Additional information was available through DirectGov and BusinessLink, early attempts at bringing information together in one place.

Following Martha Lane Fox’s report into digital government in 2010, GDS was established to focus on fixing publishing, digitising high-volume transactional services, and building “wholesale” technology platforms. GOV.UK was created, and more than 2,000 other websites were fully migrated to the new single publishing platform. Twenty five of the highest volume services were chosen as “exemplars” of digital transformation, and a programme established to deliver the transformation. While there are lessons to be learned, many of these services remain the gold standard for what excellent digital services can look like.

In the 10 years since GDS was created, departments and agencies have built digital teams of the highest quality, and many of the most important services have been built and designed based on research from real users, and are supported by agile, multidisciplinary teams.

GDS’s role in 2021 and beyond

From our position in the centre of government, we are perfectly positioned to look at the work of digital teams across government to identify where there are common needs for products, platforms and services. By building centrally we can do the heavy lifting to allow departments to focus on building services, rather than having to reinvent the wheel.

It is also important to recognise that GDS is no longer in start-up mode. Of our circa £90 million budget this year and with more than 800 people, around 60% are needed to support our existing platforms, services and content. This includes ensuring GOV.UK, which is a vital resource for millions of citizens, is available, reliable and has up to date information.

We therefore have to be selective about where we focus our people, skills and money to make the most difference to the most users of government services. We believe there are 3 main categories that enable this:

• services that hide the complexity of government structures from the end user
• services that can only be delivered by the centre
• services that should be built once, and reused widely

With this in mind, we have 5 main missions for the next 3 years.

Mission 1: GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services

At the heart of everything we do for the next 3 years, we must ensure that GOV.UK remains the single trusted source of information, guidance and services for the public. To do this, we will:

• continue to invest and develop our content teams
• ensure the technology platforms underpinning GOV.UK are in support, highly available, and secure
• iterate the design and operation of key features like navigation and search
• move beyond websites and look at how government information, guidance and services can be reached from where users are, rather than where suits us
• ensure that the publishing tools we provide to civil servants right across government are simple and clear to use, and encourage the use of emerging design patterns

Mission 2: Joined-up services that solve whole problems and span multiple departments

Some people only need to access government services a few times per year, they complete the forms and move on. However, there are millions of people who have complicated, busy lives and need lots of help from government, sometimes for a few months, and sometimes for years. For these users, our services appear tremendously siloed and difficult to navigate. To fix this, we will:

• build GOV.UK account functionality, and make it available to everyone who wants it, while ensuring that there are offline alternatives for those who can’t
• create a single sign-on for all services that need it
• explore developing a personalised view of GOV.UK content based on the users’ situation
• map and connect data around individuals and agree sharing arrangements with departments
• explore “one-click” completion of common forms and services using the information we already know about the user
• build a central interface to manage and update the information that government holds on you; for example, you could change your name or your address once and we’ll let the rest of government know
• develop a series of “whole services” for users from the centre of government to demonstrate how joined-up data and processes can work to make government simpler, clearer and faster. This might include things like having a baby, or preparing to retire, or turning 18. We have already started our first, which is “Starting and sustaining a business”, which you can read about on the Inside GOV.UK Blog

Mission 3: A simple digital identity solution that works for everyone

Most government services' existing login and digital identity solutions have been designed, developed and operated in departmental silos, with a focus only on meeting each department's needs. For users, this is a confusing and frustrating picture; for government, this is expensive and leaves the door open for fraud.

We will build on what we have learned from GOV.UK Verify and create a new way for users to sign-on to services from any department, and confirm their identity. The work will follow some basic principles:

• the new services will be built in partnership with other government departments
• the identity checking service needs to work for everyone in the country, regardless of their socio-economic situation. For example, someone who is a prison leaver and may not have a fixed location, or someone with an address but has a passport that has expired.
• we will design-in simplicity and relentlessly test with users
• existing services will only be integrated, absorbed or turned off when the new service has been tested thoroughly, and everyone is happy that it works as it needs to
• users will have full control over their data from their GOV.UK account, and the connected data we hold

Mission 4: Common tools and expert services

We talk a lot about our successes in digital transformation, from online tax to MOT reminders. However, for many citizens their experience is very different. Perhaps they want to sponsor a visa applicant, or change their name by deed poll, or even adopt a child. For these journeys, and more than 3,000 others, our users still have to rely on printing off a PDF, filling it in by pen, and posting it into a government office. This is bad for users, enormously inefficient for government and the army of people we have processing paper, and misses opportunities for using the data for analysis.

