The release of Inside Government tomorrow is a beginning, not an end. There’s a lot in it, but there’s also a lot yet to come.

Here is a list of features which are on the product roadmap to be delivered later. It’s a matter of when, rather than if, the following content and features will appear on Inside Government.

The policies of most departments

At launch, we will have around 30 policies covering the work of 2 major departments (DCLG and DFT). By March 2013 you can expect this to grow to around 250 policies from 24 departments. This means lots of government activity will not yet be covered, and some of the topics you’ll see on the site (like ‘economic growth’ and ‘national security’) will only have a small part of the overall government activity represented within them. Don’t write in.

Ways to get involved

We’ve defined Inside Government as the place to find out how government works, see what it’s doing and get involved. But this “get involved” layer will start small, with a simple explanation of what consultations and e-petitions are, and a way to see all the formal consultation papers from all the organisations who have moved to GOV.UK in a single list. The list will have filters to find consultations by topic, organisation and keyword.

By March, we expect to be highlighting not only formal consultations but all the other ways citizens can participate with government, including opportunities for less formal digital engagement and the kinds of civic participation profiled by Number 10.

At some point we also intend to use APIs to bring the functionality of some departments’ preferred online consultation tools into the consultation start pages.

Feeds and email notifications

We’re launching with a handful of Atom feeds available. People will be able to consume feeds of the latest content relating to a given policy or topic, or generate a feed of all publications (including consultations) tailored to their interests. We’ll follow this up as soon as we can to add a feed for each organisation, a customisable feed of announcements, and an email notification service (using Govdelivery) to push the content of all these feeds direct to your inbox.

Cross-government featured news

To begin with, there will be no featured government announcements on the homepage of Inside Government. Initially, the only place where you’ll see featured content is on organisation pages. With only a few departments using the platform, it would be a confusing proposition to present a curated view of their aggregated news. We expect that by around March, when we have a critical mass of departments on board, we will be adding a space to highlight the topical issues of the day from right across government, which will be based on the existing communications diary managed by Number 10.

Unified site search

The search results page will initially be showing results in 3 separate tabs for mainstream, detailed guidance and Inside Government. We are painfully aware that this is not a great user experience and will improve it soon.

Contact and order forms

We don’t as yet have any HTML forms, for example for users to contact departments and order print copies of publications. We want to take the time to make sure we are handling personal data securely, and we ran out of time to include it in this release.

Blogs and social media

We’re linking from each organisation’s page to their main accounts on social networks, and we support embedded YouTube videos in pages. There’s a lot more we want to do to grow the social side of Inside Government, including consuming content from existing government blogs and providing a single place for new blogs to be set up.

API

Detailed guidance is already available as JSON, and we’ll roll this out to all Inside Government formats when we can. In particular we want to make the data we hold about organisations and ministers as rich, useful and reusable as possible. Watch this space.

Data visualisations

There are lots of obvious opportunities to enrich the Inside Government product and improve trust in government through the visualisation of data, for example about what departments are spending and how they are performing. For the time being we’re focusing on the foundations of publishing, and baking in as much transparency into that as we can.

Worldwide content

Back in the beta we had international content about UK government policy and priorities overseas, pooling content from DFID, FCO, MOD and others. This will return in the new year, but is absent from this current release.

HTML publications

We’ve built our publications format around the realities of existing government publishing operations. That is, there are a lot of PDF downloads. But in time, we will be enabling departments to publish beautiful digital documents in the model of our recent Digital Strategy. (While still being able to support the inevitable PDFs).

Publishing tool enhancements

As well as all these features that end users will see, there is a long list of things that we will be adding later to the publishing tool for departments.  This functionality will include workflow, access controls and permissions, management information for content editors and more.

If you’re interested in the details of anything we’re planning you can always look at the Inside Government development backlog on Pivotal Tracker, which is open for anyone to view, or the Inside Inside Government blog.

Why this stuff is coming later

There’s no end to the amount of stuff we could build. It’s merely a matter of priorities. As the product manager, it’s my job to decide what the team builds and in what order, and what we won’t build at all.

This inevitably involves some tough calls. The Inside Government section on GOV.UK is replacing hundreds of mature, highly-trafficked websites with a single, brand new one. It’s a complex product with many stakeholders, each with a growing list of feature requests. Prioritising effectively means I have to forget these feature requests as much as I can to focus on the product vision and evidence of what users need, and say “no” or “later” a lot.

For me, this sometimes feels a bit like saying no to myself, because two of the websites Inside Government is replacing are ones I had a big hand in building in the first place.

But saying “no” or “later” is important. It keeps the team productive and focused on the next thing that’s most important for delivering great value to end users. (Here’s a great video about the product manager role within Scrum teams, which explains all this far better than I can.)

The version of Inside Government we’ll unveil tomorrow is – in my obviously biased opinion – groundbreaking and peerless, thanks to the efforts of staff across government. But it’s just the beginning, and it will continue to evolve as we learn more about how users want to interact with it and we’ll add more of the features stakeholders (including my former self) want and need.

Yesterday, with the announcement by DWP of the first Identity Provider (IdP) framework for government, the Identity Assurance Programme passed an important milestone in the development of a cross-government identity assurance platform.

We now have a group of suppliers with whom we can work out the practical issues of becoming operational as Identity Providers across all of government.

