An active community is essential to the GOV.UK Design System. We are a contribution based design system, so continually growing and engaging the community is essential. 

Functioning communities do not run themselves, especially those that actively ‘create’ together. That’s where a community designer, like myself, comes in; to build relationships with our users, find out their needs, and work with the team to design solutions. I’m there after things have gone live too, checking that things have landed as intended, feeding back to the team if they haven’t. A community designer is there for the whole user journey but where the community is the service.

As a team, we’ve been doing collaborative design for a few years and continue to iterate on our processes. When I joined the team, user research showed that users wanted more visibility of our roadmap and decision-making processes.

We’ve been working for years to break these problems down. Part of the solution was the community values we introduced to the team in 2022:

We try to embody these values whenever we interact with our community. That could be on support channels, on monthly calls, workshops and conferences.

Design System Day

Design System Day is our annual flagship conference. It started as a way to pick our community up after the summer lull, and it’s proving really effective at doing that. If we have one big-bang event for the year, this is it.

We’ve endeavoured to make all forms of contribution more participatory, experimenting with co-design, running open design workshops, crits, and testing sessions. This requires a lot of engagement work and a highly motivated, switched on community. During summer, when people take holidays and spend time with children during their school break, the appetite for extra-curricular activity is muted.

We use Design System Day as a re-energiser for the community, it brings focus back onto the design system’s collaborative work and draws even more eyes to our community. The event perfectly aligns with our open-source contribution model and with our community values.

Open

The GOV.UK Design System is an open-source platform and the team share our roadmap online. We do regular show and tells at our monthly calls, and we follow this up with a larger showcase at our events.

Here’s our showcase from the first Design System Day event earlier this year:

And we encourage the community to share what they are working on too. 

Inviting

Our community work is all about making people feel that we want active participation in our design system. We have a collaborative philosophy and welcome input in sessions throughout the year. We consider contribution to be anything that helps bolster our community and make it better. This can be attending an event, giving an answer during a discussion, spotting a spelling mistake on our site, sharing how you used a component, through to contributing a new component or pattern.

Design System Day is essentially a celebration and showcase of our community. We had an open call for speakers and almost all (9 of 10) speakers came from this call for speakers. We also invited Greg Macoy, a local speaker from Liverpool to speak about working with local charities and making positive change in the area. We like to pay tribute to the city we host in, and talking about local user needs is one way we do that.

Transfer of power

To stop our design system being too top-down, it is important to hand over some decision-making authority to our community. After all, most of the components and patterns that sit in our product are contributed by external users. We have an impartial, external panel of experts that make up the GOV.UK Design System Working Group, that have the final say on whether components and patterns are ready to launch. We also now co-design all our components and patterns, running collaborative kick-off sessions, ideations, crits and launches.

Design System Day helps that process of transferring power. It is our highlight event of the year, and that’s why we insist on putting our community members front and centre. We essentially create a stage for our community to showcase their work and skills. Every talk is user-pitched, drafted and delivered; much like any other contribution to the design system. The agenda is shaped by the community, for the community, and we love being able to give people that agency.

Educational

As with any good community of practitioners, we want members to learn new things from being part of the community. Whether chatting on Slack, sharing examples on Github, or discussing in one of our monthly chats, our community members have the ability to make new connections and share best practice.

We encourage collaboration, and one thing that we hope to see is community members working together on new projects and achieving something collectively. On Design System Day, we were lucky to have sustainability lead Ishmael Burdeau talk to us about his drive for services to have public sustainability statements. You can watch Ishmael’s talk here:

We hope it inspires you to take action in your service. You can join the Civil Service Climate and Environment Network and discuss on the Cross-Government Slack channels #sustainability and #green-software-development.

Gratitude

We like to say thank you to our community members for the hard work they put into making our product great. We put together stickers, credit people in release notes and send thank you messages to our speakers.

GOV.UK Forms is now in public beta, enabling all teams across central government to use the platform. We’re also expanding our support and service offering.

GOV.UK Forms is an easy to use form building platform with accessibility, security and hosting built-in. We do lots of the hard work for teams such as complying with government standards, including on accessibility and cyber security, so they can focus on building forms and using expert knowledge to run public services. 

