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This week at GDS
Mike Beaven talks about the Sprint Alpha conference where we welcomed the Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude, the Head of the Civil Service, Sir Bob Kerslake, and Permanent Secretaries of...
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Design students’ perspectives on assisted digital
A few months ago Ben Terrett, Russell Davies and I were asked to give a brief to Goldsmiths BA Design course. Matt Ward, the programme leader, contacted us to give the students an opportunity to work...
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Three cities, one alpha, one day
A few weeks ago, GDS and Land Registry teamed up to build an alpha of their property register service – one of the 25 services we’re transforming. To demonstrate the pace of change in agile teams, we...
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The GOV.UK homepage – our latest version
Today we release the latest version of the GOV.UK homepage. A screenshot of the new homepage Since the last major revision of the page (which Ben wrote about last year), dozens of ministerial...
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FAQs: why we don’t have them
We are often asked to put content in Frequently Asked Question format (FAQs). They’re a popular convention on the web, but we don’t recommend them and here’s why: They’re too slow FAQs are convenient...
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Working with govt.nz
The New Zealand Government Online team has released a sneak preview of their new beta, designed to replace newzealand.govt.nz. Their design mockups look vaguely familiar: Several GOV.UK makers have...
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This week at GDS
Mike Beaven talks about the new version of the homepage for GOV.UK and the ongoing work to the performance platform as we move more government services onto it with six more Foreign and Commonwealth...
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On dropping the name “Inside Government” from GOV.UK
There’s an adage in writing circles known as “kill your darlings”, based on a quote by William Faulkner (“In writing, you must kill all your darlings”). The theory goes that writers should be ruthless...
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The Smart Answer Bug
Back in June, I wrote about the content dashboard which I built to help editors improve content on GOV.UK. In this update, I’d like to give an example of how it has been used by the GDS team to detect...
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Performance dashboards released for six FCO services
Last week we released performance dashboards for six Foreign & Commonwealth Office services, including payment for registering births, marriages and deaths abroad. In a modern office block in a...
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This week at GDS
Mike Beaven talks about how GDS has been helping Technology in Business fast streamers learn about coding and design, the beta release of the employment tribunal fee service and the ‘GIST’ spending...
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What about people who aren’t online?
‘What about people who aren’t online?’ is a question we’re often asked on the assisted digital team. So we decided to run a workshop at GDS’ Sprint Alpha event on 17th July to answer it. Assisted...
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Digital learning day
A couple of weeks ago, at Manchester TechHub, we held our first digital learning day for the Technology in Business (TiB) Fast Stream; one of the fast stream schemes helping to create digital leaders...
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Organ donation and A/B testing
Some user needs are easier to meet than others. It doesn’t take much research to confirm that most people searching for ‘bank holiday‘ care most about when they can next enjoy a long weekend. But what...
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Learning from assessments
We’ve learnt a lot about assessing services over the last few months. James Kemp, acting Service Manager for passport appointment booking at HM Passport Office, attended one of the early assessments...
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This week at GDS
This week Mike talks about the recruitment hub, the digital services framework, and G-Cloud 4. He also talks about Young Rewired State and welcomes several new starters to government. Full transcript...
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Designing assisted digital with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design
We’ve started a project with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design about how assisted digital support can meet the needs of older people. Peter Ziegler is leading the project and is a specialist in design...
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How the new GOV.UK homepage is performing
We introduced a new version of the GOV.UK homepage a few weeks ago, and since then we’ve collected lots of data about what’s working and what improvements we can make. We thought we’d share some of the...
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Open Standards show and tell
Last year, we established our definition of an open standard for software interoperability, data and document formats, and the Open Standards Principles that explain our rationale for putting them into...
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This week at GDS
This week Kathy talks about Assisted Digital, a visit from Kazakhstan and a look forward to next week’s Digital Leaders meeting. Along with welcoming our new starters, Kathy also talks about next...
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