Today we’re releasing a beta version of the Digital by Default Service Standard, a big step towards fulfilling one of the actions established in the Government Digital Strategy last November.

The standard sets out a list of things that a service (and the team running it) have to do before it goes live. These aren’t radical things but they are important things, like doing user research, measuring performance and being able to iteratively improve a service day after day.

On their own, standards aren’t very exciting – and not that helpful either. So, rather than just produce a tick-box list, we’ve wrapped the standard together with the Government Service Design Manual; a toolbox of things that teams across government can use to help build services that meet the standard.

What good looks like

The standard will be applied to all large services from April 2014. The point of the standard is to make sure that every service that’s published on GOV.UK is so straightforward and convenient that all those who can use them will choose to do so, and that appropriate assisted digital measures have been put in place for those who are offline.

We’ve been talking to the likely users in government about the standard for some time, and we’re confident that it will create a shared understanding of what good looks like across Government.

Sharing past experience

The manual contains more than 100 pieces of guidance for service managers and teams building services. It ranges from introductions to agile development to extremely specific colour palettes, all gleaned from the work teams at GDS have been doing.

It’s wide-ranging, but there’s plenty of room for teams to innovate. Over time we expect much, if not all of it, to change. That might be because teams have found better ways of doing thing, or because standards have updated and changed. We’ll find out as those changes happen.

What’s missing?

Our beta will run for the next four weeks, and in that time we’re going to:

• keep adding and updating guidance
• create more case studies
• make some changes to navigation
• make the design responsive

We know, for example, that we desperately need search, but that was de-prioritised for this initial release, and we’d like to surface core advice – like the Design Principles and the Style Guide – a little better than we do now.

But, like any agile service, we don’t expect to stop iterating when the beta warning comes off. Over time the manual will increasingly contain not just what GDS has learned, but everything government knows about building great digital and assisted digital services. We want to capture the lessons and experiences from the service transformations that are just starting now, and share them.

That will make sure the guidance stays fresh and useful so that, hopefully, it becomes a resource that helps those outside Whitehall too.

In the meantime we’d love to get as much feedback on the beta as we can: www.gov.uk/service-manual/

Yesterday saw the publication of Restarting Britain 2 a report by the Design Commission part of the Associate Parliamentary Design & Innovation Group.

The report looks at design’s role in “creating cost-effective public services in the 21st century”. I was interviewed for the report, and as Head of Design at GDS I had a natural interest in the findings.

Usually no-one looks forward to reading a parliamentary commission report, but I’m pleased to say it’s a well written document; relatively short with some clear actions. I was delighted to see two themes that are close to our hearts at GDS; placing users at the centre of public service redesign and building design capability across government.

Start with user needs

The focus on users runs throughout the report, “A design approach to public services starts not with service providers but with citizens, customers and service users.” Lots of the examples given talk about a user focus not a process focus. They describe how “good design starts from the point of view of how people really experience those services, and how those experiences might be made better, quicker and cheaper”. We might have called that simpler, clearer, faster.

There is more:

“This is not rocket science. But it too often contrasts with how policy and public services are typically determined. “Disjointed incrementalism” characterises public service design: where services are altered and adapted by changing political drivers, professional fashions, shifting institutional norms and boundaries, and the biased lessons of past experience.”

It really isn’t rocket science, you start with user needs.

Building capability

The report laments the lack of good design in public services and describes this as…

“…curious, considering that Britain is a world-leader in all design disciplines: in place-building, in communications, in services, in products and, increasingly in digital. Equally, in many ways our public services have led the field throughout the twentieth century. Considering the scale of the financial challenge faced by public services in the UK, it would now be worth exploiting some of this readymade expertise in creative innovation.”

Again there are common themes for anyone who’s been following GDS over the last year and a half. This blog post I wrote when I joined GDS, my recent talk at Design Indaba, Stephen Kelly’s speech at Sprint 13 and Mike’s ‘The strategy is delivery’ blog post are just a few examples of that thinking.

The report recommends “Cabinet Office must take responsibility for developing design capacity across government. This should include initiating demonstrator projects and commissioning evaluation.” While we’re not doing that with design in isolation, we are doing that with the digital strategy, in particular the 25 exemplars, the performance platform, the service design manual we launched yesterday and some work in progress around digital capability.

There’s lots of other stuff in here which we set out to do in the digital strategy and others have set out in the Civil Service Reform plan, establishing strong leadership, building capability, a better commissioning model and changing the way we work across government.

Changing culture

I was interviewed by Jocelyn Bailey, who co-authored the report. She visited me at Aviation House and we spoke briefly about our work at GDS. Yet another benefit to being open is that there’s no real secret to what we do here – most of what we discussed is on the blog, twitter, YouTube, GitHub or just visible on GOV.UK.

Specifically about GDS the report says:

“The GDS office is far more akin to a digital design studio than a government department. Little touches around the office remind those who work there of the user: typical profiles adorn the walls, a piece of paper with a scribbled ‘users’ with an arrow points out of the window at the street outside.”

Lots of that is about the culture change Mike wrote about yesterday “being of the web, not on the web”. (Although when Jocelyn says, “more akin to a digital design studio” I think she means we need to tidy up a bit.)

At the end there’s is a section called “Some lessons and conclusions for Central Government” it begins with this paragraph.

“The Government Digital Service has been an inspirational demonstration of what can be achieved with a government department through a design-led transformation process. The challenge for Central Government now (notwithstanding other existing pockets of good practice) is to learn the lessons from the GDS and see if these can be applied to all areas of Whitehall.”

It’s good to see design being looked at in detail like this. I think it could have been improved with more discussion about the importance of delivery, “often, iteratively and repetitively” but it’s a good report, and well worth a read if you are interested in design, public services or both. You can get copies of the report here.

You can read more about the report in Design Week, on the Design Council blog and in the Guardian.

A busy end to the week. We announced the beta release of the Digital by Default Service Standard and the changes to the CIO profession yesterday. We also had visits from Brian McBride, Sir Peter Bazalgette, and a delegation of Future International Leaders.

Sadly, we also say goodbye to Emer Coleman, who moves on to pastures new after running the Digital Engagement team here at GDS. She’ll be missed, and we all wish her the very best of luck.

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

I’ve just got off the phone after talking to Andrew Simpson, the civil servant leading the redevelopment of the DCMS intranet. I’ve never met Andrew face to face, but I look forward to doing so, because he and his tiny team deserve a big thank you.

They have just created the exemplar for a government intranet in 2013.

