Last year we decided to drop the accessibility statement from GOV.UK. This week I was asked whether this decision sent out the wrong message to organisations wanting to make a public commitment to becoming accessible. So now seems like a good time to share our thoughts on the subject.

When we began working on the GOV.UK beta in August 2011, Tom Loosemore wrote:

“We want to make the most easy to use, accessible government website there has ever been. Merely ticking a box marked ‘accessible’ isn’t enough.”

The more we thought about this, the more we realised that we needed to take a different approach to accessibility.

We didn’t want accessibility to be an annual accreditation or statement of intention. We didn’t think it should be a box to tick before we moved on to something else. We didn’t want it to be an afterthought, and most of all we didn’t want it to be something we had to commit to becoming at some time in the future.

We just wanted GOV.UK to be as accessible as possible, which is why inclusive design is one of our design principles. It’s also the reason why we consider accessibility to be everyone’s responsibility, why we follow accessibility guidelines, and why we test everything we do with older and disabled people.

So to return to that question about accessibility statements: we realised that if we wanted accessibility to be a basic part of GOV.UK, we had to treat it like all the other basic parts. We didn’t have statements for creative design, technical merit, or user friendliness, so why single out accessibility?

Research from 2006 found that most accessibility statements were out of date, or contained inaccurate information. We didn’t want to publish an accessibility statement when GOV.UK was launched and then realise that we couldn’t keep it in step with the updates happening almost daily on GOV.UK.

In the end, the decision was simple. We didn’t think anyone should have to look at a statement to find out whether GOV.UK was accessible. Accessibility means different things to different people, and it either works for you or it doesn’t (and if it doesn’t, let us know so we can make it better).

We’re just back from an all-staff meeting, which was a great chance to see what teams throughout GDS have been up to over the last few weeks. We’ve also had meetings with the National Audit Office and the Efficiency and Reform Board, welcomed visitors from the Croatian Government and Barclays, and been preparing for the move of the Cabinet Office website over to GOV.UK.

A year ago today we launched the first G-Cloud framework and started the journey to provide a new way for the public sector to commission and buy technology-based services. And what a journey it’s been.

We didn’t know a year ago just how many suppliers or services the framework would attract, nor exactly how it would be used. We just knew that there was a strong demand for doing things differently, which meant there was a great opportunity available to us in government.

Now, with nearly 460 suppliers providing over 3,200 services, and a growing number of eager and committed buyers across the public sector, we’re seeing the framework becoming established as a way of doing business with technology.

Help us make G-Cloud better

We now have to build on the success of this first year, strengthen our processes, and continue to push boundaries. To do so, it’s vital that we listen to (and act on) your input as we improve and iterate the service.

We want to make the process of supplying and buying even easier, and that’s why we’ve started work on a new CloudStore, one that will be much more intuitive and user friendly. It’s also why we’re working on a new website, with clearer guidance, support and access to case studies and other resources. We want to make it much easier to find out who’s doing what, so we can build on things that work and share our learning and experiences.

As we release those updates, your feedback will be vital. Tell us what works, and what doesn’t, and help us to keep making G-Cloud better.

Thank you

There are undoubtedly some great challenges ahead, but we believe that with your continued support we can make the second year even better than the first. Our goal is to make a real difference to the way the public sector uses and delivers the technology needed to deliver a 21st-century service infrastructure for the UK.

We’re immensely grateful for all the work and enthusiasm we’ve seen from suppliers, and for the passion and drive from the public sector staff who have understood the benefits of G-Cloud and who are committed to making it work. Quite simply, we couldn’t have got this far without that support, so I’d like to say a huge thank you from the team to all who’ve put so much in – and keep working at it!

Last summer we built a prototype of a tool designed to help departments make better use of their data to improve public services. In October that prototype became the first GOV.UK dashboard and by December a second dashboard had been created for the Inside Government section of GOV.UK.

Now, we need your help to take it even further.

This video describes a bit more about the performance platform.

We’ve been through a number of iterations since the initial release. We’ve tweaked the presentation of the graphs, we’ve added mobile support, and shortly we’ll be releasing a more detailed interface to show how users are engaging with content on the site. But there are bigger changes on the way.

The Performance Platform needs YOU!

Now is a really exciting time for the Performance Platform, and GDS more generally. This year, we’ll be working across government to support the teams responsible for transforming some of the most used public services in the country.

We’re growing the team, and we’ll be recruiting for a number of posts in the coming weeks. Today, we’ve published adverts for three developer roles (.doc, 74kb) and a data scientist (.doc, 71kb).

You can find details about how to apply in the links above – applications should be accompanied by a CV and a covering letter. The closing date for the developer roles is Monday 4 March, while the data scientist role closes on the 5th. Do get in touch if you have any questions about the team or the roles: matt.harrington@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

Cabinet Office has become the ninth department to move its corporate and policy information to GOV.UK.

The Cabinet Office move brings with it the Offices of the Leaders of the Houses of Commons and Lords, two ministerial departments in their own right, bringing the total number of departments sharing the Inside Government section of GOV.UK up to 11.

This is a huge milestone. It’s the moment GDS’s own parent department makes the change we are asking all other central government organisations to make. More importantly, it’s the moment GOV.UK becomes home to the centre of government. Soon the number of departments on Inside Government will outnumber those yet to join, and that’s when the real value of bringing government information together in a single place will start to be felt more and more strongly.

New features

As ever, bringing another department on board has focused our development effort on some specific user needs.

In Cabinet Office’s case there were only a handful of small changes, such as:

• Improved ministers listings, with ministers now grouped by department rather than alphabetically
• New detailed guidance categories covering emergencies, devolution and the legislative process
• Support for OpenDocument file attachments
• Flexibility about the number of lead civil servants displayed on an organisation page (because Cabinet Office has 3 leaders at the very top level)

New policies

Representing Cabinet Office policy on GOV.UK has involved the creation of 13 policy documents in the new style, bringing the total to 98.