To tackle the long tail of PDF forms and other difficult to navigate services, we want to make it almost effortless for departments and agencies to digitise their services. To help, we plan to:

• build a new “Collect information from users” (formerly known as “Submit”) service to automatically digitise existing forms, as well as making it simpler for people to automatically create new digital forms rather than PDFs
• build a set of components and make them available to everyone - things like address pickers, company lookups and lists of countries
• develop or procure a set of lightweight back-office products for case management and other common needs to end-to-end digitise services

We also need to ensure our existing platforms are well maintained, and build and sustain a professional services division to help other parts of government (central and local) where needed. Specifically, we will:

• support and enhance the existing GOV.UK Pay, GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK PaaS services, as well as the GOV.UK Design System
• develop a team of expert practitioners who can go out and help teams in other parts of government to digitise their simpler services using the Government as a Platform (GaaP) products - you can read more about GaaP on our blog
• continue to work with governments around the world to share learnings on digital transformation patterns and approaches, drawing insights to also help keep GDS at the cutting edge

Mission 5: Joined-up data across departments

To deliver any of the above 4 missions, we need to put data right at the heart of our strategic approach. That means being able to comprehensively understand how people interact with the government online, and being able to use data about people and government (with permission) to provide the level of service that they expect. This mission, delivered in close partnership with the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), will focus on:

• exploring an events brokerage service that enables departments to share information about users that would be useful for other parts of government to know - some examples might include when someone leaves Higher Education, or becomes a British citizen, or is made redundant
• creating the cross-government reference architecture and identifying, enabling and standardising the data registers across government most critical to service delivery
• creating the exchange mechanism between the citizen and the state to, in time, finally enable the ‘tell us once’ principle
• building the insight capability of how people interact with the government online to focus where we should prioritise our end-to-end service transformations and to inform policy creation and iteration

How we will achieve this

For GDS, as with any organisation, how we go about delivering this strategy is as important as what is in it. We commit to:

• continuing to champion the needs of end users above all else, as we believe that ensuring things work for end users is the only way to realise the efficiencies that come with digital transformation
• embedding the highest standards of trust, transparency and equity in everything we do and build
• working in close partnership with other parts of government and build through consensus and proven delivery
• being bold in our ambition: some of our work to join up government services will result in some difficult questions about ownership, accountability and data sharing; we will listen and react, but will push for the right thing, not the easy thing
• we will be humble rather than arrogant, and regularly get out to where services are delivered
• working in the open, which involves regular blogging, public speaking and discussions with people inside and outside government
• a continued commitment to open-sourcing our code where possible and encouraging reuse in the UK and globally
• ensuring that GDS is a safe, fun, and fulfilling place for our people to work, where we will have a zero-tolerance approach to bullying, discrimination, uncomfortable banter and anything in between
• working to make our teams more representative of the society we build for: we will be carefully monitoring our diversity in all characteristics, as well as working tirelessly to reduce any pay gaps we discover
• building out GDS hubs in Manchester (initial focus) and Bristol to attract more talent, and to be less London-centric in our approach

Where we won’t be focusing

Our strategy is meaningless without an overview of what will not be focused on. For GDS, we will not be explicitly focusing on:

• government digital and technology strategy and policy, DDaT capability or spend controls: these important missions have moved out of GDS and into the newly-formed CDDO (though we will continue working closely with our CDDO colleagues)
• running another big exemplar programme for individual transactional services: most departments and agencies are more than capable of doing these themselves with the right funding and support
• legacy technology and cyber risk: our mission focuses on the interaction between end users and government, rather than the technology underpinning government departments. This will be led by CDDO and the strong technology teams across government, with support from the Government Security Group.
• shared services and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions: this sits in another part of the Cabinet Office called Business Services
• end-user technology (laptops, productivity tools and similar) for civil servants, which will be led by departments with coordination coming from CDDO

This strategy is a moment in time, and we fully expect it to change and adapt based on what we discover. Some of this work covers uncharted territory, and we may find there is limited value in what we’re building. If so, we will stop and focus on something else.

Tom Read was appointed as the Chief Executive Officer of the Government Digital Service in February 2021 - and he’s been busy since then!

For this month’s episode, Tom reflects on his tours inside and outside of digital government, takes us through the newly-launched GDS strategy for 2021-2024 and offers his take on why we’re switching gears from start-up mode - without losing any of GDS’s “secret sauce”...

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.

Do you enjoy the GDS Podcast? Help us to make it even better by completing our short, anonymous survey.

GDS will be hiring user researchers to support our exciting and ambitious strategy. We are looking for several user researchers to join us across the board, in the GOV.UK, Digital Identity and Government as a Platform (GaaP) teams.

Does this sound like an opportunity for you? We’ve got some colleagues sharing what they find valuable about being a user researcher, what’s going on in their area, and advice on applications for you.

Why we need user researchers

GDS needs to grow to meet our delivery commitments. We need user researchers to plan, design and carry out research activities with users to help our delivery teams get a deep understanding of the people that use government services.

User research informs policy, proposition, service, content and interaction design so that services work well for users and achieves policy intent. As well as leading user research activities, our researchers work tirelessly to build and sustain our user-centric delivery culture.

What you will be working on

The User Research Leads for each team have more information about what user researchers newly joining us will help to deliver.

Chris Marshall - Lead User Researcher, GOV.UK

It’s a great time to be joining GOV.UK as we have an exciting and ambitious roadmap for 2021. GOV.UK is the best place to find government services and information, and user needs are at the heart of everything we do. Our vision is for GOV.UK to offer users joined-up, trusted and personalised interactions.

GOV.UK user researchers help our delivery teams build a deep understanding of our users and their needs. They also help develop our GOV.UK user research practices, which enables us to carry out high quality and impactful research.

There are currently 11 user researchers on GOV.UK and we are looking to recruit for a number of positions in the coming months, who would join our team and the wider data and insight community.