This is the start of a huge learning experience for these new suppliers, for the government departments who need Identity Providers for their new services, and for ourselves at GDS. We’re looking forward to the development of a vibrant market which is a crucial part of the government’s digital agenda.

Building on recent progress

This builds on the great progress we’ve made in recent months. By joining the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) we’ve created a forum for exchanging ideas between interested suppliers and the broader market. We’ve been drafting good practice guides and privacy principles, and we’ve reached out beyond central government to understand the needs and opportunities for Local Authorities and the wider public sector.

The first seven suppliers are: The Post Office, Cassidian, Digidentity, Experian, Ingeus, Mydex, and Verizon. An eighth supplier is expected to sign up in the next few weeks.

Publishing all the government’s corporate information on a shared platform hasn’t been done before. So the Inside Government team have been building a profile of the site’s users over the months as we’ve been developing the product. This is what we think we know about them.

Here comes everybody

Like all apps on GOV.UK, the content, information architecture and layouts of Inside Government have been designed for use by everyone and anyone in the UK (and beyond).

Inside Government must have this broad appeal and application because it will be the authoritative, official source of information about who is in the UK central government, how they are structured, what they are thinking and what they are doing about it. All of us instinctively feel that this information should be available in the public domain and be lovingly maintained so that it is accurate and accessible to all.

There is not a large or consistent body of research available about the exact users of corporate information on UK government websites. Combining the material we could find with site analytics, industry data and our own surveys and interviews, we have developed a profile of Inside Government’s user base which we’ve been using over the months to refine our product’s design and development.

The Inside Government team at work

A niche of millions

Research by OxIS suggests 18% of UK internet users have visited government websites to look at policy information. While we hope that growing numbers of the general public will recognise and use Inside Government as a resource, we anticipate that the regular, everyday users of Inside Government will be practitioners and professionals with a specialist interest in the business and workings of government.

These will be people working in the media, academia, NGOs, the private sector, local authorities and the civil service who visit a government website in anticipation that it will hold information that will help them do their jobs. It’s a group with niche interests but who nonetheless number in the millions.

We expect these users will have tended to follow particular departments but that their true interests in government information are more thematic than organisational. They want the latest information and to be able to get an overview quickly, but they are also willing to engage in the depth and technicalities. That said, they will not tolerate jargon or obfuscation.

Inside Government users will search a lot like everyone else but also do a lot of browsing, which means they need a good flow between sections and pages and decent signposting to related content. When Inside Government launches we expect to see a lot of returning users who spend a long time on pages, consuming a lot of material and following a lot of links. In other words, the motivation here is not the ‘quick do’ of other apps on GOV.UK; yes Inside Government users want ‘simpler, clearer, faster’ but above all they want to achieve a complete understanding.

Getting to know our users

Our most recent user testing last week involved one-to-one qualitative testing with a 12 people who were all regular or frequent users of the DCLG and DFT websites. We asked them to tell us about their use of current government sites and then asked them to try meeting their needs on Inside Government and to compare it to what they were used to (just as we did back in our beta days).

The feedback from these sessions was very positive. In broad terms, no one had trouble using the site or finding material. They found it intuitive and valued the proposition.  It made sense to them that all government organisations would share a platform to publish their corporate content and that the content would be inter-related. The tone of voice and the detailed content structure scored well, as did the page layouts.  This all made for a high quality and user-friendly reading experience.  We got plenty of positive feedback over the two days, most encouragingly one user simply said that Inside Government was going to make her life easier.

Recent user testing has shown us that we’ve developed a good appreciation of Inside Government’s users, and we’re now looking forward to getting to know those user’s even better following launch tomorrow. We can’t wait to see how they move through the data using the features and the tagging we’ve provided, and which desire paths they take through the content.

We will respond quickly to how users move through the site by optimising what works well and fixing the stuff that doesn’t. It’s the user insight that we prize above all else and we’ll use that insight to guide our decision-making. As ever, testing is ongoing, and we’ll tell you more about that over the next few weeks following the launch of Inside Government.

We said in the Civil Service Reform Plan, published earlier this year, that we wanted to open up policymaking. Today marks another important step along the way to reaching that objective.

Hundreds of websites will be joining GOV.UK over the next 18 months, starting today with the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Transport.

By doing this, we will make it much simpler, clearer and faster for people to find out what’s happening inside government. Announcements, publications, speeches and other corporate information will be presented clearly and consistently. People can search by topic or department to find the information they need.

Presenting government policy

I am particularly excited about the way government policy will be presented and explained on GOV.UK. Instead of having to trawl through the websites of various departments and agencies, people will be able to find definitive information about what the government is doing, all in one place. Departments are working together, with help from the Government Digital Service, to develop a clear and comprehensive set of web pages that explain all government policies.

A more connected policy profession

But this isn’t just about presentation. Getting policy information out in this way will help the civil service policy profession to become more connected and collaborative; it will become much easier for civil servants to understand the wider context when they are developing and implementing policy; and it will be much easier for outside experts to feed in their views.

Opening up policy making

So this is also fundamentally about giving us new opportunities to work with people outside Whitehall – academics, business, experts, and the public – to develop policy in a more open, informed and collaborative way. By making it much clearer to people what we are doing, when and how, I hope we will be able to provide a clearer, more open basis for us to work with others who have expertise and insights to offer.

Next steps

We will only start to see the full potential of this work once all departments have transferred to GOV.UK. There will, no doubt, be much to learn as we work through this process, and there will be many challenges along the way – getting the balance right between clarity and detail, making sure the information is up to date and definitive, and learning how we can continue to develop the way we present the information so it’s as useful as possible.