“How Do I?” – the DCMS intranet putting user needs first

To learn much more, read these two blog posts from Luke Oatham, a developer from Helpful Technology, the SME partner commissioned via G-Cloud. As you’ll see if you read Luke’s excellent posts, those DCMS staff already using the beta enjoy a simple, clear, fast experience. They get an intranet designed to understand and meet their needs, delivered swiftly and cheaply, and set up from the word go to iteratively improve based on their feedback.

A guide on the new DCMS intranet

The team reused the design patterns and formats established by GOV.UK. They prioritised on the most important user needs. They wrote for the web, using the style guide. They designed the site to be responsive to different screen sizes, using open standards. They launched the beta early, despite knowing it still had rough edges, because nothing beats real feedback from real users as early as possible.

A feedback form on the new DCMS intranet

In short, they used the same process espoused in the new Government Service Design Manual. They will remove the beta label and turn off the existing intranet in the coming days.

And all delivered using open source software (WordPress) for a fraction of the previous cost.

And I mean a fraction. Developing the new intranet cost £15k. The monthly hosting, support and iterative development cost is in the hundreds of pounds per month, less than a tenth of the monthly hosting cost of the intranet it replaces.

That’s a 90% saving – the new normal.

Homepage of the new DCMS intranet

Andrew, his team and their supplier have set the new benchmark for government intranets. They really have raised the bar. Anyone inside the civil service thinking about redeveloping their own intranet should talk to DCMS first.

When Mike Bracken talks about a new dominant culture, this is it in action.

At the outset, it wasn’t clear that we were making a manual.

Our brief was to draw up the thing that all new services will be judged against – the Digital by Default Service Standard, as set out in the government’s digital strategy.

Discovery

We knew that it needed to offer the rich detail to help departmental service owners and their teams deliver great digital services, while providing a simple, shared definition of what a good government digital service looks like.

To get an idea of the shape of that, we used a Google Site as a scratch-pad.

That prototype told us that we were potentially looking at 4 things.

1) The standard itself (a simple list of things a service must do), 2) guides and toolkits, 3) some way of reporting the progress of a project against the standard, 4) some communication tools for service managers to discuss improvements to the standard and share their work.

Alpha

Reaching the edge of what we could do with a Google Site, we began to build an alpha using the Django framework. We also settled on the word ‘manual’ as a wrapper for those different concepts.

The alpha had a place for the standard (clearly delineated from the rest of the manual in the design) along with very detailed guidance on things like the GOV.UK colour pallet and API design, and a page for email groups and other communications channels for service managers and their teams.

It also introduced project pages where service managers could record their progress and share their learnings:

Guides and toolkits were stored on Github, then synced into the alpha to make it easier to contribute.

Rather than just try garner feedback on what was still a pretty empty website, we followed Dropbox’s lead, and produced a video to demonstrate a minimum viable product.

We shared the video and the alpha with people across government to see what they liked, and what they didn’t.

Beta

From the alpha we learned some important things:

• people understood the standard
• but they wanted much more guidance. They wanted it setting in context
• the community aspect was going to be hard and needed to evolve as service managers started work across government
• the project pages solved a problem (helping service managers to talk and share progress with each other and the public), but didn’t feel quite right

So we decided to strip things right back.

We descoped the project pages, leaving service managers to blog publicly elsewhere (much as the Ministry of Justice has been doing with the prison visits project).

The community aspect was best approached by splitting it out from the manual and allowing it to evolve separately. Katie will be writing about this soon.

We then focused most of our effort on expanding the guidance and toolkits, and setting it in the context of our design principles and the discovery->alpha->beta->live lifecycle of a project.

Since we were now dealing almost exclusively with text, we moved from Django to a simple publishing system called Jekyll that converts Markdown to HTML and hosted it on Github so anyone across GDS could contribute.

Now the beta of the manual is live we are also getting contributions from people across government as well as members of the public.

There have been 29 such edits since we launched last week, and the manual will continue to evolve throughout its beta period.

If you’ve spotted something wrong and would like to suggest an improvement, you can find the contents of the manual on Github or send us feedback to dbdss@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

One of the questions publishers in government departments are asking us a lot at the moment is “Can I embed [insert name of web app here] on GOV.UK?”

In the spirit of “publish, don’t send” this blog post sets out our answer.

The good news (and tl;dr version) is that we are planning to make sure departments can continue to meet the user needs that they have met – up to now – by embedding widgets, apps and badges on their sites. But we almost certainly won’t be meeting those needs by allowing publishers to embed 3rd party code freely on the main GOV.UK platform.

Read on to find out why, and what we’ll be doing instead.

What’s this all about?

Like practically all website owners, in recent years most government departments have made extensive use of third party web tools to host or curate content outside their own publishing systems.

That’s tools like YouTube and Flickr to host and share video and images, Storify and CoveritLive to curate or create event coverage, Google Maps and Google Charts to display data in visually engaging ways…and many others besides.

Often, departments then take free embed code from those providers to place content or widgets back into pages on their own site, augmenting the capability of their publishing tools.

It’s not a marginal activity, but part of the daily digital operation of most government departments. So it’s hardly surprising that publishers in departments are keen to know whether and how we plan to support this kind of thing for corporate publishing on GOV.UK.

What’s the user need?

As with everything else, our approach is to start with a solid understanding of user needs.

The web services used by departments – including by us here in GDS – are many and varied. Some are destinations in themselves and good places to reach people, like the big social networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Some are utilities like Scribd (for documents), CoveritLive (for live blogging), SlideShare (for presentations) and SoundCloud (for audio files). Some are a bit of both, providing both a hosting service and a social hangout, for example YouTube, Flickr and Pinterest.

It follows that the user needs are also many and varied – running the gamut from “I want to see the places this policy announcement relates to on a map” to “I want to listen to an audio summary of Foreign Office news on my way to work”.

Occasionally, there isn’t a clear user need beyond the publisher’s desire for something visually impressive. Round the GDS office we’ve got a name for this – “blog bling”. I’ve been of guilty of this kind of thing myself in my time at BIS and DCLG.

For GOV.UK we want to look at each need in turn, ensure it’s something users genuinely need, and go about meeting that need in the best way possible.

What determines the best way ?

There are many things to consider to determine “the best way possible”.

Here are some considerations that seem to us to be particularly relevant here:

• quality and convenience of the user experience
• how it looks and functions on different browsers, including on mobiles and tablets
• what the public record looks like in a decade’s time
• impact on users’ privacy
• impact on the availability and integrity on GOV.UK as a whole

Taking these considerations into account, sometimes a simple link to a third party service is the best way to meet the user need (eg linking to a Facebook page or a podcast on iTunes).