Pablo Romero - Lead User Researcher, Digital Identity

The vision of the Digital Identity programme is that citizens will be able to use one login for all government services. To do this, we need a high-performing team which is representative of the citizens we serve and motivated to make a real difference for our users.

This is a high profile programme that aims to transform the way people access services and interact with government. Our product has to be inclusive in order to ensure that everyone can access the services they need.

User researchers in the Digital Identity programme are part of interdisciplinary teams building a product that is for everyone, respecting the privacy of users and delivering a great user experience.

Nick Breeze - Lead User Researcher, GaaP

GDS’s GaaP products provide a range of shared services that solve common problems across government, enabling teams to design, build, and host services quickly and cheaply.

We are recruiting for a role on the Design System, which is an integral part of GaaP. The Design System provides teams with the styles, components and patterns to enable services to be consistent with GOV.UK and avoid doing work that’s been done elsewhere.

As a user researcher you’ll be a key part of this multidisciplinary team. Your skills will play a vital role in the team understanding its users, and will also enable informed product decisions to be made so the Design System continues to be an exemplar across government.

How to apply

You can visit the GDS career page to find out more about working here, and there are lots of blog posts about different aspects of working life. Here’s just a few to get you started:

• Tina Mermiri, Head of User Data and Insights at GOV.UK, writes about working in data, insight and user research roles in the GOV.UK programme
• Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson, Deputy Directors at GOV.UK, have also shared 4 tips when applying for a job at GOV.UK, though those tips will help you more generally as well!
• Our colleagues at DWP Digital have compiled advice if you’re new to applying to Civil Service roles
• the GaaP team has also shared some of their milestones, if you’re more curious about the kind of work you could be contributing to

We've been trialling a GOV.UK Account on the Brexit Checker since last November. It's a way of letting users save their personalised answers, receive notifications and log back in to see what they need to do. We've written lots of blog posts about our work to show the different aspects of the trial - for example how we designed it, our privacy principles and our user research.

While we've been actively blogging about the trial, I also wanted to give an update on the longer term thinking behind our GOV.UK Account work since I last introduced it back in September 2020. I wanted to write about what a GOV.UK Account could enable, and what we still need to make that vision a reality.

The vision for GOV.UK

In my 2021/22 update for GOV.UK, I covered how we're now implementing what's needed to make sure GOV.UK can provide proactive, personalised and joined-up services on GOV.UK. Our public roadmap shows how our work fits together and what we're working to solve.

Here's a quick video that explains it.

Our GOV.UK Accounts work is an important enabler for this work, and a leading part of Mission 2 of the Government Digital Service's strategy for 2021 to 2024: "Joined-up services that solve whole problems and span multiple departments". It will help eliminate the need for people to understand government, in order to interact with it.

GOV.UK as it stands

GOV.UK currently is a central publishing platform to which more than 300 transactional services are attached. Almost all users start their journey by reading some information, before heading off into a service.

However, given GOV.UK holds a lot of information - more than 500,000 pages currently - sometimes just finding the information or service you need can be time consuming. Sometimes this is also combined with people not necessarily knowing what it is they need to know or do, or what they are entitled to.

This is why we're working on a GOV.UK Account - it's part of the infrastructure that will enable us to provide tailored experiences to the user - so that they can find the information they need to know, when they need to know it, on a device that works for them.

Building on the trial, we are progressing our work and expanding the GOV.UK Account across the GOV.UK platform.

Acting as a 'home account'

In time, we see a GOV.UK account acting as a 'home account' for the user from which they can have a consolidated view of all their interactions with the government, then allowing them to go deep on whatever it is they want to do - complete a service, fill in a consultation or so on.

An early sketch of what a GOV.UK Account could look like

It doesn't matter where on GOV.UK a user signs in - the 'home account' element of this remains consistent. Think of this like deciding to purchase something online - you can have a 'guest checkout' but if you are a repeat user then you would sign in and, as well as being able to complete your transaction there (with that seller, let's say), you would also be able to see, use and manage your account with that company - like applying your bank details to that particular purchase, rather than re-entering them.

This model is not about making the join-up obligatory for the user, but to provide them with an option - to have some persistence with GOV.UK - that we believe will give them a better level of service.

Giving users continuity and curation

Expanding the GOV.UK Account across the publishing platform advances the goal to give the user continuity and curation of their experience with government online.

An account will allow users to have a quick route to the information they need. It can also let the user curate this view themselves, and will help them manage their different personas (personal, professional, as a carer, business owner and so on).

Progressing what GOV.UK Accounts can enable

To implement Mission 2 of GDS's strategy, we want to expand what a GOV.UK Account can do. We'll be doing this with the digital identity programme and their one login for government vision. Their role is to remove the friction of having different accounts with different government services.

This relationship - between access management, trust in someone's identity, and the level of service the account will provide - allows us to progress 2 further goals:

• allow the user to tell government once ("I've had a change in employment")
• deliver services that are end-to-end so that they make sense to the user

Which is to say, if we're really confident we know who you are then we might allow you to change your personal data, to get money from government, or act on behalf of a business, for example. If we're not that confident in who you are then those kinds of options won't exist for you within the account.

Similarly, there are lots of interactions with government that are not single transactions - they happen over time or are complex topics. Life events - like having a child, moving into new markets, or retiring. This kind of infrastructure - the GOV.UK Account secured through access management - will allow us to radically reimagine how we provide that kind of end-to-end service.