They include many policies which are close to our own hearts, such as:

• Creating an exceptional civil service: less bureaucratic and more skilled, digital and unified
• Improving the transparency and accountability of government and its services
• Transforming government services to make them more efficient and effective for users

With thanks

We are hugely grateful to Amy Khan, Nick Jones, Anthony Simon, Emily da Costa, Louisa Harper and many other of our Cabinet Office colleagues for working so hard to make this happen on time.

What’s next?

Next week will bring more departments and, of course, more new features and iteration to the site.

Big ticket things we’re working on include:

• Improvements to both the main site search and the filters on Inside Government’s document lists
• A worldwide section, profiling HM Government activity in over 200 world locations including translated content in more than 40 languages. We expect this to be feature complete by the end of February to enable a launch in late March
• A ‘get involved’ page showcasing the opportunities to participate in policy development and society
• An expanded history of government section
• More automation to make the ongoing transition programme more efficient and robust

We’re on track to bring all ministerial departments onto the site by the end of April.

We’re just back from an all-staff meeting, which was a great chance to see what teams throughout GDS have been up to over the last few weeks. We’ve also had meetings with the National Audit Office and the Efficiency and Reform Board. We welcomed visitors from the Croatian Government and have been preparing for the move of the Cabinet Office website over to GOV.UK.

What have you been up to this week?

We’ve just come back from our all staff event, a thing that is fresh in the mind. Over 200 of us saw all the great things that are going on around GDS. It was great because you see the breadth of all the stuff that is going on. We had everyone up on stage presenting in a sort of Ignite-style. One of the biggest challenges this year will be that our teams are distributed. They will be in different places on different platforms and systems. So it is great to get everyone in a room once a month, for a morning, and go through it. It was a really interesting and exciting event, and I look forward to it next month.

Outside of that this week, we’ve done a couple of key presentations. Yesterday I saw the National Audit Office, Sally Howes and the team there. They are tremendously important, not just because they keep us all honest, but because the auditing regimes and the financial management regimes they have bake in the way stuff should be done. It is crucial that we work closely with them so they represent the digital agenda as well. It was great to see over 100 of their staff, and talk about how we can do things differently in IT generally, and digital services, specifically.

I also had the pleasure of presenting at the Efficiency and Reform Board, to Sir Peter Gershwin and Chris Haskins, amongst others. I had the opportunity to walk them through the identity programme and our work so far. It was great to see the enthusiasm and the interest and also the context, because many of that group have been around various ID schemes and understand some of the problems that government has had in the past. It was great to get their steer as well. We did that in Cabinet Office again, yesterday.

I guess, the most important thing we did this week in terms of the longer term stuff is, we kicked off our Exemplars. Now, remember, just before Christmas, we announced 23 Exemplar programmes in eight departments, right across the country. We are doing a bunch of work here to understand what good looks like, and how the feasibility analysis work. We will come up with change plans and business plans with departments. To kick that programme off and formally get it going was a real milestone. We have got 400 days, or just under now, to get some stuff delivered. So to get it going here was a big win.

We have been working with other people as well, this week, who have we had in?

We always have interesting people in. The first bunch in this week were the Croatians. We had Thomaalav Korman and his colleagues from the Ministry of Administration, which is the equivalent of the Cabinet Office there. It was tremendous fun seeing what they are doing, and I think they’re really enthusiastic about what we are doing here. We should say thanks to Chris Freeman, from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who helped set that up. It is great to see another country come into GDS and make a good connection there.

What are you looking forward to next week?

I think we’re all looking forward, here, to the next major migration onto GOV.UK, because it’s the turn of the Cabinet Office. That is a big win for us; it validates all the things that we have been trying to do, but also it means we know what it is like being, if you like, the client of our work.

Is there anything outside of government that has caught your eye?

Yes. A farming community in Lancashire digging up fields to lay their own broadband network. Fantastic stuff. It shows a powerful form of social enterprise and also shows that you don’t have to wait for Tel. Co.’s to come to your area to get yourself broadband. I was listening to a woman who has got 90MB broadband to her home as a result. So, it is a terrific example of what you can do and really, the power of connected economy. People that have been on dial up for such a long time have been waiting for broadband, and now they’re actually owning and operating their own network themselves and will create a few support jobs at the same time.

As the GDS story has travelled around the world, it’s not surprising that some of the world has wanted to come and find out more. This week, for example, we’re meeting the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, the Swedish Companies Registration Office, the Irish Local Government Management Agency and the Bulgarian Ministry of State Administration. 

As the international liaison lead at the GDS, I organise, plan, coordinate and host all international visits. The value of exchanging insights and experiences runs both ways: we can provide the detail of how we’re putting a vision of “digital by default” into practice, and in return, there’s much for us to learn about the challenges that others have faced, with lots of tips and war stories along the way.

Some visitors are just starting on their journey toward user-focused public services, others are further advanced and keen to share their learning and sense-check their progress.

In total, we’ve hosted more than 30 international visits in the last 6 months with many more in the pipeline. These requests come through embassies, the FCO, through our blog and our twitter accounts: @govuk and @gdsteam. We can’t accept every request, of course – sometimes a call or an email will do – but we work hard to make sure those who do come and visit get to talk to people whose work overlaps with their own.

Strategy and principles

It’s always inspiring to see the reaction of first-time visitors in the earliest stages of digital service development. For some, it seems as though a cloud of disbelief is lifted. Watching teams run stand-ups or retrospectives and seeing post-it covered walls proves that agile service design really can work in government.

For higher-level visits we tend to talk about the Government Digital Strategy, how governance, organisation and financial structures work, and how to apply the design principles and the style guide to provide citizens with the information they need.