The two departments that have moved to GOV.UK today have blazed a trail for others to follow – they have worked hard to meet demanding deadlines, and taken all the risks involved in being the first. I congratulate them on their effort and thank them for learning a lot of lessons in the process that others will benefit from.

Today we released Inside Government, bringing together all the corporate and policy information of 2 ministerial departments (out of a total 24) and 3 smaller public bodies (out of the hundreds of agencies and other bodies who will later be joining the site).

Here’s a quick video to explain what Inside Government is all about.

You can find this video, along with some more information, at www.gov.uk/tour

The new URLs for the 5 organisations are:

www.gov.uk/dclg – Department for Communities and Local Government
www.gov.uk/dft – Department for Transport
www.gov.uk/dsa – Driving Standards Agency
www.gov.uk/brac – Building Regulations Advisory Committee
www.gov.uk/pins – The Planning Inspectorate

Roll credits

Inside Government was built by GDS, but it’s the people in the 5 departments and agencies who deserve most of the credit for today’s launch.

We are hugely grateful to the following people for their hard work, pragmatism, broad shoulders and the trust they have placed in us. Thanks for being the first and helping us learn.

Department for Communities and Local Government

Lauren McAllister
Howard Gossington
Simon Ricketts
Graham Noad

Department for Transport

Sioned James
Gavin Dispain
Luke Vincent
Gwen Cheeseman
Hayley Ward
Dave Stiffell
Tommy Baines
Philip Goodyear
Margaret O’Mahony
Matt Redmond

Driving Standards Agency

John Ploughman
Doug Swain

Special thanks also to Tim Stamp and his team in DFT and James Denman in DCLG for helping us refine our approach to publishing government statistics.

Inside Government in blog posts

Here’s a roundup of posts on this blog and press releases which tell the Inside Government story so far…

Launching Inside Government – guest post from Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary

The new home on the web for DFT and DCLG

What is Inside Government?

Explaining government policy

What you won’t see (yet) on Inside Government

Digging into the detail

Have I got government news for you?

A little blog on the side – Inside Inside Government

Learning alongside Inside Government – guest post from John Ploughman, Driving Standards Agency

Designing for the long read on Inside Government

Showing people around Inside Government

All about the beta

Cabinet Office press release – Second release of GOV.UK beta

Introducing the next phase of the Inside Government beta

Inside Government – a few highlights

Delivering Inside Government

Feedback isn’t just for Cobain and Hendrix – what we heard from the Inside Government beta

When we were young

Government policy – a spotters’ guide

The vision for corporate websites in the single domain (with early wireframes)

Government corporate websites in eye-popping 3D

Why do people need government department websites?

The big news this week has been the transition of two central government departments and three agencies to GOV.UK. Following the release of GOV.UK last month, it’s the next step towards establishing a single domain for government. Huge congratulations to everyone involved for months of hard work, and special thanks to all the people in departments and agencies doing hard work to make this happen.

Now it is time to focus on moving 22 more central government departments and even more agencies and arms length bodies to GOV.UK.

But that’s not the only thing we’ve been doing at GDS this week. Support of GOV.UK continues, with more than 200 items published in the last week. There’s also been a lot of focus on improving the Licence Finder, with iterations made to that throughout the week. And we’ve been conducting user testing sessions on Inside Government in Leeds and London.

You may have seen on the blog earlier this week with footage from a visit Tim O’Reilly and Jennifer Pahlka made to GDS on Monday. It was an honour to welcome them to Aviation House, and also to hear about the impact things like our Design Principles have had on the work of people outside of the UK government. It’s a terrific validation for the idea of doing work like this in the open.

We’ve also been contributing to blogs elsewhere. Dave Mann, a GDS delivery manager, wrote a case study about how we collected user feedback during the alpha and beta of GOV.UK for the Open Policymaking site. It’s important to get more of what we’ve learned on the way out in the public, and it’s great to see the team’s work being celebrated – and scrutinised – in places like this.

I’ll leave you with a couple of shots of the Inside Government team taken in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Will and Susan just before release

Neil and Pete just before release

Before we launched GOV.UK we introduced you to the Finance team and the Hosting and Infrastructure team. In this the third film the spotlight is on Mark Pinheiro who talks about his work in procurement.

The next team under the spotlight will be the transformation team.

It’s been some months since GDS published our social media guidance for Civil Servants, and there’s been lots of interest across the civil service (and beyond) in the idea of social in government. We’ve had queries from other countries too about our approach, and I recently Skyped into a conference that the Dutch Government were hosting to talk how they approach social media and what they might learn from the UK.

There, and in our work across government, it’s clear there’s still a lot of work to do to represent the benefits of social media. Metrics and measurement are a particularly thorny issue, as colleagues are asked to make business cases for the use of social media.

Measurement and perception

Let’s begin with that last sentence. Making a business case to use these channels is like making a business case to read the newspaper; it suggests that there’s a decision to be made about whether to engage or not.

I’d argue that the tipping point for that decision is long gone. We have to be actively engaged in those networks to talk with and to the public.

Measurement then becomes tricky. If it’s something you have to do, how do you choose what to measure? What are you trying to prove or what audience you are trying to influence?