But wherever there is a clear and frequent user need which is best met from within the pages of GOV.UK, we will look to meet that need either using GOV.UK’s publishing tools or using a (technically) separate blogs platform, which be available alongside GOV.UK by late April.

Meeting the need on GOV.UK

For the most common and compelling needs, we intend over time to provide functionality within the main GOV.UK platform.

It is likely that we may continue to encourage the use of 3rd party web apps to help curate and host content, but we will not be using the embed code provided by these services on the main GOV.UK domain.

Here’s some of the reasons why not:

• The use of JavaScript, images and iframes from third party sites can be used to set cookies that we won’t be able to control or document, as well as to harvest cookies set by GOV.UK. By allowing this we would flout the law and ICO guidance and enable third parties the potential to track users across parts of the government web estate.
• By embedding third party code in GOV.UK we also tie our integrity to that service. If the service is compromised in an attack, shut down, changed without notice or taken over by a new provider we could be left with broken functionality, or missing or inappropriate content on GOV.UK. Similarly if third-party JavaScript is badly written or allows users to embed badly formed HTML or CSS into the page then that could break the display of GOV.UK.
• The user experience of embedded services is often poor, displaying content in a small viewing area when a full page view would often be more useable. The user experience tends to be especially poor on mobile – few if any of these services use responsive design and many drain battery power. Often the services require a particular plugin (eg Flash or Silverlight) that not all devices support. Very often, embedded services are completely inaccessible for users of assistive technology.

To avoid all these drawbacks and more, and better to meet users’ needs, we will provide alternative ways of achieving these objectives without relying on embed code on the main GOV.UK platform.

We’ve done this already with YouTube. Since GOV.UK’s launch (in fact, since its beta) departments have been able to embed YouTube videos into the site by pasting a link to the video into their content and using a simple markdown command, which GOV.UK then renders using a fully accessible media player. Here’s an example.

The next thing we will tackle is maps. This sketch below illustrates our likely approach. There’s material for a whole post about this alone, but in summary, we’re going to provide a way to import geographic data that departments create using online mapping tools like Google Maps and output it as a static image for displaying on GOV.UK, from which end users can then download the data in their preferred format or view the map in their preferred online service. It’s an approach which places open data front and centre, removes reliance on proprietary services and gives more choice to the user.

After delivering our solution for maps, we expect to turn our attention to the need to aggregate and curate news, and social media conversations and reactions around announcements, currently met by embedding Storify and similar tools. To ensure this valuable content is not lost to posterity and to provide a better user experience, our current thinking is that we will pull the curated content into GOV.UK using Storify-like tools. This next sketch gives an idea of what that might look like. We’ll be doing some thinking about a design approach to reflecting these reactions on GOV.UK in the coming months.

Meeting the need with blogs

We also want innovation to flourish, and for departments to be able to exploit opportunities from new web apps that might come along.

We are in the process of setting up a blogs platform with partners dxw and expect the first GOV.UK blogs to go live by late April. From a user’s perspective, GOV.UK blogs will feel like an add-on to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK – but in terms of infrastructure they will be entirely separate.

For that reason, we intend to be a little more permissive about the use of 3rd party services within blog posts.

For instance, there is a very clear need for users who are unable to attend a public event to be able to follow real-time coverage in the form of a live blog. CoveritLive is probably the best way to achieve this, at least in the short term. So we intend to support that in GOV.UK’s blogs from early on.

We don’t yet know exactly what other services we will support on the blog and by when. It won’t be a free-for-all, but we’re working with dxw to design a process that will allow us to add support for new embedded services within blog posts, giving proportionate rigour to quality and security, and starting with the ones that are most frequently used by departments right now.

Looking beyond GOV.UK

And of course, it almost goes without saying that often the best way to meet users’ needs is not to use GOV.UK at all. The whole internet is our canvas.

We expect and encourage departments to continue to do lots of their user engagement on the social networks where their users spend their time and to continue to run their own cost-effective platforms for online consultations and conversations like http://dementiachallenge.dh.gov.uk and http://www.redtapechallenge.cabinetoffice.gov.uk.

In other words, never underestimate the value of a simple hyperlink to meet the user’s need from within GOV.UK.

As ever, we welcome your feedback.

Images by Paul Downey (available on popular third party web app Flickr.)

This week GOV.UK is up for the Designs of the Year awards at the Design Museum and the exhibition opened on Wednesday, the Department for Culture Media and Sport released a new intranet using GDS services and design rules, and we had Kip Meek a leading digital strategist inspiring our Digital Leaders. Next week we welcome the permanent secretaries to Aviation House and we also release the ‘Worldwide’ and the ‘Travel Advice’ section on GOV.UK.

What have you been up to this week?

GOV.UK is up for the Design of the Year awards at the Design Museum in the digital section and the exhibition opened this week. Our team went over to the Design Museum on Tuesday to see the GOV.UK installations in the exhibition. Great work by Tom Stuart who made an application, which shows a map of the UK and highlights areas of GOV.UK people are looking at by location. So that is a really fun start to the week.

A great thing that happened this week is that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport have used a lot of the services that we have created here, our design rules and our templates, and created their own intranet at a fraction of cost of the one it’s replaced. It is great to see that happen, especially when we have had very little to do with it ourselves.

In the middle of the week we hosted the Digital Leaders, and it is great to see departments coming together, really pressing us now to get more help on resources and to get more skills into departments. We are working very hard with them. Kip Meek presented to the Digital Leaders. Kip is one of the leading digital strategists in this country. He is currently at Everything Everywhere and was previously at Spectrum and Ofcom. It was great of him to come and present to the Digital Leaders, to really raise the bar and ambition statement and to give them some confidence for the challenges ahead.

The final thing that wouldn’t have escaped anyone was the Budget on Wednesday. The team have reacted really well. The are a lot of changes to GOV.UK that will come on 6 April, maternity pay, married couple allowances and so on and so forth. So overall it has been a very busy week with a lot of notable wins.

What is happening next week?

I am delighted to welcome the permanent secretaries to Aviation House next week. The permanent secretaries are the people who run large government departments and they meet every Wednesday.

They are coming over to Aviation House to see how government is doing things digitally. It is a great sign of what we have been doing here to see the interest from them. Sir Jeremy Heywood and Sir Bob Kerslake are bringing them over. It will be wonderful see them and to allow them to see what we are doing with their departments digitally. So that will be on Wednesday, we are really looking forward to that.