We recently hosted representatives from the Chilean and Greek governments. They hadn’t been before and almost the first thing they wanted to do once they were here was to call home and tell their colleagues, “Look, I told you so!”

Details, details

When we host visitors who are already successfully operating digital public services, or using social media effectively to engage with citizens, the tone and the depth of conversations are much more hands-on. These are more like “peer-to-peer” sessions on the workings of GOV.UK, from technical architecture, coding, technology management, transactions and publishing.

I tend to call on people who are working in GDS in those areas of shared interest to talk to visitors, to build up networks and relationships, so that dialogue can be continued once our visitors have gone.

We recently hosted a delegation from the Croatian Government, including Tomislav Korman and Chris Frean who have just received confirmation to create their equivalent of GOV.UK called govhr. They spoke to me, James Stewart, Ross Ferguson, Frances Berriman and others in the team to learn more about how GDS operates, how we how we work with departments, how we decide and agree on content and how we work through issues. We also talked about how we apply the style guide and the design principles. In return, we got a real sense of the challenges that the Croatian team faces, and the way in which their political and governance world contrasts to ours.

Overview of @govuk by @jystewart thnx to @nicepaul @abs_GDS @ChrisFrean @markodugonjic Great vibe at @gdsteam office ow.ly/i/1vHC0—
Tomislav Korman (@tomislavkorman) February 12, 2013

The international angle means a good deal of work for me and the other GDS staff who support the visits, but it gives us an invaluable perspective on what we’re doing, and from the feedback we’ve had, is thoroughly appreciated by our visitors.

This week’s round-up comes from Kathy Settle, Deputy Director at GDS. The full transcript is below.

What has GDS been up to this week?

Two big things to flag this week: the first one is GOV.UK. The next department moved onto GOV.UK on Thursday morning – the Cabinet Office. So, our own department moved on which was great. Big thanks to Neil Williams and his team, as ever, for dealing with all of that. But also to lots of other people in Cabinet Office, Comms and Policy Teams who have provided all the content. They have done a really great effort.

The other thing that we did on Wednesday afternoon was we had the next meeting of our Digital Leaders’ Network. At that meeting, we discussed three new things: the first one was the digital procurement framework. This is a new framework that we are putting in place in the summer. It will enable departments to be able to access the kind of digital suppliers that they need going forward.

The second one was GOV.UK. We talked about the exemptions bids – this is where Government organisations can make a bid if they feel they should not move onto GOV.UK for some particular reason, but they should keep their own site. We have looked at this a number of times now, over the last few months. Wednesday was the final day where we actually made the decision about who is on and who is off. We have now got a big list of organisations that need to move by April 2014.

The final thing we talked about was Apps. Tom Loosemore came and gave us a presentation about Apps; what they are for, what they do. Whether you should use them or not, how beneficial they are. It gave digital leaders a list of questions they could take into their own departments. If someone says to them, “I would like an App”, they have their list of questions to ask, when they can decide whether it is a good idea or not.

What about visitors to GDS this week?

We have had three Governments in this week. Sweden, Bulgaria and Ireland have all come in and talked to us. Particularly big thanks to the Swedish Government. They took time to present at our Show and Tell. Every week, we have a session in GDS where everybody comes and presents what they have done that week. The Swedish government team very kindly came and gave us a presentation and took questions from GDS people about what they had been doing. A big thanks to them.

What’s coming up next week at GDS?

More moves onto GOV.UK. Two departments next week: firstly HMRC, and secondly DCMS, who are both moving their corporate content onto GOV.UK. That will be almost well over half, I think, of our departments who are then on GOV.UK, which is a really great effort.

With the number of ministerial departments, public bodies and agencies on Inside Government increasing each month and features being released or adjusted daily, it is important to gauge the success of each iteration. That way, we can make sure that it continues to support existing and new users’ needs.

At the end of December, I wrote about the usability research we have been conducting on Inside Government since its launch. Here’s an update on our latest round of lab-based testing.

Qualitative insight

Our lab-based testing provides qualitative data. The testing combines 11 moderated lab-based and 14 unmoderated ‘in-home’ sessions conducted by an independent research agency.

Participants in the January sessions had a professional interest in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) and were long-standing, frequent users of those departmental sites. They were, therefore, well-placed to give us honest, informed appraisals of what was now working better since transition and what wasn’t.

Positive feedback

Awareness of GOV.UK was very strong, with many participants mentioning it even before they had been told it was the site they would be testing. They reacted positively to the new departmental sections, especially the consistent look and feel, which they felt was appropriate for a range of audiences

Participants felt that the department homepages looked good, and provided access to useful information, while the inline links offered useful cues for further journeys through the site.

After previous rounds of testing, we’d tweaked and repositioned the filters on index pages. Participants now found it easier to locate detailed policy information.

As soon as they landed on a policy page, participants were keen to find the latest information. Following on from that feedback we’ve ensured that this content is far more visible.

Topic pages also performed well, bringing together content on a particular subject from a number of departments. Providing this ‘horizontal’ browsing route across multiple organisations can be tricky but we were heartened to find out that users really appreciated this approach.

Constructive criticism

Positive feedback is great but we’re more interested in finding out if and at what point, the site falls short of users’ expectations. These sessions showed us which sections of GOV.UK needed more work.

We know that search is the main method for navigating around GOV.UK, but these sessions demonstrated that the search functionality available within the site did not perform as well as expected. This caused some frustration among our participants.

This is now a priority for us and we’re working on it. There’s a multidisciplinary group tasked with rapidly improving the search. Immediately after the lab testing, the Inside Government team used the information from the sessions to improve the relevance and timeliness of results in the site’s internal search.

The top navigation menu was less used than we thought. Once users did see it, some expected that it would only apply to specific departments rather than the whole of government. We are addressing this and we’ll retest soon.