Tape measure by Leo Reynolds

That’s not a problem unique to social media. In one of my previous roles, as Director of Communications in local government, our media monitoring companies would send us reports comparing the amount of coverage we received in local and national news with the equivalent amount we would have spent had we actually purchased that space as advertising. The equation therefore was if size of spread > cost of purchasing that space = success.

That, of course, is tosh. Most local politicians don’t care if you’ve gotten a lot of coverage if that coverage is negative.

(This was equally true if you actually managed to achieve positive stories. I remember one particular occasion where we had two positive front page stories in the local press – the holy grail of coverage – and a small negative paragraph buried deep on page 12 about CPZ’s (controlled parking zones). Guess which one generated the call to me from the Leader of the council?)

Which is all to say that its’ always been about perception. The metrics that mattered to me then were the number of phone calls I received from the Elected Members in any given week. No calls = good job.

Understanding sentiment

Of course, we do use several monitoring and measuring tools (like the Twitter API or Sproutsocial for example) across our various social media channels in GDS. We need to understand what is engaging people, what conversations are happening that we might usefully participate in, and to see what content is of sufficient interest that people ReTweet it, or comment on it.

All of that plays an important part in keeping us relevant to the people interested in our work at GDS, so we can work with them to deliver better services.

But reporting on that interaction is never going to be an exact science. We engage in conversation with those who are interested in what we do in government. We try to explain what and why we are doing something in a certain way. We need to accept that there will always be a multiplicity of views. Where there is negativity we try to understand what is driving that and accept that while we can engage we cannot always persuade. Very little of that can be captured in a graph that shows the number of tweets we’ve sent in a given week.

Conversations build trust

The act of engaging in the social sphere shifts the dynamic in other ways. Even where there is disagreement about a particular government policy or decision, being visible and taking part in dialogue builds trust in our ability to at least have a robust conversation.

In my experience, (trolling aside) most people have a strong sense of fair play. Though they may never agree with you they do respect you for stepping out of the shadows and making yourself visible to them. That’s really important in building trust with our users, something we hold dear at GDS.

I made this point to my Dutch colleagues, but at the end of our recent session they asked me a question: “You say that engaging in social media encourages trust in government. Could you tell us what percentage growth in trust your metrics have shown so far”?

I rest my case. There’s still a lot of work to be done in showing people how engaging with social can yield substantial benefits, even though they can’t always result in traditional metrics.

We are not yet in a space where reporting can become standardised (if it ever can). Not everyone is on the same page, and that’s something we need to acknowledge in a future iteration of our social media guidance.

The search engine optimisation landscape is changing. As I have blogged previously, we are doing our best to make sure we use the same search terms as our users to make content easier to find. Now that Directgov and Business Link are no more, and GOV.UK has shaken off its beta-warning shackles, it’s time to see if we’ve achieved this.

The number of visitors from external search remained stable at about 4.2 million for Directgov in the week prior to launch, and totalled 4 million to GOV.UK in the week after launch. This is good news because it shows that GOV.UK is attracting the same level of search traffic as Directgov and Business Link, but with far fewer pages.

Number of pages: GOV.UK compared to Directgov and Business Link combined

Note: I haven’t focused on comparisons with Business Link as the site received under 500,000 visitors per week, while Directgov received closer to 5 million.

The redirects worked

Usually you’d expect to see a significant drop in referral traffic after a site is replaced, as both people and search engines take some time to find the new pages. But for GOV.UK, immediately post-launch, people were presented with the old familiar Directgov results and then redirected to the closest-related GOV.UK content. Bravo to the transition team, whose redirection plan meant that they captured the Directgov and Business Link search rankings and sent people our way. The redirects ensure that the high search rankings earned by Directgov and Business Link are transferred to GOV.UK, so it’s a double-win. You can read the transition team strategy here in the blog post No link left behind. The mappings have worked, as users coming from search were redirected to 2,380 different pages.

How are people from search interacting?

	Directgov	GOV.UK
Average visit duration	2.3 mins	2.4 mins
Pages per visit	2.5	3.5
Bounce rate (only one page viewed)	55%	13%

 

So what do these figures mean? On a conventional site these figures would suggest that GOV.UK is performing better than Directgov – more pages viewed means more interest in the site. But with GOV.UK’s ‘in and out as quick as possible’ philosophy it’s not that straightforward. The higher number of page views could be due to how we format our guides.  This format chunks down information previously on one page into separate pages. We’re planning to look into this in more detail. Hopefully the stats will show that people are finding what they need on GOV.UK and then choosing to explore the site in more detail. At the very least they’re not bouncing out after a couple of seconds and going straight back to a search engine. This is largely due to the work of our design and content teams who are committed to ensuring that GOV.UK inspires trust.

The battle of Directgov and GOV.UK – keyword comparisons

Below is a comparison of the top referral terms leading to Directgov a week before launch, compared with GOV.UK’s performance for the same search terms a week after launch.

Directgov (a week pre-launch) compared to GOV.UK (a week post-launch)

We can see that traffic from each referral term has remained pretty consistent. The spike in ‘clocks’ for GOV.UK was expected as the clocks went back that week. Bear in mind that this is more than just an SEO hit list – these are GOV.UK’s top user needs and although they may change slightly throughout the year, they generally remain pretty fixed. It’s worth remembering them because services and content related to these keywords are reaching our biggest audiences.