A couple of other migrations onto GOV.UK. The ‘Travel Advice’ section and the ‘Worldwide’ section will be released, with content coming over from FCO, DFID and UK Trade and Industry. So again, yet more content onto the platform, a busy week for the team here.

I should mention a couple of new starters as well, Reema Mehta joined our Digital Policy team to work with Rebecca Kemp. Just at the end of last week Phil Buckley came over from the BBC, who has been running BBC Worldwide Services, and most notably CBeebies. Anyone with a small child will thank him for putting that online.

So another group of great people coming to GOV.UK and we look to recruit more people of that calibre in the near future.

Today we are very pleased to release the Worldwide section of GOV.UK, which explains the structure and activities of British government organisations in over 200 locations around the world.

Worldwide (www.gov.uk/government/world) is the new home on the web for the overseas web presences of DFID and FCO, and much of UKTI‘s international-facing content (ahead of a wholesale transition later this year). These location profiles will be frequently updated to set out the government’s response to international events, present case studies of diplomacy, development and trade in action, and provide information about senior staff responsible for overseeing that activity.

These sites have the job of engaging both UK citizens and those overseas, will be published in 44 languages and maintained by a network of 440 publishers based in the actual embassies, consulates and other government offices around the world. All of which makes Worldwide a very exciting addition to GOV.UK.

Simpler, clearer, faster

Worldwide takes over from some long established and well-used sites and attempts to tackle a number of challenges troubling those sites by making them simpler, clearer and faster.

In 2012, for example, 56% of the pageviews on FCO’s previous platform were on its overseas sites. Yet despite the demand for the content, users were struggling with complex architecture, noisy page designs and six year old infrastructure that was fast depreciating.

User frustrations were matched by the FCO’s publishers who struggled with their content management system’s stodgy performance, especially in overseas posts with unreliable telecommunications. Recurring problems forced FCO staff to adopt a number of ‘workarounds’ and lowered their expectations of what a publishing platform should be capable of.

What on earth is going on?

Tackling these issues head-on has been our goal, and we have started by clarifying the purpose of Worldwide by bringing three separate sites into one and making corporate information their focus.

Now, if someone is interested in how the UK government is working with Ethiopia, for example, they can rely on one site instead of having to visit separate sites for DFID, FCO and UKTI. On the location landing page they can see what is happening at a glance, and then dig down into more detail. The user can browse the activity of a particular organisation in that location (such as the British Embassy in Addis Ababa) or follow cues to the main FCO site where they can learn more about the policies framing the department’s work in that country and region.

In some cases, the previous sites also housed services but these have now been moved over to live alongside the rest of the guidance, tools and transactions on the Passports, travel and living abroad section of GOV.UK. You can read more about this aspect of the transition in Sara Bowley’s post.

Get your priorities straight

Government organisations overseas carry out a range of duties ranging from bilateral diplomacy to providing consular support. A new page type, called ‘Priority’, provides detailed accounts of this significant work in each location, and most announcements and case studies published overseas will be linked to these priorities and displayed on the ‘Latest’ tab.

From the titles of the priorities, it may seem that there is some repetition; for example, most Worldwide location sites will carry a priority called ‘Supporting British nationals’. But when you read further you will find that keeping British nationals safe in Spain is quite a different thing to keeping them safe in Mongolia or the Antarctic.

The languages of diplomacy

In many cases the priorities, as well as case studies and announcements, will be translated into one or more local languages, with the options highlighted to the user at the top right corner of the page. Translations are all done manually and this is the first step into dynamic, multi-lingual publishing on GOV.UK.

The languages available include those using non-Latin characters and requiring right-to-left templates. As well as translation of the body content, the FCO is translating page labels to help those who don’t read English navigate around the site.

Contacting us

The UK government has hundreds of overseas ‘posts’. An organisation may have a number of offices spread across a country or even many offices within a single complex. In each case, the office will have contact data, such as a postal address, telephone numbers and email addresses, as well as instructions for people wishing to get in touch with or visit that office.

We have been exploring how to deal with both repetition of information and customisation for specific offices in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the user. And we have begun exposing this data via an application programming interface (API).

Indeed, the API is already being used to inform a number of consular services provided on the mainstream section of GOV.UK, like Foreign Travel Advice and Getting a British passport overseas.

Concentrating on content

To ensure that the contact information and other Worldwide content is accurate and compelling it will be managed directly by publishers around the globe. These are people with the necessary expertise but who have many other responsibilities and operate in testing circumstances, and for whom digital publishing is often only one part of their job.

We believe that the publishing app that they now have is quicker and easier to use, built as it is from the ground up expressly with their needs in mind. We hope that this will resolve previous concerns about technology and enable them to concentrate on producing fantastic content that explains their goals and achievements.

A world of ideas

Although it is built on the solid foundations of Inside Government, the design and development have been a major undertaking for our team. Taking place over just three months, the process has been nothing short of exciting and we look forward to now seeing how this first iteration performs.

We had the benefit of a beta last year, the analytics from the old sites and feedback from the publishers, but what we are desperate for now is feedback from users. We have lots of ideas for further development and we are sure that they will too, so keep an eye on this blog and the Inside Inside Government Tumblr for updates on our progress.

Team effort

All that remains is to applaud the work of the Inside Government developers and designers, and to say a major thank you to FCO’s Adrian Chapman and Paul Hosking, DFID’s Peter Lamb and Ros Connolly at UKTI and their numerous colleagues in the UK and further afield who have helped us to get to this point.

This morning we fully welcomed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) on to GOV.UK. There are lots of new features and services but a big focus for our team has been building the new Foreign Travel Advice pages.

Foreign Travel Advice provides British nationals with official FCO advice about safe travel around the world to help them make informed decisions about travelling and operating in a particular country. It has been the main driver of traffic to the previous FCO site and is sure to be a popular feature on GOV.UK.

What we’ve done

There was lots of information on the old FCO travel advice site but it was buried in long, scrolling pages that were difficult to read and navigate. We’ve clarified user needs, removed generic advice that users can better get elsewhere and focused the material on providing vital safety information so people can make informed decisions about where and when to travel.

We have split important information into easily accessible parts, such as Safety and security, Entry requirements, Natural disasters and Local laws and customs. For countries that may have safety considerations there is a clear warning at the top of the page and map to indicate which regions the FCO is warning against travelling to or where precautions should be taken. Users can also subscribe to email alerts for the countries they are interested in.