There are a bunch of other things this work can enable, but for now this is enough for us to be getting on with!

Get in touch if you'd like to find out more about this work - we'd love to talk.

GOV.UK is the digital home for the UK government. It’s vital for anyone wanting to live, work, trade or study in the UK. The site receives millions of visits each week from people needing to complete both life-changing and routine tasks.

Back in May, the GOV.UK programme updated its roadmap to reflect its priorities for the 2021/22 financial year. In this month’s episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast, we speak to Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson from GOV.UK about how the roadmap objectives are helping to make GDS’s ambitious mission - of building a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone - a reality.

Tune in to hear more on how we’re:

• moving to a personalised and proactive service, with updates on our GOV.UK Account work
• building a solid foundation for future innovation by ensuring the site is available, accessible and accurate
• meeting our users where they are with a channel agnostic approach

You can subscribe to the GDS Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms. You can read a transcript of the podcast on Podbean.

Do you enjoy the GDS Podcast? Help us to make it even better by completing our short, anonymous survey.

We want every form on GOV.UK to be accessible, easy to use and quick to process. To make this possible, we’re helping operations teams that run public-facing services with fewer than 10,000 transactions per year to quickly create affordable online forms using a common form-building platform for government.

What problems are we trying to solve?

The GDS strategy has set the ambition to tackle the long tail of inaccessible forms on GOV.UK. Almost all forms on GOV.UK solely use PDFs or other document-based forms, and the number of these forms is growing by roughly 6% every year. These forms are usually inaccessible, hard to use and, on average, 8 minutes slower to process compared to online forms.

Currently, PDFs and other document types are easier to create than online HTML forms, especially for teams without any digital specialists. However, this comes with significant drawbacks.

In particular, PDFs can behave inconsistently with assistive technologies, such as screen readers and magnifiers. They can also be difficult to use on smaller screens. For those interested in more detail around this, we've written previously about why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF.

We’ve identified 3 key constraints which will affect our solution to this problem.

Firstly, the majority of these forms are created by small operations teams without dedicated Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) capability - these teams don’t have the budget to develop HTML forms themselves.

Secondly, the scale of the problem means that the current pace isn’t fast enough - we estimate that it would take the 11 existing form-building service teams around 70 years just to convert existing PDF forms into HTML forms, let alone deal with the 6% annual growth.

Finally, the content designers who manage the specialist guidance and publishing on GOV.UK are already dealing with high workloads - increasing the pace of the current form building process would potentially overwhelm these teams.

For our solution to work within these constraints, it will have to be:

• affordable to operations teams, so that they can justify using it
• easy to use, so that operations teams can build forms themselves without needing assistance from DDaT teams
• closely integrated with GOV.UK publishing workflows, to reduce the impact on publishing teams

What has been done before?

Teams across government have been developing form-building platforms, and the cross-government form-building community was founded to coordinate these teams and avoid duplicating work. This process resulted in the creation of browser-based editors like XGov Digital Form Builder and MOJ Forms, and code-based editors like the GOV.UK Design System Form Builder created by DfE Digital.

These are very capable solutions, and we hope we'll be able to make some use of them. However, they're currently aimed at digital specialists rather than generalist users; we’re aiming our service at teams that don’t necessarily have any specialist digital skills.

There are also some commercial form-builders on the market, but we aren't currently convinced that these are suitable: we want to provide a solution that's accessible for all users, and not prohibitively expensive for small operations teams.

What are we doing now?

Currently, we're building a team - we're in the process of recruiting an interaction designer, a service designer, technical architect, developer and content designer.

We're conducting user research with participants from across government so that we can further investigate how document-based forms come to be published on GOV.UK and where the problems are for users.

We've been reviewing the existing government form builders for accessibility to see what they do well and how we might make use of them.

We're also working out how much time and effort the platform can save service teams, in preparation for the next spending review.

Alongside all of this, we’re working with the cross-government form-building community to define what a good lower-volume form looks like and how we can embed the principles of the Service Standard into our product.

What are we doing next?

Our intention is to start the alpha phase in the coming months. We’re interested in partnering with other government organisations - if you think this platform would be useful in your organisation, we want to speak to you. Similarly, if you work in operations or know someone that does, we’d love you to help test our platform - please email us.

Last month Tom Read, our CEO, wrote about GDS’s strategy for 2021 to 2024. Today, I want to provide an update on our work to build a single sign-on and digital identity solution for government.

The problem

The impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has underlined people's need for swift and easy access to government services. Thanks to GOV.UK, users can already find almost all government services in one place.

But people are still asked to sign in and prove their identity in different ways to access different services. You would need individual usernames and passwords to file your tax return, claim benefits or apply for a driving licence. From our own research we know that many users don't understand the differences between these logins, and are confused about which ones they already have.

Some services need to carry out digital identity checks to make sure the people wanting to access them are who they claim to be. However, people without easy access to official documents, like passports and driving licences, are too often excluded from these simple, online routes. As government services become increasingly digital and accessing in-person ones now often relies on some kind of online interaction (like booking an appointment), it's vital that access is as inclusive as possible.