Navigating back to departmental pages also proved challenging for participants when they found themselves within the main GOV.UK site. This ‘cross-product’ proposition will form the basis of a much larger piece of research, but right now we’re looking at highlighting the ‘route home’ for those who want to base their use of Inside Government around a departmental homepage.

Large ‘advert-like’ images on department pages fared less well with participants, who criticised the use of these sites as ‘marketing vehicles’. We know from our research that users like appropriate imagery on the department sites, and we want to encourage departments to make choices that will enhance, engage and add value to their pages. With editorial guidelines already in place, these user insights will help to guide publishers on what works best.

Where do we go from here?

It may be uncomfortable to hear and see people critique the site, yet without this insight we wouldn’t know what to improve. That is why we take these findings seriously and iterate the designs and functions. We then re-test.

We have another round of qualitative testing scheduled for April. We’ll look at the issues we’ve discussed in this post and we’ll test new features including topical events and location-based sites.

Before then we will have the results from another round of testing and data analysis on how Inside Government is being used. We’ll keep you posted.

A year ago today we launched the beta of Inside Government on GOV.UK – a working, public demo of a product which to many people had previously seemed unimaginable.

The site was a live test of what multiple departments sharing a single platform could look like, with 10 departments actively re-publishing all their content to the beta site over a 6-week period.

It was the predecessor of today’s Inside Government section which, with DCMS, HMRC and the Office of the Advocate General for Scotland having joined this week, is now the main corporate web presence for 14 departments.

Here’s a reminder of how it looked this time last year, alongside the equivalent pages today.

Left: beta Inside Government homepage; right: current Inside Government homepage

Left: beta Cabinet Office page; right: current Cabinet Office page

Left: beta higher education policy; right: current higher education policy

What we learned

Looking back, it’s fair to say we and the participating departments learnt a lot from the beta.

We learnt that users got the ‘single domain’ proposition and wanted the product, but that featured content on the lists of topics, consultations and publications got in the way of users finding what they needed.

We learnt that writing consistent, clear policies met users’ information needs more directly than the content on departments’ sites, but that users also wanted more detail – feedback which you can clearly see incorporated in the policies on the site today.

We also learnt about the benefits of agile software development – starting small, getting user feedback early and iterating fast based on evidence of real need. To give a small example of a possible many: before the beta several of us thought a WYSIWYG text editing interface would be essential for departments to format their content. But by building working software and unleashing it early we discovered that editors quickly came to like the simplicity of markdown and, a year on, more than a hundred people around Whitehall are happily using it. Developing something more complex would have been a waste of time.

How far we’ve come

From being unimaginable to many people a year ago, Inside Government is now a reality and becoming better known among its users.

At our most recent round of usability testing, for example, many participants came to the sessions already aware of the project. Several of them said amazing things about how it was making their working lives easier as well as teaching them things they never knew about government (some even said they’d like to spend spare time just clicking around). In the round before that, the research company told us it was the most positive response to user testing they had ever experienced.

What we are building is not only world class, but a world first. The governments of New Zealand, Croatia, Sweden and Norway have told us they intend to reuse aspects of what we have built, from the design down to the entire codebase.

Listening to users and putting their needs first has led us to take the product in some surprising directions. For example, profiles of government organisations on today’s Inside Government have been stripped back to just a single aggregation page with a handful of corporate information pages beneath them. You can trace this change back to the beta, in which we found that having a second layer of navigation to view each organisation’s documents confused users and made them feel ‘lost’ in the site. Compared with the separate sites that departments have had for many years, this is a radical innovation.

We’re also seeing departments make the mental shift from thinking about ‘their content’ to thinking about ‘government content’. People across Whitehall who previously had never spoken are now working together to present a unified explanation of what the government is thinking and doing.  During the beta, there were times when it felt like this was an impossible dream. And yet, here we are.

A year from now

Reflecting on how far we’ve come, it’s exciting to think about where another year might take us.

Developments you can expect in the coming months include a new section about UK government activity around the world, a section on the history of government, and a showcase of ways to participate in government and society. We also have plans to amalgamate government blogs (including this one) and provide easy ways to find them all from Inside Government.

As the public-facing product matures, we’ll also be able to turn more of our attention to improving the publishing tool to make it even more efficient for the many writers and editors around government, monitoring content quality (on a massive scale!) and providing APIs for all the rich data we are accumulating in the site.

Beyond that, who knows. But the opportunities are many and far-reaching in terms of opening up access to government, increasing trust, enabling participation in open policymaking and joining up the journey of a policy from an idea, through Parliament, into law and back round again.

We’d love to hear your ideas of where to take the product in future. Let us know via the comments and usual channels.

Meanwhile we’ll keep on iterating, testing and holding firm to the design principles so that the site continues to meet users’ needs as it grows. You can follow our progress both here and on the Inside Inside Gov Tumblr.

Today we released a new module on the Performance Platform that enables exploration of how the individual components of GOV.UK and Inside Government are being used.

For each piece of content, we show the number of views it had in the past week along with measures of how users engaged with it.

See how all of GOV.UK’s guides performed last week.

It’s something we’ve primarily built to support our product managers and content designers but we think some of our users will also find it interesting.

The tool is useful in all sorts of ways:

• we can see how individual items of content are performing
• it helps our product managers prioritise which content, template, or subject area needs more investigation
• we can see how content sits within the context of similar or related content
• it enables us to share with everyone how content is being used.

Sharing information about our content like this also reminds us of the great variety of user needs being served by GOV.UK.

It also reinforces that many of the people coming to GOV.UK every week come for the same things – for example, the student finance guide on GOV.UK gets more than twice the views of the next most popular guide.

Supporting our product managers and content designers

The Content Explorer helps our product managers and content designers as they identify, prioritise, and evaluate content.