‘Quiet’ vs ‘Exciting’ countries

One of the biggest challenges was making the design flexible enough so it worked for both ‘exciting’ countries where there is lots to say and the situation on the ground could change rapidly, alongside the ‘quieter’ countries such as Luxembourg (sorry Luxembourg, it’s a good thing) which had little information that was rarely updated.

We dealt with this by giving editors the ability to make different pages and sections depending on the needs of the country. The design works equally well as one page with no parts or one with multiple parts and sections.

Building digital capability

Part of our mission at GDS is not only building great products but also improving digital capability across government departments.

Improving capability isn’t just about skills but also about having the right tools for the job. Foreign Travel Advice is the first time we have devolved publishing on GOV.UK outside of the corporate sections. We’ve built a simple, easy-to-use publishing app for the travel advice team at the FCO to use to manage and update the content themselves.

Our publishing app replaces an archaic, folder-based content management system that resulted in the team taking several minutes to make even basic updates. The new approach has a user experience to match the simplicity of the front end, and will enable the team to spend time on crafting great content rather than battling technology.

We also ran training sessions with editors and created a helpful GDS style guide. We still think there’s room for improving the content and would love to hear your thoughts on what information you find the most useful.

Beyond Travel Advice

It’s not all been about holidays. We’ve also built a whole host of other features, transactions and tools to meet a diverse range of user needs involved in British people travelling and living overseas.

We’ll post more detail about these over the coming weeks but for now here’s a list of what has also been released today:

• Report a birth overseas
• Report a death overseas
• Getting married abroad
• Getting a British passport overseas
• Help if you’re arrested abroad
• Information around forced marriage and female genital mutilation

This has been a truly collaborative effort and a big thank you is due to the FCO team, especially as they were also working with another GDS team on moving their overseas sites to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK.

Today’s launch is another big step for GOV.UK and FCO and we will continue to make improvements as we learn more about how people use what we’ve built. So please let us know what you think.

You might think that we’ve gone a little quiet since we published the Open Standards Principles last November, but we’ve been working hard on getting together the processes and the people to lead on some of the open standards challenges that you, our users, inside and outside government have told us to focus on first.

We know that having interoperable software and open information and data formats will mean that we can provide better services and bring about a positive change to the way government buys its IT.

So today, we’ve opened up 8 challenges on the Standards Hub that we think open standards can help to solve. This is the first step in identifying open standards for use across government. The Standards Hub will help us to engage with our users and to be completely transparent in how we select and implement our open standards.

The challenges range from:

• transferring information across public safety systems, that could potentially speed up emergency response times and save lives; to
• making us more transparent and accountable through sharing of government data.

Now, we need your ideas, through the Standards Hub, to help us develop the proposals to tackle these challenges.

Getting to grips with document formats

We haven’t included a challenge about document formats at this stage, which many of you may have expected to see. We know how important the document format issue is to you. That’s why we now plan to publish a challenge on document formats once we’ve fully tested the engagement process. We also want the Open Standards Board to be up and running to make sure we can make progress as speedily as possible.

I’ll be letting you know about our plans for that next week.

The government’s IT strategy mentioned that that we’d focus on document formats as part of the first set of standards that we’d consider. We still believe that users should be able to read government documents with the standardised document format reader of their choice.

More challenges and proposals will follow in the coming weeks – this is just the start. If you think there is something else we should focus on, suggest a new challenge through the Standards Hub and we’ll consider it.

We’re looking forward to tackling some of the problems that will make a real difference to how users experience our digital services right across government.

Getting a new message out

This week the IT Reform team within GDS released new guidance to government departments and suppliers around the technology we use. We’ve done this to make sure our technology doesn’t end up becoming inflexible, overdesigned, or adversely burdened with unnecessary management or security controls.

What problem are we trying to solve?

We know that civil servants have often described their experience of using technology as ‘frustrating’. And we know that the cost of our desktops and laptops has often been far too high, sometimes running to several hundred pounds per person per year.

We also know that it’s not always easy, cost-effective or obvious how to use the best available tools for a particular need, be they convenient devices or innovative digital services. It’s also vital that we can use different tools when our needs change, and to be able to adopt the best solutions from rapidly innovating markets.

A few years ago we were all using desktops and laptops, then very quickly tablets and smartphones became convenient tools. It’s difficult to predict the next innovation in digital tools. We need to design ways of being able to take advantage of new innovations quickly and easily.

We also need to make sure that small and medium sized suppliers can provide nimble and cost-effective services to government. The systems we use day-to-day shouldn’t be so complex that they are out of the reach of a wide range of suppliers. If they are, we’ve designed them wrong.

What must a solution address?

We need to get 4 basic things right:

User Experience – we need to design services with users’ needs in mind – and that goes for our own technology as much as it does for what we deliver to the public

Proportionate Security – security should be proportionate to the risk, and for the vast majority of government business, this means using controls in the same way that a well run commercial business would

Sustained Value – making sure that value can be sustained after something has been bought. This means designing for change, and opening up access to all types of suppliers, including open source or small businesses

Consumerised IT – we need to make it possible to use the sort of general, commodity technology that works well for consumers, and for other businesses

What does this mean in practice?

We need to take some tips from the way that digital services have developed on the web. Openly and with technologies that are both simple and good enough for developers to use. What we don’t want are heavy, expensive technologies designed by committees that limit our flexibility. We want to use digital technologies that are of the web.

We need to set clear, open standards; to give ourselves the option of short, flexible contracts, and make sure that technology choices don’t lock us in as our needs and organisations change.

Guidance

We’ve developed guidance to help departments and suppliers understand what kinds of design decisions they should now be making. There’s specific guidance on the standards that need to be met to ensure that digital services don’t become heavily dependent on particular products or suppliers. A new security framework has been developed with CESG (the government’s specialist technology security advisors) for those working with government information across all types of mobile devices.

What happens next?

Departments and suppliers can get in touch to find out more or to get help in making this happen. We’ll clarify what this strategy and guidance means, how to implement it, and we’ll bust a few of the myths around security and other common concerns. Departments can and should start using this new guidance now.

Applying for licences is rarely a fun activity and this applies equally to the authorities responsible for processing them.

When you wanted a licence extension for your birthday party in a pub this would have traditionally involved a tedious and complicated paper process. Forms had to be completed by hand and in many cases copied to two or more authorities. The Electronic Licence Management System (ELMS) system launched in December 2009 and provided an online application option, however the uptake was slower than anticipated due to its complexity.

When the Businesslink site closed in October last year, the GOV.UK Licensing service – powering applications like registering a food business and holding a licensed event on unlicensed premises – launched alongside the main GOV.UK site. Since then it has processed around 15,000 licences.