At the same time, departments delivering government services currently have to build or buy  their own sign-on and identity services, resulting in people having to enter the same information time and again when accessing multiple services. Running multiple systems in this way also leads to added cost to the taxpayer and, because it is hard for different services to share information with each other, reduced capability for government to tackle fraudulent access to its services in a joined-up way.

The solution

There is now a clear consensus – with strong Ministerial support across government – that it's time services are offered a better solution, and people enjoy an easier, more joined-up experience. In March, Minister Lopez set out a vision for "one login for government" and a key action from the recent 'Declaration on Government Reform' policy paper was to "launch a single sign-on for online government services". Meanwhile, the GDS strategy sets out our intention to "create a single sign-on" and "a simple digital identity solution that works for everyone".

We're now working with colleagues across government to develop one simple, secure way for people to sign in and prove who they are. We are focused on reusing the deep expertise we have in government today, not on re-inventing the wheel. We're also working with colleagues across government on a roadmap for migrating existing systems to the new solutions.

Working with teams across government

Building a solution flexible enough to meet the needs of different services and their users requires a cross-government effort. So, we have adopted a collaborative approach and are already working with and learning from experts from more than 30 service teams within central departments – but we’d like to work with more.

After all, this is not a new challenge for government. It is therefore vital that our collective work builds on the many lessons we have collectively learned from products already in use across departments, including GOV.UK Verify.

Joining up with GOV.UK Accounts

All of this work feeds into our vision to provide proactive, personalised and joined-up services on GOV.UK. In her blog post last month, Jen Allum, Director of GOV.UK, shared an update on the role of a GOV.UK Account in personalising users’ experiences and letting people find the information they need to know, when they need to know it, on a device that works for them. Both the digital identity and GOV.UK Account teams are working towards the common goal of developing a more seamless experience of interacting with government.

Technical architects, site reliability engineers and developers are a mainstay of how GDS is helping government transform and tackle complexity for users.

They engineer solutions to complex architectural needs, evolve our infrastructure and tooling to keep us resilient, and develop digital products and services that are used by millions of people in the UK (and emulated by governments around the world).

In this month’s episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast we talk coding in the open, solving common problems once and some of the exciting challenges our technologists are working on as we deliver on the next phase of GDS’s strategy, with Himal Mandalia and Louise Ryan.

We’re building one simple, secure way for people to sign in to all digital government services and make it possible for users to prove who they are to government once. This way every citizen who wants to access government services digitally can do so in a better, fairer and faster way.

In this month’s episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast Helena Trippe and Will Myddleton from GDS, and Tom Stewart from Veterans UK, talk about lessons learned when it comes to digital identity, the importance of cross-government collaboration to create this product, and how other service teams can get involved with the next stages of the work.

You can subscribe to the GDS Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms. You can read a transcript of the podcast on Podbean.

Do you enjoy the GDS Podcast? Help us to make it even better by completing our short, anonymous survey.

At GDS, our mission is to build a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone. Over the last few months we've written about our work on a GOV.UK account, and a new single sign-on and digital identity solution. Today I want to talk about the strategy underpinning these initiatives, and how the systems are going to work together.

The principle of least astonishment

The GDS mission says we are here to make government simple. It's easy to say, but what do we really mean by that word, "simple"?

One approach to simplicity is to say: we want to surprise our users as little as possible. When they click a button, it should do what they expected it to do, not something completely out of the ordinary. This idea is sometimes called the principle of least astonishment.

Almost all successful digital organisations offer a single way to sign in across all their products. Your BBC account works for Weather and iPlayer, your Amazon account works for both shopping and video streaming, and your bank app lets you view both your current account and your mortgage. You could reasonably ask, why don’t government services work this way? Why are there well over a hundred different ways to sign in?

There are two reasons. One is about the public sector technology estate, the other is about GDS itself.

The challenge of steering flotillas

One of the reasons things don't work that way is that GOV.UK, while it appears to be one thing, is really assembled from hundreds of different products run by hundreds of different teams. The UK government has one of the most distributed technology estates of any organisation in the world. This is a tremendous strength, because it allows digital products to be built by the people closest to their users.

The drawback to this federated model is that all those different systems sometimes have to find different ways of doing the same thing. GDS has long championed an approach to this challenge known as Government as a Platform, where common components are built once and used by multiple services. This improves user experiences, drives down costs and makes service operations more efficient. GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify are two great examples.

So, to make ‘signing into GOV.UK’ work the same way across the whole site, we have to create a set of common systems so good that all these hundreds of teams want to use them. That's where the new single sign-on and identity checking solution come in. Think of them like new additions to the toolkit for building great government services (which today already includes GDS services, as well as great APIs offered by the likes of HMRC and DVLA among many others).

That's why we work so closely with people across government at all levels to guarantee that what's built works for both sets of users: users of government and teams in government.

Beyond one-size-fits-all

I said that there were two reasons why signing in to government services on GOV.UK doesn't always work as a user might expect. We've covered the first one, which is that government's distributed technology estate (a good thing) can end up with the same problem being solved in many different ways.

The second reason is that much of GOV.UK was never built with the expectation that people would sign in to it. If you forget for a second about the hundreds of services attached to it, the core of GOV.UK is an information-based website with about half a million content pages. If a user looks at one of those pages, the next user visiting that page will see the same thing. That might sound obvious, but it's very different to, say, the Spotify homepage, which will look quite different from one user to the next, based on personal preferences and previous usage.