GOV.UK rankings are looking good for most popular searches

We now need to keep monitoring to ensure that our content shakes off its shiny-snake skin of redirects and retains its high search rankings. Just over a week after launch I manually typed some popular searches into Google to see how we ranked. Apart from one, GOV.UK URLs ranked first or second for the top 20 Directgov and Business Link terms. So it looks like we’re in good form.

Screen Shot of how GOV.UK ranks in Bing for car tax

Imagine that you are a violin maker, and you have only a chisel and a hacksaw. With such inappropriate tools, you’re going to either a) make a really shoddy violin, b) spend an age trying to get the tools to work, or c) develop some tools that are better suited to violin making.

I work on the infrastructure of GOV.UK, and in the infrastructure team we are making the tools that make better violins, so our violin makers (the developers) can get on with worrying about how the instruments sound.

Using others’ tools to make thing simpler

At GDS, we’re in the business of addressing the needs of our users, the British public. In order to better serve these users, we frequently make use of software that someone else has already built. One of our design principles says “Do less”, and for us that means using tools that are already available so we can do things faster and better than we would if we built everything from scratch.

We’re not the first to use other peoples’ efforts to simplify our jobs. Indeed, the history of computing is dominated by the struggle to manage complexity: the work of others hides low-level detail through the use of “black box” abstractions. Those of us writing the code behind GOV.UK today rarely have to think about where the computer stores our data in its memory, and we certainly don’t pay much attention to what particular brand of processors are installed in our servers. There are other tools to worry about those things for us. We don’t even really pay much attention to how our servers map on to real physical machines, thanks to virtualisation.

What’s all this got to do with how we serve our users?

The tools and systems we build in the infrastructure team act as a layer of abstraction on top of things like virtual machines and web servers. If we do our job well, developers at GDS should be able to concentrate on what really matters — writing code that solves peoples’ problems — and spend less time worrying about implementation details.

For example, our developers care that when a user visits a particular page, their application serves it quickly and correctly. They care that they have access to timely logging and monitoring data, so they can use it to inform the improvement of their application. Most of the time, our developers shouldn’t have to care about webserver configuration files, operating systems, or load balancers.

Some of the ways we’re helping achieve these goals are:

• writing Puppet modules that automate configuring an application in the GOV.UK stack
• making deployment processes faster and more reliable
• encouraging the principles of the Twelve-Factor App in our systems: in particular, “dev-prod parity” (making our development environment similar to our live production environment)

Finishing the instrument

We’d like to share more of the code running our infrastructure, but this is still a messy and emerging field and this means we haven’t always been able to do things in the way we would like. In some cases, we’ve only learnt how best to do things after we’ve done them the wrong way! There are some pieces we can’t share in public yet, but in the coming months we’ll be working on opening up whatever we can.

We’re also a long way off removing all infrastructure concerns from our developers’ lives. We’re certainly not running a true platform as a service, for those who know their buzzwords. But that’s where we hope to be: a world where getting something up and running as part of GOV.UK is as quick and easy as downloading an app for your phone.

Following a busy few weeks here at GDS, some staff holidays and a few winter colds have left the office feeling a little bit quieter than usual.

For the most part the team have been preparing for the next big chunk of work, lots of it coming directly from the Digital Strategy. That includes preparing the Assisted Digital strategy, defining the Digital by Default standard and working with colleagues across government for the new wave of transactions we’ll be working on in 2013.

Meanwhile, it’s almost six weeks since the full release of GOV.UK, and there’s been a lot of detailed work done to analyse visitor trends. Lana wrote a bit about our SEO performance yesterday, but there’s also been analysis into how people are moving through the site, establishing baselines for future performance, and really digging into the parts of the site that people are getting stuck with. It’s very useful work, and we’ll talk more about that in the next couple of weeks.

We’ve also been supporting the release of the new Universal Jobmatch service this week. The first major tool a third party has implemented since the release of GOV.UK, it’s been a tough test of how quickly our support teams can work with teams elsewhere to help them monitor and respond to problems users are reporting to us. Where appropriate, we’ve lent a hand to help resolve them too.

Finally, following the transition of the first departments over to GOV.UK last week, we’re working with the next batch of departments to get them ready for the move. Next week Paola Wright from the Ministry of Defence will be telling you a bit more about what that means for policy teams outside of GDS.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post detailing the technical side of the Government Digital Strategy. One of the things I spoke about was how we were keen to keep improving the site and fixing bugs. We were also hoping to move some of the code into its own repository. The code could then be used as a completely independent plugin which would have other uses beyond the strategy. Today I’d like to update you.

Magna Charta

The biggest thing we’ve done is create the Magna Charta. Using JavaScript Tim and I turned some of the publication’s tabular data into bar charts.

After launch we pulled the JavaScript into a jQuery plugin, and you can see the results in the Magna Charta. Once we were confident that the plugin provided everything we needed, the old JavaScript powering the charts was removed and replaced. We are still working to improve the plugin, so if you find any issues please do let us know via Github.

Tweaks and fixes

Since launching the strategy we’ve kept a full change log on Github and the commits are free to browse if you’re interested. I’d like to highlight a few of the most important changes we made.

The biggest improvement for us has been the PDFs. They are now much smaller in size, better designed and much easier to download and read. A lot of users missed the PDF link when we first launched, so it’s been tweaked and is now more obvious.

Each document now includes a link to its section in the Github repository. The link shows the date the document was last edited and takes you directly to Github, which makes it even easier for you to see the changes we’ve made.