“It’s going to allow us to see quickly and in a really visual way all of the thousands of items on the site, which of them are performing well and which are falling short… …we can work out where we need to prioritise our resources, either to make a fix, or to make it work even better than it already is.” ~ Ross Ferguson, Associate Product Manager, Inside Government

Content designers often work on specific pieces of content or topics, and being able to see where these sit in comparison to other items is really important.

A bit on engagement

When a user visits a piece of content on GOV.UK, depending on what they do, we classify them as engaged or not engaged.

This can only ever be an estimate, but across millions of visits (GOV.UK had 5.52 million visitors just last week) we’ve found it a useful way of seeing how content is being used.

We’re open with our engagement criteria; we’ve blogged about them, and we’ll refine them over time.

Differing views

In most browsers you will be able to choose between two views – a scatter plot and a table.

Scatter plot

Table view

The scatterplot is helpful for seeing items in context and to spot items which are noticeably different to the group. The table lists all the items, and is great for sorting.

The horizontal axis of the scatterplot scales automatically between the minimum and maximum engagement scores for that format as we’re usually interested in the relative distribution across content of a similar type. Similarly, items with more views have larger ‘bubbles’, which puts extra emphasis on high-use items.

Filter all the things

Something we’re really happy with is our nifty filter. It lets you search within a format for keywords, helping you to find specific pieces of content.

Importantly, this lets you see how the items you’re interested in perform in the context of all other items.

Filtering for ‘tax’ highlights the items you’re looking for.

Using the Content Explorer

Student finance isn’t the lowest engaging guide, but would be a priority to look at given its high views. How can we help it perform better?

When identifying content to look at, we’re interested in items with lower engagement that also get a high number of views.

This is just one of the ways we’ll use to prioritise work, and in many cases we expect the Content Explorer to provoke further analysis and research.

Details

We only show view counts and engagement scores for items with 1000 views or more. Below this level the engagement scores appear to fluctuate week on week and are not a good representation of performance. However, it does mean that some GOV.UK content is not shown in the chart, although all content is listed in the table view.

We’ve also made an exception for Inside Government news content where we only show items updated in the last 2 months, or those that had over 1000 views.

We’re using our red/green colour shading to add additional emphasis to those content items which probably require further investigation.

Raw data

You can get the data used by the Content Explorer as json:

• GOV.UK content engagement feed
• Inside Government content engagement feed

(These are the internal URL’s we use, and are subject to change.)

Iteration

There are lots of ways in which the Content Explorer might get used, so we’re going to watch what people do with it and what they ask for, and look at how that might apply in the future.

We are particularly interested in being able to filter on metadata, and give some context of history (where has this piece of content been?, has it changed significantly?) to see what impact this has on our performance measures.

Teams from across government are making the transition to Inside Government. Robin Riley, HMRC Head of Digital Engagement (and project lead for HMRC on Inside Government), writes about what it was like.

Yesterday the corporate web presence of HM Revenue and Customs went live on Inside Government, exactly one year to the day since the beta of Inside Government went live.

HMRC joins 13 other Departments who have moved across their corporate websites.

But I would argue that HMRC has had the longest journey of any Department to arrive at this point so far. Why? Because, bluntly, we started from furthest behind.

Take a look at the new home for HMRC corporate information, and then take a look back at the old home (pictured above, now archived).

The difference is dramatic. And much more than cosmetic. HMRC has re-engineered the way it publishes corporate information online. Taking just three examples:

HMRC now uses online news to explain what it is doing

We may not have news articles with the global import of the FCO, but news is a simple, accessible way to narrate what we are doing and why. Building our presence on Inside Government has led us to raise our game, putting news at the front.

HMRC now uses images to illustrate its work

Admittedly, HMRC’s news images are never likely to match MOD’s for visual impact. But they still add value, and the discipline of assembling images for publication over the past year has helped us to think about new ways they can be used.

HMRC activity is now cross-linked to overall government policy

HMRC isn’t quite like other Whitehall government departments; it is a non-ministerial department, with a sharply-focused mission and special governance arrangements backed by law. Does this mean HMRC doesn’t need to put its activities into a policy context to the same extent as the Departments headed up by politicians? Of course not.

HMRC is a business with over 30 million customers, annual revenues over £400 billion, and UK citizens – arguably – as shareholders. We have a duty to explain our activities and where they fit into the bigger picture.

These examples, and Inside Government as a whole, have one simple overarching aim: better accountability, enabled by better understanding.

Our work is just beginning

I can testify that bringing HMRC up to speed to deliver a strong contribution to Inside Government has been challenging. It has meant making fundamental changes to the way we think about our corporate web presence.

But the actual transition from our existing website to Inside Government has been relatively painless, even enjoyable. We’ve been fully involved all the way. The move from departmental websites to GOV.UK is very much something that departments are doing – it is not something that is being ‘done to’ departments.

While HMRC’s corporate presence on Inside Government is now live, it is certainly not finished. February 28th did not mark the day HMRC stopped working on the site – if anything, it is the day we began!

Please let us have your thoughts and feedback on Inside Government. With your help, we’ve changed our corporate site almost beyond recognition over the past 12 months.

What changes should we make together next?

Two big releases this week, with the new additions to Inside Government and the release of the Content Explorer, and we’ve visited DFID and the Student Loans Company up in Scotland.

What have we been up to at GDS this week?

This week, we mark the one-year anniversary of Inside Government. I know of no better way to mark it than the migration of no less than three parts of the government estate into the service. The first was the Department of Culture, Media and Sport; DCMS. Also, we mapped over HMRC; a lot of content and services from the tax side of the government – and not least the office of the General Advocate for Scotland.