The current one-size-fits-all approach has worked beautifully for years, and will always be the main way GOV.UK works. It's one of the things that helps keep GOV.UK loading super fast for millions of people every day. And if you just want to find out some information, it works great. For that reason, GOV.UK expects users will sign-in to access services (like Universal Credit, or Personal Tax Account) when needed, but it doesn't have a concept of users being signed in to the whole GOV.UK experience.

Until now, that is. The GOV.UK Account introduces, for the first time, the idea of being logged-in to GOV.UK itself – not just an individual service, but the whole website and all the services on it.

Personalised and proactive

This simple and powerful idea introduces a host of opportunities, many of which the GOV.UK Account team have already written about. Logging in to GOV.UK will let users bring together the information and services most relevant to them, and make it easier to keep track of what they're doing with different parts of government. A GOV.UK Account could, with permission, suggest what services a person might need next, show them services they're eligible for, and even notify them when policy changes affect them.

This gets to the heart of how the single sign-on and the GOV.UK Account work together: the single sign-on will provide an easy way for users to sign in from any part of GOV.UK, then the account will make the experience of GOV.UK better for those who are signed in.

This is a high-level sketch illustrating how users may experience the features of the GOV.UK Account and single sign-on system. The top illustration demonstrates the journey a user may take to access a government service via a search engine, and the bottom illustration shows a user journey with GOV.UK as the starting point.

Signing in will work the exact same way whether people sign in to fill in their passenger information, pay the Dart charge, or to subscribe to content updates on GOV.UK. If they've already signed into any other government service, there will be no need to sign in again. And while they're signed in, they'll have access to features on GOV.UK that provide more convenient access to services they use frequently.

Meanwhile, as Lead Product Manager Will Myddleton put it in a recent episode of the GDS Podcast, government teams will be able to spend "their budgets and their time and their human creativity solving the problems that are unique to their service." Users of government services will have fewer passwords to manage, and fewer systems to work out. And, for those who want it, there'll be a personalised experience of GOV.UK that goes beyond one-size-fits-all.

In one sense, it's transformative to how government services work today. In another, it's just… the least astonishing thing.

The Government Digital Service’s (GDS) ambition is to build platforms, products and services that help create a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government to everyone.

In a recent podcast we discussed how technologists ensure delivery across GDS’s 5 missions through resilient infrastructure and tooling. We’re looking for developers to join us and improve our services used by millions of people across the UK.

Interested in this opportunity? Read what 3 developers do in their day-to-day roles and find out more about life at GDS.

Kelvin Gan - Senior Developer and Tech Lead, GOV.UK

GDS is full of good people doing good work and I really love working on GOV.UK. The impact of what we do is wide-reaching across all of society. People depend on GOV.UK to find help, such as the benefits you’re entitled to, or support in starting up a business.

I'm also currently a tech lead on a team that is working to improve navigation on GOV.UK. Each day usually involves a lot of code reviews with a focus on ensuring we stick to standards, such as those set out in the GDS Way; planning work for the developers; thinking through the technical approaches we can take to deliver my team's bit of the roadmap; and finally coding!

It's a challenging but rewarding role, where I get to utilise my skills by supporting and getting the best out of other developers. I have a high-empathy personality, and I'm really pleased I'm in a place where I can make a positive impact that way.

Pea Tyczynska - Developer, Government as a Platform (GaaP)

I'm a developer on GOV.UK Notify, which sits within the GaaP programme. Notify helps public sector services contact their users via SMS, emails and letters. This means that our system deals with a wide range of things: from numerous user journeys for creating and sending notifications via our interface and API integrations, handling character encodings and limits for SMS, to PDF-processing for letters.

My day starts with a “stand-up”, where we share what we plan to work on and see if anybody needs help. If I'm working on something new, I'll organise a kick-off to double-check I have all the information I need and then I will code either in a pair or on my own. I would normally work on things like building a new feature for our web app, a maintenance task for our infrastructure, or sometimes fixing a bug. Around once a week I'm on the support rota, which means answering technical queries from our users and keeping an eye on our logs and metrics to make sure everything is running smoothly.

In the afternoon, I might have a meeting or two. Sometimes those meetings will be related to my team work, and sometimes they may be related to one of the clubs or networks I am part of. For example, I’m the lead for the Meditation Club, so I facilitate a daily meditation session at work.

Working remotely during the pandemic has really made me appreciate the flexibility that my job offers me. Once we return to the office, I'll split my time between working at home and the office so I can catch up with my colleagues in person but also avoid sensory overload.

Alex Wilson - Senior Developer and Tech Lead, Digital Identity

I'm a senior developer and tech lead on the authentication team, part of the Digital Identity programme, working on building a single sign-on and digital identity solution for government.

I’m responsible for making sure the team has what they need, removing blockers and uncertainty from our path, and ensuring the way we plan and divide up technology work is effective for what we’re trying to achieve.

Another big part of my role is building relationships with teams that are stakeholders in what we’re creating, such as the privacy, information assurance, and counter-fraud teams.

I still write code and deliver technology-focused features but these tend to be smaller pieces of work rather than pieces on the critical path. These are shared among the team to give everyone a chance to learn and develop, and additionally so that opportunities to work on key features are open to everyone who wants them.