You can see how the platform is enabling teams to save time and money in this short video. 

There are over 10,000 document-based forms published on GOV.UK. GOV.UK Forms is designed to tackle some of the common problems associated with these. Many of these forms tend to be less accessible, difficult for the public to use and take longer to process. 

GOV.UK Forms is part of GDS’ commitment to make common components, making it easier for government departments to build better digital forms, save everyone time and improve the public experience of interacting with government. 

Teams right across central government can now sign up to quickly create secure and accessible digital forms without needing any technical knowledge. We estimate this has already saved government teams over 2 years in processing time since September 2022.

During private beta and early access we saw 87 forms published alongside over 1,200 users creating accounts to test how GOV.UK Forms can help their organisations build better forms. The team have done lots of accessibility research throughout development and Oliver Quinlan, Lead User Researcher at GDS, has previously written about what we learned from users when testing different form formats and the preference for digital forms.

To help organisations use GOV.UK Forms we’ve also included controls such as user management, which enables departments to manage who can publish forms, and guidance on how to create good forms.

We’ve been working with and learning from teams across government throughout private beta. John Ploughman and Thomas Williams from DVSA, recently published a blog post on ‘How to get started using GOV.UK Forms’ and what they’ve learned. 

We’re continuing to develop and scale the platform and we’re keen to do that in partnership with teams across central government. So if you have questions, feedback or ideas, please get in touch.

As we come to the end of our initial three-year phase, GOV.UK One Login is now fully operational, and I’m delighted to be able to tell you that we’ve passed a golden milestone.

As of October 2024, 50 services are using GOV.UK One Login for authentication and identity-proving. This is testimony to the hard work of not just the GDS teams developing the product, but all those in service teams across government who have worked to help us understand what their users need and to onboard to our service. This shows that GOV.UK One Login is fulfilling its purpose, empowering more teams to streamline their processes, and delivering tangible benefits for departments and end-users. 

The Department for Education ‘Confirm my Apprenticeship’ is officially our 50th service. With five Apprenticeship services now using GOV.UK One Login, employers, citizens, and apprentices are enjoying an improved user experience and are saving time as they access the services they need.

Gary Tucker, Deputy Director, Digital Skills Portfolio from the Department for Education said: 

We’ve now integrated five Apprenticeship services with GOV.UK One Login, and it’s been a game-changer for our apprentices, the supporting services and our department. It shouldn’t be difficult for apprentices to create and manage their account, and now with GOV.UK One Login, the end to end process is so much smoother.

The fact that employers, citizens and apprentices are all using GOV.UK One Login as well makes the process so much simpler and more joined up. As a department we’re saving time and money, reducing duplication and better serving our citizens. We’re proud to be part of this important milestone.

It's exciting to see how GOV.UK One Login’s adoption continues to expand, boosting efficiency and collaboration while validating all the hard work that's gone into its development. A huge thanks to all our services who have onboarded and our colleagues who continue to work hard to achieve our shared objectives.

A modern digital government 

With the recent change of government, GDS - including teams working on GOV.UK One Login - has moved to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), alongside the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) and the Incubator for AI (i.AI).

This move will drive forward the digital changes needed to overhaul the British public’s experience of interacting with the government, so it becomes personalised, convenient, and timesaving – for example, by providing people with just one way to login and prove who they are so they can quickly access the government services they need. It will also help remove roadblocks to sharing data across the public sector.

We have always worked closely with others in DSIT, and this move unites our efforts to create a modern digital government with a strong mandate for change. Our work in GOV.UK One Login will continue to drive forward a modern digital government that gives citizens a better experience, and their time back. 

A front door open to all users 

GOV.UK One Login is providing a secure front door to all government services, and so accessibility is vital. Over the past year we’ve honed in on inclusion, broadening the range of documents and evidence that people can use to prove who they are. We are now at a place where we can verify someone's identity with a range of different documentation, including UK biometric residence permits and knowledge-based verification questions.  

Last October, we established our face-to-face route for identity verification meaning people can instead choose to visit their local Post Office to complete this part of the journey. Enabling a face-to-face route is a huge step in enabling access to One Login for people who may not have the confidence to complete things online, or those without a smartphone.