That’s where you’ve been this week…

It is. We spent Monday and Tuesday up in Glasgow. We went to the Student Loans Company. We’ve been working with them for quite a while; since November 2011. Gordon Simpson, who’s really led the transformation of that business; it’s great to see what he’s done by getting a team of people there who are long-established Student Loans Company people. Also some SMEs; got SOPA in there and a few others, and we’re really taking a new approach to creating digital service for the Student Loans Company. There’s a lot of work to do yet, but early signs are that user satisfaction rates are improving rapidly, and it’s great to see the team there. We’ve got Tom Meade, Lindsay and Martin, and Rhona Cameron, who helped build that team out there, working with Trish Quinn.

Second up on Monday, we had a chance to go down to East Kilbride, just south of Glasgow, and see the team from DFID; the Department for International Development. I’m a long-standing admirer of what Charles and John and the team up there have been doing, not least with the aid platform. You can see the way that they’re really opening up the data economy for international development; a terrific achievement. It’s also great to see what they’re doing with Agile in that building. So they’ve got companies like Emergen helping them, but they’ve got a whole bunch of people working in a very different way from how they used to; they have Rapid Sprint, they iterate really quickly, and they’re really driving development of data services. I think they’re the model for many government departments. It’s great to see them, and I think we can help them more. It’s a great place to work, and we’re going to try and help get more people with digital skills up there in the near future.

What’s coming next week?

Next week, two major events. Early in the week, parliamentary accounts committee; hugely important in government, chaired by Margaret Hodge, and we’re talking about the nexus between IT services and IT procurement. It’s a huge opportunity to start that conversation to how we reform both those areas.

End of the week, much more upbeat I hope, I’m speaking at the London Business School tech media summit, and one of our digital advisors, Tim Brooks, has really opened the door there; we’re going to try and get some of those MBA students and graduates to help us on our journey.

Has anything caught your eye outside GDS this week?

From a long way away, from South Africa, we saw Ben Terrett, our design lead here, and he was trending on Twitter in South Africa because he was speaking at the Indaba conference. He’s been talking about Gov UK and GDS, and that’s really lit up the design world. So it’s great to hear the echo chamber play that back from a long way away.

Much, much closer to home, just down the road here, we have some news from Soho. We now have Baroness Martha Lane Fox of Soho, and I’m delighted for Martha. She works incredibly hard; she’ll make a fantastic cross-bench peer when she enters the Lords, and personally I’m just delighted that she’s our backer, and that she gets the long-awaited praise that she deserves. Because she’s been an endless pioneer for all things digital in this country.

In 2010 the Prime Minister established the Northern Future Forum (NFF) with a different angle on the typical international summit. Instead of the usual set piece speeches and behind-the-scenes trading, NFF is a forum for leaders to learn from experts and a place for them to interact as well as listen.

From the beginning, the Forum has included the dynamic, progressive and open Nordic-Baltic countries. Now in its third year, it’s proved to be a very popular and worthwhile gathering for the 9 Prime Ministers and its additional expert and official membership. Held this year in Riga the topics covered were ‘bridging the digital divide in society’ and ‘competitiveness of the green economy’. The Forum heard presentations ranging from how to make shipping companies more efficient to creating a digital memory for a national network of museums.

The British delegation included Niklas Zennström from Atomico, Joanna Shields, CEO of Tech City, Tom Hulme from Ideo, Peter Boyd from the Carbon War Room, Nicholas O’Donohoe from Big Society Capital and me, representing GDS. I was there to present to 3 heads of government on the establishment of GDS, GOV.UK and how we’re addressing the digital divide and the work on Assisted Digital.

Given the imperative for service improvement and cost reduction it’s no surprise that we’re all doing quite similar things, and that the development of digital public services is a driving force for change in all our countries. Collaboration was also a common theme. It’s striking to see the extent to which we’re all focussed on designing user centric services, and how we’re all moving away from individual departments delivering services to a more cohesive single-site approach.

This approach offers huge potential for cost savings. The GDS cost per transaction model was acknowledged as very progressive, and the fact that we can only declare a new service ‘live’ once the responsible minister has successfully completed a transaction, raised a wry smile from the Prime Ministers.

Since our successful visit to Estonia in 2012 and the informal co-operation with RIA (the Estonian Government Technology Authority), we’ve signed an agreement to formalise our technical co-operation. This ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ means that both GDS and RIA will share information, experience and even colleagues so that our governments can learn from our progress and pitfalls. Our Estonian colleagues are more advanced in many areas than the British government, so this is a good opportunity for us to catch up.

There’s definitely an appetite for further collaboration among NFF member states around digital public services. And our collective enthusiasm for Open Standards and Open Source will make co-operation easier and cheaper. Perhaps the idea of creating a ‘D8′ to bring together the top digital governments may even become a reality? It’s certainly something we are all keen to pursue after the Riga meeting.

Finally profound thanks to the organisers and our embassy colleagues in Latvia. This was a very complex multi-delegation event with ever-present security, diplomatic and logistical headaches. But it was so well organised you would never have guessed. It was straightforward and without fuss though this was only my second NFF as a delegate, it was the best so far. Good luck to the next delegates in Helsinki in February 2014.

Last month I was appointed to the European Commission’s Young Advisors Expert Group and this week I visited Brussels for our first meeting of the year. The Young Advisors Group is made up of twenty-five young people who have all been involved with fascinating digital projects around Europe, like the greenlight for girls project in Belgium, the Robotikos events in Lithuania, and the Ljubljana branch of RailsGirls.

On Monday morning, we met at the Berlaymont building and were joined by Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. She asked for our honest thoughts on the Digital Agenda for Europe – getting more people connected to the internet, overhauling the ICT curriculum in schools, and putting a greater focus on hands-on experience in computer science degrees were just some of the things mentioned.

I also attended the launch of the European Commission’s Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs, where firm commitments were made from large companies and education bodies to create more education and training options, in order to meet the increasing number of jobs being created in digital industries. There also followed some great panel discussions on encouraging entrepreneurship, and how we can get more people interested in a career in digital.