At GDS, we always measure success with actual data. Looking at the number of applications in the last three months compared to the same period last year we’ve seen it more than double – from 4,461 under ELMS to 10,168 via GOV.UK. In addition, the majority of the qualitative feedback we’ve received says that GOV.UK Licensing is an improvement on the previous system.

There’s much more to do, of course. Since the launch of the service, GDS has been working with local authorities to understand their needs. We’ve also created services that reflect different licensing requirements across the UK. Being a small, agile team we’ve been able to meet with users and service managers, listen to their feedback and use it to make improvements.

For applicants, we’ve removed the need for Government Gateway registration and made the process simpler. We’ve also increased the file size limit for documents that need to be uploaded to support applications, such as building plans or copies of certificates.

Recent improvements for local authority users include adding an ‘ownership’ function. This helps their team members know who is dealing with an application and helps avoid duplication.

Coming soon, we’re hoping to design online forms for the most popular licences. These will replace the current PDFs which have to be downloaded, completed then uploaded. This will further simplify submitting and processing applications. It will also allow the data to be made available electronically to further improve efficiency through the removal of duplication and errors.

There’s always room for more and we’re keen to carry on improving the service. If you’re a member of the public who has used the system, or from a local authority, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch via this blog.

The move of web content from the Department of Health (DH) to GOV.UK has been a relatively calm experience for the DH team. It’s been extremely busy and quite intense at times but I only had one day of actual panic, about two weeks ago.

If I were starting the process again there are a few things I’d do differently, but there are other things I’m really pleased about and that I think we got completely right. Here are some of the things I’ve learnt – or re-learnt – over the past 6 months.

Know your content inside out

I thought I knew the content on the DH website pretty well. Turns out I was wrong. I’d been hands-off for a little while, busy with other things and not attending weekly editorial meetings or writing content. I hadn’t paid attention to some of the changes to the ways we were doing things as a team and in retrospect it would have helped me spot potential problems if I’d been doing some actual publishing.

It’s also the case that the sooner you marry your publishing processes up to GOV.UK the easier it’ll be. Though in fairness when things are changing as quickly as they were a few months ago it was sometimes safer just to wait and see!

Use your stats

I’m quite geeky when it comes to analytics and can spend several hours following user journeys through the website, looking at where people have come from, what keywords they use, where they end up and at what point they exit the site.

There can be some revelations from finding out why people are coming to your site, and what paths have led them there. And there’s no better way to win an argument about content style or structure than with facts and figures. Everyone working on a website should know what kind of content gets a lot of traffic and what kind of search terms people are using.

Don’t be afraid to archive

Government websites are not the best way to store everything that a department has ever published – instead they should make it easy to find what’s current.

We went through several stages of archiving for the DH site; at the start of the coalition government, again in the summer of 2011 when we moved to a WordPress platform, and it still amazed me how much out-of-date content got through the net each time.

I suggest that rather than look at your website from the front, you go round the back instead. Trawl through all the URLs in your sitemap section-by-section and you will almost certainly find some corkers. If you’re nervous about archiving, look at the stats to back up your gut feel. Chances are no one’s looking at those pages anyway.

Tell everyone about your project until they’re bored of hearing from you. Then tell them again.

It’s quite possible that someone at DH will email me in the next few days asking where their page is. There’ve been news articles and blogs on the staff intranet, a feature in the staff magazine, emails to management teams, invites to attend presentations, a story on every single page on the DH website for the past month, etc. etc.

But in the real world, more communication than you thought possible is almost enough.

Be transparent and people will trust you more

Tell people what you do know but also tell them when you don’t have the answer. Be prepared to make changes if someone comes up with a good reason even if it means more work for you. And remember that the earlier you know about something the easier it is to fix it.

I have really enjoyed blogging about the move to GOV.UK on the digital health site and on our internal channels. It has helped me prioritise and get my messages clear.

Have faith in the team at GDS

Sometimes you need to have blind faith, which can be quite uncomfortable. Accompany that faith with regular questions, emails and phone calls, keeping up with blogs, following people on Twitter, attending workshops and talking to colleagues in other parts of government to find out how they did things.

There have been quite a few things that we couldn’t get perfect for day 1. We still have subsites to close, migrate or archive and some of the changes will take a bit of getting used to. We’re also mopping up link redirection to minimise any disruption as people search for the content they need in Google and elsewhere.

I’m confident though that we’ll be able to save time and do a better digital comms job as a result of moving to GOV.UK, or in other words do less, better.

This week we have welcomed four new departments to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK: Department for International Development, Department of Health, Home Office and Wales Office.

18 of 24

This takes the total number of ministerial departments that have moved to GOV.UK up to 18, leaving just 6 more to go.

At the same time, Public Health England and six Home Office organisations have also moved across, bringing the total number of agencies and other public bodies up to 25.

This is great progress and we’d like to thank colleagues in these organisations for all their hard work over the last few months and weeks. You can read more about what the experience was like from one department’s perspective in Alice Ainsworth’s guest post.

New content and features

Preparing Inside Government for the transition of each organisation invariably involves new features and of course a significant increase in content.

Highlights amongst these recent transitions include:

• 40 new policies, taking the total number of policies up to 159
• The ability to translate content into Welsh (for example, https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/wales-office.cy)
• New HTML publications (eg. Police powers and procedures England and Wales 2010 to 2011)

For more regular updates on Inside Government releases, you can follow our Tumblr blog, Inside Inside Government.

Nearing ‘done’

We began transition of ministerial departments to Inside Government in November last year and by the end of April this year the remaining 6 will have completed their transition. That is very exciting for all involved.

We’ll be posting more details on those launches and what ‘completion’ means for Inside Government in due course.

Today the National Audit Office (NAO) published their Digital Britain Two report, examining the government’s digital by default strategy. In particular, the report took a close look at the strategy document we published last November, and assessed whether the evidence stacked up for taking the direction we’ve chosen.

The NAO’s views on what we’ve done are important, because they are both independent of government and responsible for checking that it spends public money wisely. Their reports are often very influential. In 2011 they published the Digital Britain One report (PDF, 556kB), which recommended five lessons that informed the newly created Government Digital Service (GDS).

The report includes findings from a large piece of independent fieldwork that the NAO commissioned to find out more about the UK’s online preferences and capabilities. They surveyed over 3,000 people and 130 businesses, gathering a wealth of interesting data. Happily for us, many of the findings tally very closely with the Digital Landscape Review, a survey that we ran to provide the evidence base for the Government Digital Strategy.