At the same time we also opened a contact centre, so that users who were struggling to prove who they are could call us and get support at the time they need it. If you’d like to find out more about the contact centre’s offering, check out our latest blog post here. 

Making our service even better for citizens

But 50 is clearly not our end goal, with many more services on our roadmap in the future with HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency soon to come on board. This achievement not only shows the programme's success but also highlights its potential to continue transforming how we work, collaborate, and serve users.

And throughout, our mission remains clear: save taxpayer money by cutting duplication, and make life easier for people with a simpler, faster login process. We’re opening doors for genuine users while keeping fraudsters at bay. Every step we take gets us closer to that goal and we won’t stop until we truly achieve One Login for all services. 

Until next time, Natalie. 

At the Government Digital Service (GDS) our international work includes engagement with multilateral organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The UK’s digital, data and technology expertise is highly sought after by our international peers in other governments and multilateral organisations. Our membership of forums hosted by these bodies plays a role in providing our UK practitioners with unique learning opportunities.

With first-hand experience of delivering digital transformation, our GDS senior leadership is at the very core of our engagement, through their participation on international forums such as the OECD’s E-Leaders where they get together with other senior officials from different governments, share lessons learnt and collectively solve common problems, but also help to shape the future of the global digital government landscape.

Organisations like the OECD bring together international experts and digital practitioners in their respective specialist subject fields to conduct in-depth analysis and share international insights and best practices with other governments.

The end goals all have the same purpose - sharing of information and opinions between country peers and thematic experts to achieve a desired output or common goal.

The UK’s engagement with the OECD’s Digital Government and Open Data Unit opens up many opportunities for learning. 

GDS digital practitioners have previously supported digital government reviews led by the OECD, in Chile, Slovenia and will be supporting upcoming OECD capacity building workshops in Thailand.  Participating in interviews and discussions with other governments also brings back learnings and insights to help our own work and thinking.

Here’s a recent example of a trip that my colleague Tim Paul, our Head of Interaction Design, joined. Over to Tim…

Peer review trip to the Republic of Korea

Back in June 2024 I was lucky enough to be selected to join a small OECD delegation to the Republic of Korea, to conduct a peer review of their digital public services and infrastructure.

The OECD works to help its 38 member countries improve people’s lives with better policies for things like digital government, economic development, education, climate change and corruption.

They occasionally visit member countries to conduct a detailed review, and then share what they learn in a report. Typically they invite a few peers from other member countries; experts in a particular field that the country in question is interested in.

I was joined by another peer, Laura Sommer, an advisor from the New Zealand equivalent of GDS. We were there to provide expertise on User Centred Design and Service Transformation.

Over 5 days we held 19 in-depth interviews with civil servants from 14 different departments. They were held in government offices in Seoul and Sejong, and for each interview we were joined by a translator.

The interviews were semi-structured, with some pre-prepared questions, but as peers we were able to improvise a bit. At the end of the week we presented our initial findings back to our hosts. The final report is written by OECD, but Laura and I will review it too.

On reflection, it’s been one of the most fascinating and rewarding experiences of my career so far.

It felt really good to be supporting the digital transformation of another country. The OECD team was fantastic, and it was great to make connections with a fellow peer.

The trip gave me a new appreciation that every nation is on its own journey when it comes to digital transformation. What works in one place may not work elsewhere, so it’s really important to understand a country’s context before you try to replicate their strategies.

Also, the food was delicious.

Early developments

GOV.UK has thousands of forms which exist as PDFs or other document formats. Users have historically had to download, fill out, and send them back to the department which owns them. 

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic most are now submitted as email attachments. We want to see fewer document-based forms on GOV.UK because we think that online HTML forms are better for users. Some of the benefits of online forms include:

• Compatibility with different browsers and assistive technologies, making it easier for users to access and complete forms
• Validation, helping users spot problems with their answers and saving time filling and processing forms
• Instant updates, meaning users always have access to the latest version of the form
• Page-by-page statistics, meaning form creators can see how well their forms are working and fix any issues

In 2017, GDS started looking at this problem with a project called GOV.UK Submit. While this didn’t progress past the alpha stage, it did inspire a number of form-building platforms across government. Then in 2020, the cross-government form building community was founded to connect people working on form building solutions.