Our work has been driven by feedback too. Several users were trying to click the blue text on the charts. That’s now been changed. We have also made lots of other changes that improve the whole user experience. The project’s README was also re-written, so if you’d like to take the project and run it locally, you can.

We still want feedback

If you find any bugs in the strategy or with the Magna Charta, or have any suggestions on how we can improve it, please let us know. We’re continuing to iterate and improve, and we’d like to thank everyone who has taken the time to feedback, good or bad.

Janet wrote recently about how we’re presenting policy differently on Inside Government, but what does that mean for individual departments? Paola Wright, Online Policy Desk Officer for the Ministry of Defence (MOD), explains the impact it has had on their work.

After nearly two months of work, all of our policies at MOD are just about ready to be published on GOV.UK. It’s taken a lot of hard graft, in a very short space of time, and it’s meant big changes to how we approach policy. Although there have been a few hiccups along the way, it’s been a success story.

The right team for the job

Some of our policy team decided to take on the task of rewriting content for GOV.UK themselves, but we also worked with GDS to hire professional copywriters to help rewrite the rest.

Writing for the web is very different to writing a document for internal use, especially in a government department. Here, we tend to use specialised language  to talk about what we’re doing, which goes against the Inside Government style guidelines.

We needed copywriters who could change complex language and jargon into plain English. They had to be able to condense long documents and communicate very clear messages without losing any of the meaning.

Iterating policy

Copywriters, my team and policy leads all worked closely to iterate each document. Although some people were initially anxious about that process, we demonstrated early on that rephrasing the language doesn’t dilute the message.

But at times it’s been difficult. As you can imagine, in government the phraseology or a single word can carry great significance, whereas it may not mean much to the general public. So although changing a word may make a sentence more meaningful, that one particular word may have great significance for the department involved, and no other word will do.

For example, we’re using the GOV.UK style guide and we’re paying close attention to the words to avoid list. These words are vague and confusing, but widely used in policy documents.

Never finished

Communication hasn’t always been as frequent as it could have been given the tempo of the project and the need to achieve so much in such a short period of time.

Our biggest task was explaining to our stakeholders that the documents we were rewriting were not the finished products – they were the first of many iterations.

We’ve had to learn to approach projects in a more agile way. It hasn’t always been easy, but it has resulted in clearer content that people can read and understand more easily.

When the Ministry of Defence joins GOV.UK in a few weeks time, you’ll be able to see the result of this work and get a much clearer idea of what the MOD is doing. We look forward to your feedback.

After speaking at AgileTeaCamp, I thought I would share how people management has evolved in the GDS Delivery Team.

What you get for free with agile

Agile product teams are self-managing. With the users’ needs in mind, the product manager defines what needs to be done and the team itself decides how to achieve it. This is instantly a more motivating approach. You’re trusting people to design the best solution to meet the need, rather than handing down a ‘solved problem’ to be implemented. You’re also making the most of the smart, talented people you’ve worked so hard to find.

The approach we’ve taken at GDS is to create high-performing multi-disciplinary teams.  These teams consist of designers, developers, user researchers, content designers, technical architects, delivery managers, product managers and experts in customer insight, web operations and product analytics. These people all work together to build digital products and services. Managers are no longer expected to tell people what to do and how to do it.

So what do the people managers do and do we still need them?

How the role of ‘manager’ has evolved

The role of the manager now focuses on:

• looking after people (what used to be called ‘pastoral care’)
• matching people to challenging, engaging work (ie understanding what someone’s skills and interests are and then matching them to an appropriate team and opportunity)
• personal development and training (discussing with folks whether they want to deepen their specialism or widen their skill set, and helping them plan how to make that happen)
• career guidance (coaching, mentoring and helping people find out what the opportunities are)

Communities of practice

Most of our managers are specialists in their own right and they’re extraordinarily good at what they do. They act as head of the specialism and they line manage the specialists in their area. They arrange training and regular meet-ups, and they create opportunities for work to be shared across the different product teams.

At GDS, these communities are at various stages of maturity. One of the best examples is our design team. Ben Terrett, head of design, holds regular ‘design crits’ in which designers share their work and receive feedback from other designers. The design team visit relevant exhibitions and attend design-related events.

The advantage of this approach is that most people can learn from their line manager, who is a specialist in their field. People also have the opportunity to work with colleagues with different skills and viewpoints. This diverse mix generates excellent solutions to challenging problems.

The future

We will of course continue to evolve our approach. We’re eager to hear about other people’s experiences of agile and their views on how traditional people management is changing. What needs to be preserved and what is no longer necessary?

Photo credit: Tea! by @chrisinplymouth

We’ve been monitoring the volume of traffic to GOV.UK since launch. We want to ensure that the people who used to rely on Directgov and Business Link can still find the reliable and authoritative information and services they need.

As the GOV.UK dashboard shows, and some followers have commented, the numbers of visits and unique visitors have fallen since the first week after launch. So what’s been going on?

I’ll start with some caveats. Firstly, GOV.UK, Directgov and Business Link all use different analytics software, implemented in different ways. The figures are not calculated in the same way. Nevertheless, our benchmarking shows that comparing trends across the three sites is a worthwhile exercise. Secondly, I’ll focus on the month or so after GOV.UK came out of beta, but before the first iteration of Inside Government and before the job search entry page moved to GOV.UK. This gives us the closest comparison of Directgov and Business Link traffic to GOV.UK.