There’s other good news in this report. The NAO praises GDS’ firm leadership of the agenda, and the ambition of government’s digital plans. They also emphasise throughout the report that there is plenty of scope for greater use of online public services, and that most people and SMEs support this intention.

There are also some recommendations for things that GDS could look to improve upon. Improving public awareness – both of the public services that are available online and how we plan to help those who are offline – is something we can work on. They also suggest that our plans on assisted digital should seek to make more of the help those offline get from friends, family and colleagues, and make sure those plans are communicated effectively.

Overall, this report is a really positive sign we’re moving in the right direction. But it’s also a helpful reminder of the work we still need to do to support those who are less able to use online services.

One of the most important objectives for the Digital by Default Service Standard project was setting out a consistent way of measuring service performance. Why? Because all too often, there has been no shared understanding of how concepts like ‘customer satisfaction’ or even ‘cost per transaction’ are measured in government – which makes data-driven decision making difficult.

We wanted to create a set of measures that would help service managers to monitor and improve the performance of government services over time. Specifically, service managers need to be able to measure progress in three areas: improving the user’s experience of the service, reducing running costs, and shifting people towards using the digital channel.

The GDS design principles provided us with a starting point. They say that key performance indicators (KPIs) should define measures that are simple, require data that is easily collectable and generate actionable metrics.

We settled on four KPIs that met these requirements:

• Digital take-up: how many transactions are completed online?
• Cost per transaction: how much does it cost to provide each transaction?
• User satisfaction: how highly do users rate a service?
• Completion rate: how many people start a transaction and then drop out?

The Government Service Design Manual provides more detail about how each of these is defined. To meet the service standard, all new and redesigned services must measure these four KPIs. But in terms of performance measurement, these are only the tip of the iceberg. Service managers will almost certainly want to add other KPIs to measure their more specific requirements.

For each of the KPIs, GDS will work with the teams building the exemplar services (23 transactions picked by departments as priorities for new or redesigned digital services). They’ll set sensible goals for ‘what good looks like’, with interim milestones on the way towards meeting them. The goals set for the exemplars will then be applied to other, similar service transformations. After a service goes live on GOV.UK, this performance data will be regularly collected and made publicly available.

We’d really like to hear your views on the KPI guidance we’ve written, so please use the feedback option on the Government Service Design Manual and let us know what you think.

The Design Museum’s annual ‘Designs of the Year’ awards exhibition launched last week. As usual it’s an eclectic mix of architecture, fashion, digital, furniture, products, transport and graphics. Category winners and the overall winner will be decided by a jury and announced to the public on 17 April 2013.

Until July you can visit the show and look at the Shard, Thomas Heatherwick’s Olympic Cauldron, the Raspberry Pi, the dresses from Anna Karenina (which have already won an Oscar) and a table which costs £100,000. You can also see how your benefits might be affected by a change in circumstances, read the Dept of Health’s latest consultations, browse the Ministry of Defence’s latest news, discover how to set up a business or find out how government works.

That’s because we’re delighted to announce GOV.UK has been nominated in the digital category.

You can’t enter these awards; all the projects are nominated by a panel of experts. It’s a great honour to see the Civil Service recognised among such global design talent. A project on the scale of GOV.UK couldn’t happen without the collaboration of everyone across government and this nomination is really for all of us.

Websites in museums don’t really have a happy track record, but we still wanted to create something of the experience of actually using GOV.UK. So we created a few things I’d like to mention:

There’s a laptop set up in the museum, pointing at GOV.UK (so you can’t jump off anywhere naughty). We wanted to show that we’ve designed the site for use on many screen sizes, so we built a web app that mirrors exactly what you do on the laptop, on a tablet and on a phone. Tom Stuart who built this has written about the process here and of course the code is on GitHub. Although we made this for the exhibition we’re already thinking of other ways we could use it, given that it’s web-based. It could be a great way to demonstrate services to a large group for example.

I’m pleased we were placed in the “What People Need” part of the exhibition. We wanted to show the basic things people are using GOV.UK for: jobs, benefits, schools, passports. So Edd Sowden made a map that shows which pages people are looking at on GOV.UK and where they are. That’s also on GitHub.

Tickets are available here and the show runs until 7th July.

Read more here:
Design Week
Dezeen
The Guardian
Creative Review

Images courtesy of Ben Terrett, licensed CC-BY-NC-ND on Flickr.

Highlights this week – many more services make their transition to GOV.UK, including content with an international flavour in the form of the new Worldwide section. The policy content has also been strengthened with the addition of 15 new policies. Four more departments have joined GOV.UK in one week, leaving 6 to go.

Three events of note: one for large, established suppliers to government to look at the impact of new frameworks, a policy forum hosted by Policy Exchange, and a very important one in terms of relationships between government departments. The weekly meeting of permanent secretaries (heads of central government departments) was held in the GDS office at Aviation House – bringing a great opportunity to highlight the work of GDS in relation to each department.

Mike Beaven, who leads our transformation programme, will provide the weekly update next week, including more on commercial and contractual issues and relationships with suppliers.

(Full transcript below)

What have you been up to this week?

This has been a massive week for us, we released a whole slew of services on the Worldwide section of GOV.UK. We’ve had over 200 embassies, UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) and Department for International Development (DFID) agencies around the world in 44 languages using GOV.UK. Clearly it’s doubled traffic already, so it’s great and it’s probably going to be our biggest week for GOV.UK. It’s a terrific effort by the team and it’s great to see the Hawaiian shirts in the office to mark the launch and also our colleagues from Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) welcomed us over to celebrate that. It’s been great to work with them.

I should single out Janet Hughes, our policy content co-ordinator, for thanks, because we’ve put about 40 more policies onto GOV.UK this week and it becomes a richer repository of government policy. So it’s a huge week and it’s a great win for the team to show how much content and how many services can be moved on in one go.

Also, we had 4 more departments move over to GOV.UK; Department of Health, two sites came over from there, DFID, Home Office and the Welsh Office. It’s a huge migration of content onto GOV.UK and to show we can do all that in one week is testament to the hard work that team’s put in. I hope they have a lovely Easter.

Can you tell us about this week’s events?

Yes, firstly the supplier event. We have regular supplier events, we’re trying to open up the government supply chain for digital companies. Bit of an interesting one this week because actually we had an event for the companies that have already got very large IT contracts and services into government and know us very well. We explained to them the whole new frameworks approach that we’re bringing through. Mike Beaven, our transformation lead and his team will probably talk about that next week and show how the landscape is changing for them. So there’s a bit of a challenge in there, but also one that some of those organisations I’m sure can respond to positively.