I think there’s a larger challenge than ever before in attracting (and keeping) the best digital and engineering talent in Europe. I’ve heard first-hand from graduates who say that, when compared to jobs in some of the world’s most innovative startups, they just aren’t excited by opportunities from some of the largest companies here in Europe, many of which work with decade-old technologies and give few opportunities for real innovation. There’s a role for these companies to play in creating jobs that rival those of Facebook, Google and Twitter.

From meeting the other young advisors, the last few days have really opened my eyes to just how many grassroots projects with young people and technology are going on around Europe. There feels like a lot we can all learn from each other, and there seems to be determined interest in working together more frequently. I’m also really keen to involve more young people from our own countries in discussions, as I think that more thoughts and feedback from the people these issues affect can only lead to a stronger, and greater qualified, voice that we can shout from in the places where it matters.

This week started with the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, and saw the beginning of work alongside HMRC on their exemplar services. We’re also gearing up for the beta release of the digital by default service standard next week.

We’ll be updating this post with a transcript in the next few days.

One of the GDS design principles is ‘design with data’. Front end developers need to know what the current browser landscape looks like and in which browsers they should be regularly testing new features.

To help us do that, I created a tool, which extracts statistics from analytics and displays them as a nice line graph or as a data table.

When I used the tool I expected to see a collection of straight lines. What I actually saw had me scratching my head and wanting to delve further into the data. I thought I’d share some of the more interesting trends.

What you can see here is a graph of 1 week’s worth of traffic to the whole of GOV.UK. I’ve highlighted the interesting results. This could be any week of traffic – I’ve compared several and they all follow the same trend. Traffic from Internet Explorer browsers all dip at the weekend and traffic from all other browsers, most notably Chrome and iOS Safari, increase. So for 2 days a week, every week, Google Chrome is the most used browser on GOV.UK. We think this is due to people accessing the site during the week from work or publicly available machines, for example in libraries. We will continue to look into this.

The other interesting trends looks like this:

What you can see here is the effect of the ‘auto-updater’ built into Chrome. This lets Google update all of its users to the latest version of the browser without users knowing. On or around 23 February 2013 Google hit the button to auto-update all of their users to the latest version ie Chrome 25. Within a week you can see most of the visits to GOV.UK from Chrome were from the new version, now that’s a pretty impressive uptake. If you look lower in the graph you can just about see a  similar trend with the Firefox updater.

These are just a couple of interesting things you can see from our stats. You can access this tool via your own Google Analytics account to see what the browser landscape looks like for your users. Feel free to use this browser matrix tool on your stats and share with us any interesting trends you find.

We’re in the middle of a significant change in how people use digital services. Use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is exploding.

People should be able to use digital services wherever they are, on the device of their choosing (see Design Principle No.7 Understand Context). Users now expect to be able to change the date of their driving test while on the bus, or pay their VAT while lying in bed.

Here’s how government services have been responding to mobile growth. To note for later: none of these examples are apps.

GOV.UK is a website that adapts to mobile screens

In its final months, the separate mobile web version of Directgov was attracting around 10% of the visits to the standard site. Both the standard and mobile versions of Directgov were replaced by GOV.UK in October 2012, which uses responsive design to adapt its layout to different screen sizes.

A GOV.UK guide adapts its design to different screen sizes and device capabilities.

In the run up to Christmas, GOV.UK saw around 20% of visits from mobile devices.  Since Christmas this has jumped to nearly 25% This change was also noted by the BBC.

Nearly half of e-petitions visits are from mobile devices

In March 2012, just over 20% of those visiting the HM Government e-petitions service were using a mobile device. In the spring of 2012 its design was made responsive.  The graph below shows the trend since then. It’s now over 45% mobile.

You can now book your driving test on the bus

Meanwhile, up in Nottingham, the Driving Standards Agency has just redesigned its practical driving test booking service.

Old (left) and new (right) designs of the practical driving test booking service, as appears on an iPhone

Results? Over 23% of those booking and 27% of those changing practical driving test bookings are now doing so from a mobile device. (Overnight it hits nearly 60% – hypotheses welcome!)

Booking your driving test is not a trivial process. Users  have to choose a date, a venue and give contact details and the like. Yet give people a decent mobile-optimised experience, and they’ll lap it up on their smartphones or tablets.

If you want to learn more about DSA’s test booking redesign, I suggest you follow @johnploughman – he’s an excellent source of knowledge and happy to share.

Bring on all the apps, surely!

So mobile web usage is exploding, and the sooner we have all our transactions responsively adapting to mobile screen sizes the better.  The forthcoming Digital by Default Service Standard will require it.

But does it follow that the government should also be investing heavily in mobile apps?

No.

Our position is that native apps are rarely justified.

Action 6 of the Government Digital Strategy states:

Stand-alone mobile apps will only be considered once the core web service works well on mobile devices, and if specifically agreed with the Cabinet Office.

Since November 2012, central government departments and agencies have to get approval from Cabinet Office before starting work on apps.

For government services, we believe the costs of developing and maintaining apps will very rarely justify their benefits, especially if the underlying service design is sub-optimal.

Departments should focus on improving the quality of the core web service.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation to the Digital Leaders Network, sharing the rationale behind this ‘by default, no apps’ approach, and offering guidance on when Cabinet Office may allow exemptions for apps to be developed.

When it comes to mobile, we’re backing open web standards (HTML5). We’re confident that for government services, the mobile web is a winner, both from a user and a cost perspective.

Apps may be transforming gaming and social media, but for utility public services, the ‘making your website adapt really effectively to a range of devices’ approach is currently the better strategy. It allows you to iterate your services much more quickly, minimises any market impact and is far cheaper to support.