Here’s the weekly data from the GOV.UK dashboard:

But what do the metrics look like on a daily basis?

Note: the visits to unique visitors ratio is consistent at 1.2:1.

If we compare GOV.UK data for October and November, against Directgov and Business Link a month earlier in September and October, the data looks more worrying; with visits down 12% and unique visitors down 20%.

But looking back over the past month doesn’t really give us enough context. So how did Directgov perform over the last two years?

Looking at the Directgov monthly visits, we noticed two things. Firstly, there’s a strong seasonal pattern with traffic falling off in the autumn. Secondly Directgov performed well in 2012.

So we overlaid the number of Directgov and Business Link visits for the month starting 19 October 2011 with the GOV.UK data for a year later, starting 21 October 2012.

Over the month, visits to GOV.UK increased by 14% and unique visitors increased by 3%.

So we think the biggest influence on traffic trends is this strong seasonal pattern. We’ll start investigating whether particular topics and services are less in demand in the autumn or whether there is a more even distribution of the tail off. This is useful insight for our content designers who ensure that seasonal topics are highlighted at the right time of year.

Of course, the launch of Inside Government and the move of additional government services to GOV.UK will impact significantly on traffic.

We’ll continue to monitor ‘like for like’ traffic for a while, but we’ll focus on GOV.UK’s own traffic patterns as the site evolves.

The department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has been working with GDS since before GDS existed to help get department websites ready for the move to GOV.UK. John Turnbull from BIS explains what it’s been like to see the project evolve.

I’ve worked on quite a few web projects in the classic project management style. In these the focus was very much on the process and the specification, rather than the product; you’d have to specify so much, and in such detail, that it often took a very long time for anything to get built. But in the last year, BIS has been working with GDS in a very different way.

Back at the start

At BIS we first got involved with the single government domain back in August of 2011. Our then Head of Digital, Neil Williams, started working with the newly formed GDS part-time, before moving over to the team full-time as the Inside Government project gathered pace.

Back then we knew what the basic shape of the product was going to be: a place for users to find out about government policy. But we didn’t know much beyond that.

Things became clearer as we went along. Our minimum viable product showed one way of presenting government policy, and that grew as we identified new types of content to be catered for.

A place for any policy

Within BIS the range of policy work is probably broader than for any other department; we’ve got everything from innovation and education to consumer issues and trade and investment.  So we spent those first few weeks of the Inside Government beta struggling to find a way to present our policies.

Eventually we came up with the Issues and Actions format. We got a clearer idea of how we needed to present this information last February, when we started to put content into the publisher and watched the pages go live.

We realised that we needed new features as we went along, rather than specifying them at the start. Doing it this way around is far better: it feels like we’re getting a more useful product.

Making things less muddy

It wasn’t just the product that became clearer. Some of the communication with GDS has been muddy, as Paola Wright mentioned in her blog post.

In the early days, there weren’t many people at GDS working on Inside Government and they were focused very much on the product, which meant we didn’t always know what stage things were at or what was being worked on.

That’s been much improved with the addition of various members to the team, such as Suzanne D’Arcy (our liaison at GDS), and more recently Janet Hughes.

I’ve enjoyed going to the meetings with the other departments, especially over the last few months as we approach next week’s release. GDS has taken on board the feedback from departments as the products have been developed. This includes the guides mentioned by John Ploughman and BIS’s own detailed content. It’s been a very collaborative process.

Beyond content

We’re currently focussing on alerting and communicating with our users, some 40,000 of whom use our email notification service to keep up with changes and updates to BIS’s policies.

GDS is implementing a similar service, which it will be rolling out across government. I need to ensure a smooth transfer of as many of our subscribers as possible to the new service, but given the new ways in which policies are being presented on GOV.UK it’s not straightforward.

The nature of agile development means that we can’t expect to have all the features we want. After our content is published in December we’ll see how colleagues and users react to BIS’s presence on GOV.UK. We’ll take it from there in terms of requesting new features or functionality, as well as how we can improve what’s already there.

A year ago we had an idea of where Inside Government was going, but even then it was only a fraction of what it’s become. It’s been exciting to see it unfold.

It’s slightly strange to be reporting on another week without a major launch but it’s something we should get used to. One of the main advantages of iterative working is that the big bangs of launching new products and platforms are replaced by the quiet work of releases, updates and improvements. It’s not as dramatic but it’s more effective, safer and serves our users better.

So, to that end, the quiet work this week has included:

The ‘mainstream’ team working hard on getting Welsh content ready for GOV.UK.

The content team tweaking and reviewing items, working with departments and publishing new items –  111 this week, giving a total of 2,822 published on GOV.UK.

Working with more departments to deliver the next phase of Inside Government. John Turnbull from BIS blogged about some of that work earlier in the week, as did Paola Wright from the MOD.  Thanks John and Paola!

Doing summative testing on Inside Gov this week to give us an idea how it’s performing with users. We’ll share the results of that next week, alongside our lab testing results.

We’re also beginning  to build up enough data on the traffic to GOV.UK to start looking at and understanding usage patterns. Peter Jordan wrote about some of this earlier in the week. In a nutshell, we were wondering why traffic to GOV.UK had been falling since the launch and it looks like it’s a seasonal effect. If you’re interested, you can keep an eye on the traffic yourself on the GOV.UK dashboard.

(Incidentally, right now, Inside Gov represents about 3% of visits to GOV.UK.)