Outside of my day-to-day role, I’m also part of the organising group for the Technology Community Meetup, which is a session every 6 weeks for technologists to come together and share their experiences through lightning talks, or to participate in workshops.

What can you do next?

If you’d like to find out more about problems GDS developers have worked on, check out these blog posts:

• How we fixed a strange week-year bug
• Automatically creating and rotating GOV.UK application secrets
• Using multi-stage Docker builds to patch vulnerable containers

In this month’s episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast, we’re joined by Harry Vos and Moyosore Kolawole from GDS’s Collecting Information From Users team to talk about tackling the long-tail of PDF forms in government.

As you might expect, many government services use forms to collect information from their users. But did you know that the number of PDF or other document-based forms hosted on GOV.UK is growing by approximately 6% per year?

Making government forms accessible, easy to use and fast to process

Typically, these forms are inaccessible, hard to use and slower to process compared to online forms. That’s why a team at GDS is exploring options for a new common form-building platform for government.

Working in close partnership with operations teams, policy teams and the cross-government form-building community, GDS hopes to create an affordable way for lower transaction services to quickly create accessible online forms.

We’re also joined by Suzanne Mycock from the Home Office who is contributing to GDS’s user research. Suzanne, who works in a non-digital team that provides services to a small number of users, tells us about the difficulty her team faces when trying to create, and interpret, forms with limited software options and little design experience.

Get involved

We want policy teams to join our research panel and help us by testing prototypes and taking part in user research interviews.

If you build or publish forms on GOV.UK as PDFs or other document formats - please get in touch. Our team would love to hear more about:

• how your team is involved in creating or maintaining document-based forms
• what tools you use to create document-based forms
• your skill and experience level in creating forms

If you don’t work on forms directly, but know other people who do, why not share this post or connect us?

Subscribe to our podcast

You can subscribe to the GDS Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms. You can read a transcript of the podcast on Podbean.

GDS is building a single sign-on and identity solution, with help and support from colleagues right across government. This is the third mission of the GDS strategy for 2021-2024: “A simple digital identity solution that works for everyone”.

We recently passed a service assessment for our alpha on identity checking, so we thought we’d share some of our learnings.

Prototyping was our fastest route to learning

In pre-discovery we reviewed over 100 rounds of research from GOV.UK Verify and spent hours learning from colleagues across the public sector who run identity services, such as the Home Office and NHS Digital.

We also decided to start prototyping in our discovery phase, since we felt we would learn more - and learn faster - from thinking about our own user journeys and prototyping them than we would repeating research that had already been done by others.

Getting the whole team generating divergent ideas for user journeys in discovery flushed out major design, technical and scope questions to explore in alpha, and we were testing our first prototype and learning from real users in week one of alpha.

Inclusion works on several levels

Inclusion is a hugely important part of our work, because anyone should be able to prove their identity to access government services, and it’s often the most vulnerable people who are at most risk of being excluded. To be honest we didn’t get this right with GOV.UK Verify. We have an opportunity and obligation to do much better this time.

But as soon as we started exploring this space, it became clear it’s a concept with more than one meaning.

First, there’s digital inclusion, which is a concept relevant to any online service. We owe a lot to our colleagues at Universal Credit and DWP for helping us to think about different barriers to inclusion, which could relate to digital skills, confidence, time, or someone’s financial situation.

Second, there’s an identity-specific dimension to inclusion, which is about which documents or evidence sources someone can use to prove who they are. Millions of people in the UK don’t have a passport or driving licence and there’s no magic document that lets everyone prove their identity. To include everyone in identity checking we will need to accept a broad range of documents and evidence types: there’s no silver bullet. And although we often talk about ‘digital identity’, it’s clear that we will need to go beyond online channels to include everyone.

These two types of inclusion are distinct but they intersect and interact.

For example, someone with a strong credit record and two types of photo ID but with poor internet access, low digital confidence and a wariness of sharing personal information online could be excluded from proving their identity. And so might a young, highly educated, urban renter who does everything online but who has never needed a driving licence, moves address frequently, isn’t named on any bills, and is short on time.

Our understanding of inclusion in this context has benefitted from thinking about these two levels - general barriers to inclusion plus documents and data sources - and the interaction between them.

A mobile app is the quickest and most convenient route for some users

Most user needs can be met without an app, but there are exceptions to this.

Mobile apps are a helpful tool in identity checking because they allow users to do things that can’t easily be done in a browser. For example, someone with a document containing a near-field communication chip (like a UK passport or a biometric residence permit) can scan that document using a smartphone to open the chip and read the contents. This is a high value check that provides assurance about the validity of the document which can then remove the need for additional checks that would take longer and might require the same user to share extra personal information.

Not everyone will want to use an app or even be able to, and that’s OK. But if a mobile app can be cost-effective, secure, and help us meet the needs of some users better than we’d ever be able to without one, we should offer them one.

So, GDS is developing an app as one of several routes for people to easily prove who they are, when they need to access government services. Use of the app will always be optional, not mandatory. And, we will be running a discovery in parallel with this work to explore whether there would be value in further uses of mobile app technology to personalise and improve the experience of GOV.UK.