We also did a bit of policy work, I spoke at a Policy Exchange event with Rohan Silva and Liam Maxwell. Rohan has been central to the creation of GDS and has really been driving and been supporting it from Number 10 since inception, so it was good to help them out there.

On Wednesday we had probably the most interesting meeting of the year so far when we hosted Wednesday Morning Colleagues. That’s the permanent secretaries’ weekly meeting. Sir Jeremy Heywood and Sir Bob Kerslake were good enough to host that here at GDS, Aviation House. We had the opportunity to show them the work we’ve been doing and I think we made a big impression on some of those permanent secretaries, it was great.

What’s happening next week?

I’m on holiday next week so Mike Beaven will be taking this and there’s some interesting reports coming out from the National Audit Office that I’m sure we’ll be able to talk about then.

“The start of a process that will transform how we provide services…to make them…fit for the 21st Century – agile, flexible and digital by default”. That was how Francis Maude described the Government Digital Strategy, published in November 2012.

You may have read in earlier posts that the strategy set out 14 actions for departments to respond to. It was followed up in December 2012 by departmental digital strategies, where each department set out their own detailed plans and commitments on how they would transform and improve their services to meet user needs better and achieve savings.

An ambitious agenda. So how do we keep track of what is happening?

Digital Leaders meet monthly to advise on cross-government work towards services that are digital by default, as well as championing digital development within their own departments. Each quarter they review high-level progress against the Government Digital Strategy. In the spirit of transparency they decided to publish these quarterly progress reports – hence this post.

We’ve just got to the end of the first 100 days since publication – what have we been doing to make the Digital Strategy a reality?

The first few months have focused on:

• starting to get empowered people with the right skills in place. Some departments have already started to establish specialist digital teams to support these changes; others are assessing what skills they need. GDS itself is setting up a programme of work to support digital skills development at all levels across government. We are already sharing best practice through things like this blog, and our Sprint 13 event.
• beginning the 23 transformational ‘exemplar’ projects identified in departmental strategies. Work has already begun on 15, with 9 at alpha/beta delivery stages, 4 in the ‘discovery’ phase, and 2 at initial engagement stages. We expect the remainder to move into discovery phase during the next quarter.
• continuing to move departmental information and services across to GOV.UK. Most departments have now done this, with the remainder due to have moved by the end of April.
• establishing clear guidance to assist departments in making services digital by default – take a look at the beta version of the Government Service Design Manual to find out what services need to do to achieve the Digital by Default Service Standard. (And feel free to feed back to us where you think that it could be improved for users).

To find out more, read the full Digital Leaders’ quarterly progress report which gives examples of departments’ actions. Over the next quarter we’ll be building on these foundations, and delivering visible changes. Watch this space.

Highlights this week – we published our first quarterly progress report on the Government Digital Strategy, setting out what’s been achieved since it was published in December. Work is now well underway on the transactional “exemplar” services – 9 are in either alpha or beta versions, and 4 currently in the first “discovery” stage.

Traffic to GOV.UK hit an all-time high of 6.13m visitors in February, which will only increase as more departments move across to GOV.UK. Tom Loosemore’s blog post on whether we should use apps (including a copy of his presentation) proved to be our most viral blog post. We’re also doing more to measure how much engagement we’re getting through the blog and through Twitter.

The National Audit Office published their Digital Britain Two report – useful praise for government’s work in the digital space, but also plenty to keep us on our toes, and some very useful recommendations for areas of improvement.

Next week – more departments join GOV.UK, including Ministry of Justice and Defra. Not long now until all departments are on there.

(Full transcript below)

What’s been going on at GDS this week?

Well, it’s been quite a quiet week this week, post-Easter and in fact Mike [Bracken]‘s actually recovering, actually, from eating chocolate Easter eggs so he’s taken the week off this week to recover from that. But actually we have been doing quite a bit. So today we have published our first quarterly progress report on the Government Digital Strategy, so setting out what’s been achieved over the quarter since the strategy was published in December.

So some of the highlights from that: we’ve had 6 departments who’ve changed their digital leader this quarter – all very good news – actually most of them have been promoted to bigger and better jobs; that’s led to a bit of change in the system. And we’ve also done some more work on the transactional services; we’ve had work beginning on 15 of those services, and we now have 9 services in either alpha or beta versions, and we have 4 that are currently in the first stage of discovery – so good progress with those.

We’ve also been looking at our traffic on GOV.UK, which as of the end of February – the last week of February in fact – we had 6.13million visitors, which is actually an all-time high for GOV.UK. And as you know we are just expecting that to continue going up as more departments join the site.

The other thing we’ve been doing in terms of data is getting some data about the use of our blog and our Twitter feed – and that’s been, again, really good news. So you might remember last time I spoke I was talking about a presentation that Tom Loosemore had done to digital leaders about apps, and whether we should use apps or not, and Tom put that out as a blog post with a copy of the presentation, and that’s actually been our most viral blog post, which is good news – so lots of interest in that.

And finally, just on Twitter, the @gdsteam tag gets about 100 mentions a week, so that’s really good because that’s people either asking for some information or giving us feedback about some of our services, which helps us improve, so that’s really good news.

What else has been happening this week?

So I think Mike mentioned in his video last week that the National Audit Office were publishing their Digital Britain Two report, last week. That was a follow-up to their Digital Britain One report published in 2011. So some great data in there, some really strong praise for what governments been doing in the digital space, which is fantastic, but also keeping us on our toes – lots of recommendations of further things we could do to improve, particularly focusing on assisted digital and how do we help those people who are offline. So really important as we take that work forward, that we can build on their findings and recommendations; that’s really helpful.

What’s going to be happening next week?

Next week we’ve got some more moves to GOV.UK – we’re now on to Ministry of Justice, and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – so they’re coming next week and then we’ve got 5 more sites to come by the end of April. So not long now and we’ll have all departments on there.

Have you seen anything interesting elsewhere this week?

People might have seen the Ofcom report which tied in with mobile’s 40th anniversary, so the 40th year since we had mobile phones. And you might be interested to know that in 2012, 20 gigabyes of data was consumed every month through mobile phones. So it just reinforces the message that we give out to all the departments about ensuring that their services are accessible through all sorts of user devices to meet the increasing user need for both mobile, tablet and similar use.

If Mr Bracken was here, which way would he be saying that we’re going?

He’d be saying a word beginning with O that I don’t talk about – so for me it’s “’til next week”.