Work continues on the Assisted Digital Strategy, on the Digital By Default Standard on trailblazer transactions and the IDA team are doing user research on some wireframes. And we’re digging into the planning for a cross-government digital event in January. More on that soon.

It’s all quiet work. But it’s important.

It’s early days for Inside Government but we wanted to share some analytical data on user traffic, demand and engagement.

Inside Government is just three weeks old. We launched with five government organisations on 15 November and it felt good to get going. With no time to waste, another four departments will be joining the original five in a few days time.

So how is the site performing? Honestly, it’s still a little too early to say. We’ve just completed a round of user interviews and we’re finishing off some large-scale, quantitative usability tests, which our Insight team will report on soon. We expect to hear about what’s working well and what needs rethinking.

We’re also watching our analytics closely. Being so new, Inside Government hasn’t generated very much in the way of analytical data, but we wanted to share some of the early figures (from 15 November to 5 December) to give you an idea of the levels of user traffic, demand and engagement.

Between 15 November and 5 December, Inside Government received 557,276 visits from 330,828 unique visitors. That’s approximately 3% of visits and visitors to GOV.UK. These figures are as the departments expected and in line with what we predicted. Following on from the Inside Government beta, we projected that Inside Government – with just the ministerial departments on board – would generate 18% of the visits to GOV.UK.  It looks like we’re on track.

Arguably, more important than numbers, is engagement. Inside Government visitors viewed a total of 1,536,495 pages.

Weekly page views on Inside Government (November 15th – December 5th 2012)

Those users visited an average of 2.76 pages per visit, and the average duration of each visit was 2 minutes 23 seconds. The average bounce rate for Inside Government is 57%. Although Inside Government is more of a reading and browsing site than the rest of GOV.UK, there is still a strong element of the ‘quick do’. Google judges a bounce rate of between 40 and 60% as ‘decent’ for a content-led site like ours, so we’re not doing too badly.

In terms of traffic sources, it will come as no surprise that most users, ie 50%, come to Inside Government via search, 35% come via referrals and 15% are direct traffic. Ten percent of traffic is from mobile devices compared with 19% of visits to GOV.UK, which is possibly due to the desk-based professional-practitioner nature of Inside Government’s user base.

We’ve been curious to know what content users come to Inside Government for. The top-level pages feature in the top 10.

10 most viewed pages on Inside Government (Weekly page views on Inside Government (November 15th – December 5th 2012)

It’s satisfying to see policies up there because everyone has worked hard to produce a new and compelling way to access and read government policies. And when we look at the next ten most popular pages, there are three specific policies alongside two publications and one news item. There are also three topics in the top 20, which is another Inside Government innovation, which allows users to look thematically, as well as organisationally, across the government’s corporate information.

Most viewed pages on Inside Government 11 – 20 (November 15th – December 5th 2012)

We hope people find these early, indicative figures illuminating. Shortly we will open a tab for Inside Government on the GOV.UK dashboard, which will give an overview across organisations, showing trends and highlighting things we need to work on. This will transform and enrich our data.

Putting this data, and its visualisations, in the public domain is important for transparency purposes. Hopefully it will encourage departments to produce and curate good content. The data will also highlight any shortcomings in our product and it will illustrate the impact of improvements we make. That’ll keep us on our toes and that’s exactly how we like it.

It’s a year since the event that officially launched GDS. The last twelve months have seen major milestones like the release of GOV.UK, the Digital Strategy and the transition of government departments to the single domain, all at a pace that’s set to continue into 2013.

While it’s business as usual for most people here at GDS, it’s interesting to see how Departments and Agencies are starting to define and deliver on their digital ambitions. This week I visited the Rural Payments Agency, part of Defra, where Mike Beaven’s transformation team have created a small agile team. The work they have done in a few weeks has already brought huge benefits to our colleagues in Government, and is a great example of how small teams can quickly change existing technical assumptions.

Back in Cabinet Office, the digital case management system was presented to the controls team, which should improve the design and efficiency of how we handle controls and help departments to see the flow of requests.

Next week the Inside Government team will be adding four new departments to GOV.UK, and work has continued virtually without rest to make sure that goes smoothly. They’ve also been meeting with other departments as they prepare for their transition early next year.

One of the big things that made the Directgov and Businesslink transitions so smooth for users was the effort put into making sure users were redirected to the right place on GOV.UK. In between working the same magic for departmental websites the team responsible have done a lot to tidy those tools and their repositories up, and next week Anna Shipman will reveal more about how all of them work. It’s an extraordinary achievement, and it’s great to be releasing code for the wider community to use.

The team working on the tools and advice for government transactions are nearing an alpha release of their product. There’s a real thirst in government to get hold of the guidance, and it’s proving to be especially well-timed as departments near completion of their own digital strategies.

Meanwhile the user research team have been analysing user testing sessions in London and Bristol, doing the fieldwork for more Inside Government testing, and helping to conduct guerilla testing in Nottingham. The range of input we get from users is really valuable in making sure the things we build are on the right track, and it’s always a good opportunity to check your assumptions about what will or won’t work for users.

Finally, I can reveal that these week notes will be coming from a slightly different place next week after a bit of a desk shuffle here at Aviation House. Lots of teams have changed shape since the release of GOV.UK, so we’re moving around to make sure people who work together can sit together. It feels like a strangely appropriate way to celebrate our first birthday.