The ‘Collecting Information from Users’ Discovery

The number of document-based forms continued to increase, so in January 2021 we started looking at this problem again in a new discovery. Our aim was to understand how document-based forms end up being published on GOV.UK, and identify ways to help civil servants make simple and accessible online versions instead.

We wanted to find out whether the existing form-building solutions would work for the teams creating these forms, so we assessed the cost and accessibility of existing platforms. We conducted approximately 30 in-depth interviews with people working across local and central government departments to find out more about their needs and the barriers to making online forms.

We audited a sample of document-based forms on GOV.UK and found that 68% of them received fewer than 10,000 submissions a year. The teams who manage these forms can’t justify the cost of a multidisciplinary digital team and we found they weren’t being adequately served by existing form building platforms either. 

To address this and support teams across government, we decided to build our own self-service form-building platform. We designed it to enable people with little or no digital experience to make their own online forms without needing help from digital teams.

We hypothesised that this would allow them to deliver quick improvements for their users, while digital teams continue to focus on converting higher-volume document-based forms. This in turn would enable a wider move to online forms across government. 

Alpha (July 2021 to March 2022)

Before spending public money on building a new platform, we wanted to validate some of our assumptions, so in our alpha phase we wanted to answer these questions:

• How cost-effective can we make adopting online forms for teams running services with between 250 and 10,000 transactions per year?
• Can we make it easy enough for civil servants without digital expertise to create "good enough" online forms?
• How easy do we need to make it to approve and manage online forms alongside document-based forms?
• How do we convince decision-makers to adopt our platform?
• Would usability improve after notifying digital assurance teams and publishers of underperforming forms?

To answer these questions we worked with 50 people across central government, carrying out interviews and experiments with form builders, which gave us confidence that our form building platform was viable.

We put together a proposed service journey and a roadmap for private beta and started assembling our team.

Private beta (March 2022 to November 2024)

We moved into private beta and started building the product in March 2022. Our aims in this phase were to deliver enough features to drive adoption, and test the platform with a small number of partner departments to validate our designs.

Throughout this phase we tested regularly to make sure our platform worked for everyone. We spoke with civil servants and members of the public, including people with different levels of digital confidence and users with access needs. 

We published our first form in September 2022, the Insolvency Service’s Amend my claim for holiday pay accrued form. Shortly afterwards, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency used our platform for their Apply to be a Volunteer Coastguard Rescue Officer form, which has helped to recruit almost 500 volunteer coastguards since it was launched.

To help us scale up we opened up our platform for early access in November 2023. This is an unusual step, but it meant that while we focused on developing new features and building forms with our partner departments, users from across government could sign up to try our platform. Within two months more than 500 new users had set up accounts.

Around the same time we took on a high-profile form - Defra’s Apply for a Certificate of Exemption to keep an XL Bully dog. Our platform enabled Defra to set up this new service quickly and easily, and it received more than 60,000 submissions in 3 months.

After receiving feedback from early and prospective users, we made changes to allow departments to assign forms to groups and manage access to those groups, giving departments more control over their ways of working. 

Other major features we added during private beta included:

• allowing users to skip questions based on a response
• allowing forms to take a payment along with a form submission
• adding detailed guidance to a question to help end-users answer more complex questions

You can see a full list of features on our product page.

At the end of private beta we had 87 published forms from 52 partner organisations. Those forms have received more than 165,000 submissions which we estimate has saved form processors over 3 years’ worth of time.

The future

On 4 November 2024, we moved into public beta. You can read about it in our announcement blog post and watch our animation video. This means that users in most central government departments can start building forms and publish them on GOV.UK.

We’ve started work on some new features, including branching and exit pages to enable more complex forms, and select from a long list of answers. You can see our GOV.UK Forms Forthcoming Features page for more details.

We're starting our next chapter, and you can be part of it. Visit our product page to start building your own accessible online forms and sign up to stay informed on the latest features and developments.

We’re also looking for help testing and improving the platform - if you’re a civil servant and you’d like to help us make the platform work as well as possible for users, you can sign up to take part in user research.