The points we’ll be making to anyone in central government wanting permission to start work on a mobile apps are:

- government’s position is that native and hybrid apps are rarely justified
- make sure your service meets the Digital by Default Service Standard and it will work well on mobile devices (responsive HTML5)
- make your data and/or API available for re-use and you will stimulate the market if there is demand for native apps

The 5 questions civil servants should ask before contemplating asking for an exemption are:

1. Is our web service already designed to be responsive to different screen sizes? If not, why not?
2. What is the user need that only a native/hybrid app can meet?
3. Are there existing native/hybrid apps which already meet this user need?
4.. Is our service available to 3rd parties via an API or open data? If not, why not?
5. Does meeting this need justify the lifetime cost of a native or hybrid app?

We are not ‘banning’ apps outright.  For example, the NHS-funded ‘Change 4 Life’ healthy lifestyle apps rely on a persistent 24/7 presence on users’ mobiles to try to persuade people to eat and drink more healthily.

But we are backing open standards, in this case the Web.

So expect more blog posts from us about responsive design, progressive enhancement and their ilk, and an imminent treatise from some of my wiser colleagues on my sloppy use of the word ‘mobile’….

Identity Assurance is made up of many different areas of work, as you’d expect of a complex programme. Whether they’re focused on business processes, security, commercial models, government standards or anything else, they all share the common goal of producing results that are actually fit for purpose. And the only effective way to ensure that is to test – continually – with real people in real situations. This helps us to learn what works and, just as importantly, what doesn’t.

At the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) meeting on 15th February we presented one of the first ‘alpha’ projects. It’s running in South Yorkshire and involves a number of collaborating organisations: O2, the South Yorkshire Credit Union, e@SY Connects (South Yorkshire Public Services Partnership) and a company from Canada called SecureKey. Each one of these organisations needs to invest in projects like this and find ways to address the challenges of trust, identity and authentication.

The aim of this particular alpha project is to test the theory that if you make it easy for people to establish their identity when accessing digital public services, people will choose to access them digitally rather than pick up the phone or go to a branch. However, as years of exploring the concepts has shown, making this happen is not simple. It requires a lot of different organisations to collaborate – because no single organisation is responsible for everything required to create a solution.

The presentation was about the initial phase of this alpha project which started in November. In terms of conclusions from this alpha it’s still very early days, but O2 have produced a video interviewing some of the participants here which gives a deeper insight into what it’s trying to achieve. We’ll be providing further updates at OIX meetings every 3 months or so.

We’ll also have similar presentations on other alpha projects that we’re running. You’ll be able to find dates for these meetings on the OIX website. They help us to get genuine insight into how digital services will actually be used, and that’s particularly important in making sure they’ll be useful and relevant for all areas of society.

Today we announced some small but important changes in governance. The detail is here but the upshot is: we won’t have a cross-government Chief Information Officer (CIO) any more, nor a Head of Profession for Information and Communications Technology (ICT). We are moving responsibility for these capabilities to the Government Digital Service and we are closing some cross-government boards in various technology areas and reviewing the rest in order to make sure we are set up as efficiently as possible.

Why’s this important enough to merit a blog post? Every industry and business constantly needs to adapt its internal processes and governance to accommodate digital disruption. We are no different in government, so don’t expect this to be the last of these small changes.

However, as we are government and, rightly, come under public scrutiny, and also because there is an active technology industry which follows us closely, let me expand on why we are doing this and what it means. Notably, I want to pick out the major issue which underpins these changes: our dominant culture.

From ICT to Digital

As we move away from a large procurement approach to technology and become adept at commissioning and co-delivering digital public services our capability profile needs to change technically, and culturally. In the last few months, in GDS and in other departments, we are hiring and commissioning roles including:

• data scientists
• information architects
• enterprise architects
• product managers
• service managers
• software engineer
• designers of all types
• user researchers
• delivery and test managers

And to ensure that all these roles can operate to their full potential, the people and organisations with which we work must be imbued by the culture and ethos of the web generation. This means they understand that what used to be hard is easier, and what used to be expensive is cheap and becoming cheaper. But above all they must understand that the challenge now is not about information technology, but about designing, developing and delivering great, user-centred digital services.

The modern CIO

The CIO moniker to me was a natural development from the elevation of the technology function to a board role. While Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) deliver the technology, CIOs are expected to use the flows of information and data from that technology and across business systems to inform strategy. And this is why we need to address the CIO issue in government as, by definition, it is tough to be a CIO in government with so much of that information and data residing in outsourced services and proprietary software.

Unfortunately, this means that many of our CIOs are performing as quasi-procurement and contract managers, rather than really driving business performance based on meeting user needs. The result? An uneven playing field, with the CIO role in government varying hugely by department and agency.

There is no better time to be in a senior digital role if information and data flows can be harnessed into creating great digital services, but to do that we have to put digital leaders and Chief Operating Officers (COOs) in the driving seat across government. In Justice, DEFRA and elsewhere we are already seeing huge changes as a result.

Governance

This is why the governance model we need now is more analogous to service design than procurement of technology. We need helpful web services, appropriate tools to iterate and develop new features, outstanding data analysis and resources like https://www.gov.uk/performance. We need fewer meetings between large budget holders to discuss procurement, and more stand-up meetings and daily releases based on user need. Or in short, we can do much more, more quickly by using the web, and digital tools and services internally, to collaborate.

Today we published the Digital by Default Service Standard, a guide for all involved in the delivery of digital services. This is governance writ large: inclusive, transparent and requiring collaboration and regular input and learning. Compared with existing governance models which are paper-based, hierarchical, exclusive and slow to change, this is a long overdue shift. Governance is central to upholding a culture, so ours should be web-based, user-focused, and participative.

In short, we are not just on the web, but of the web. And our culture and governance must reflect that.

There will be more to follow. The service manual for CTOs is in alpha, being reviewed with colleagues across the government’s estate. The team will report back in the next 30 days with our view on governance structures and boards – but do expect our future governance to be web based, in beta and open to subsequent change.