Strength + document + channel = journey

From exploring the array of user journeys we could offer, we realised there are three dimensions that identity checking can vary across:

• the strength of the identity check that the user needs to do, which the service decides depending on the riskiness of the transaction
• that document or evidence that the user provides and the way it’s checked
• the channel

This creates a large number of possible combinations. For a rough indication of scale, let’s say there are 4 strength levels, 10 accepted documents which can each be checked in 2 ways, across 3 channels. That’s already 240 unique user journeys. This has been a helpful framework not only to understand journeys, but also to define our initial scope and help us understand complexity

For private beta, we will be starting with one strength level, one document, and one channel. This will let us build something quickly, get it into the hands of real users, and start augmenting our research and interviews with observed user behaviour and feedback.

Identity is complicated, but proving your identity shouldn’t be

Identity checking is an inherently complex problem. All too often this gets translated into a difficult and unwieldy process. We don’t think it has to be this way and we’re experimenting with how to keep things as simple as possible.

Identity checking can’t be a one-size-fits-all journey (there’s no magic document) but we don’t want to create a confusing maze of possibilities. One of our main discoveries from usability testing was that a task list-based design pattern works well as a simple, flexible and extensible way of assembling user journeys from different types of checks to fit different demographics.

Another learning was a ‘just in time’ principle for introducing concepts. For example, our first prototype tried to educate users at the start of the journey about the value of having a reusable identity, but it was too abstract and confusing. We knew it was important for users to understand that they’re creating something that can be reused, but the right moment to introduce this idea is when someone has finished proving their identity and has the option to save it. This has tested much better and makes the journey more seamless.

Live traffic is the next big step in learning

In alpha we learned a huge amount from six rounds of usability testing, countless technical spikes, and some frankly mind-bending team workshops as we dove into the complex world of identity checking.

But just as we decided in discovery that we needed to start prototyping to keep up the pace of our learning, a few months later - and after an intense alpha - we concluded that doing real identity checking with real users will unlock the next big frontier of learning.

To continue learning at the same pace, we need to make things real. That’s why we headed to our service assessment, and why we’re excited to move into private beta.

GOV.UK as a website is read by millions of people, worldwide, every day. You are among them - even if you didn’t realise it. The content we publish is really important.

At the Government Digital Service (GDS), we aim to hire great people who can help us make our content as good as it can be, and accessible to everyone.

We want to make sure we are drawing from as wide a pool of candidates as possible - people with experience of life and work both inside and outside the Civil Service, because people rely on our information to make decisions affecting all aspects of their lives.

Guidance to help potential applicants

Getting great people in to work on content starts with the pipeline of candidates who apply for our jobs. We aim to recruit using an open and transparent process, to make sure we are recruiting fairly. But our recruitment process may be very different to the process people are used to, and this can, sometimes, be a barrier to people applying.

In 2020, GDS Content Design Community set up a working group specifically to look at recruitment, to see if we could support applicants better. As part of this, we reviewed our application process, and we realised we could do more to help our applicants submit good applications.

So we wrote a recruitment guide for potential applicants, where we addressed a range of questions, including the below.

What does a content designer do?

Although the term ‘content designer’ is gaining traction, and more employers are using it, many people aren’t clear about what it means. So we’ve explained it in our recruitment guide.

What is GOV.UK style?

Our style and design guidelines are used by governments and institutions around the world, as well as by publishing staff across government departments and agencies. They are a set of rules and guidelines on how to create user-centred content and publish it to GOV.UK. Read our recruitment guide to find out more.

What skills do you need to become a content designer?

If you have good editing skills and know how to write and present digital content, you already have some of the skills we’re looking for, and we’re interested. But that’s not all you need and we have added some information to our recruitment guide to explain this.

What is the application and sifting process at GDS?

Our application and reviewing process follows the wider Civil Service process, and is designed to ensure that we recruit candidates fairly and objectively. We don’t ask you to fill out an application form - we just ask for a CV and a supporting statement, which are reviewed through an objective shortlisting process. We explain this more fully in our recruitment guide.

We hope this guide helps future applicants understand our processes better and that it encourages you to apply.

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In this month’s episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast, we’re joined by Jonathan Harden and Kat Stevens, who recently migrated GOV.UK Pay to a serverless platform.

While Jonathan is a site reliability engineer who recently joined GDS from the private sector, Kat is a software developer who has been with us for several years. Together they combined SysAdmin and TechOps experience with DevOps thinking as part of a multidisciplinary team.

DevOps in practice: keeping the product online while making improvements

Kat shares how they were able to progress the migration while ensuring there was no downtime for service owners or end users, and explains about the background decisions that led to this project.

Jonathan talks about the improvements this migration delivered: from freeing developers from repetitive tasks so they can focus on new functionality instead, to scratching an itch from the backlog, there was plenty that excited him about this project.

Traditional SysAdmin or agile jack of all trades? No problem

Jonathan and Kat cover the benefits of having a multidisciplinary team, and how their different experiences still led to the common goal of wanting to work where they could make a difference.

Both agree that whether you’re a full-time site reliability engineer, or learning about aspects of that role while collaborating on a project like the GOV.UK Pay migration, the opportunities at GDS have been pretty varied so far! If working on exciting projects that can benefit the public interests you, check out our vacancies.

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