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Trying to keep it simple? It’s complicated
Keeping it simple is one of the guiding principles for all content designers. We try to apply it to everything we do, but when the content we’re working with is extra-complicated, it’s not always easy....
View ArticleLasting Power of Attorney – live
Over the line The Office of the Public Guardian (OPG)’s lasting power of attorney digital service has just gone from beta to live. This is the first exemplar service to pass the Digital by Default...
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Weekend links: Choosing checklists, checking content, customer companies and...
Found a link you think we’ll like? Share it with us on Twitter: @gdsteam Ever wondered what your social accounts would look like if they were Lego figures? Of course you have. (Image courtesy of Jeremy...
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Principles for prototyping
All our projects begin with discovery, a short phase in which we start researching the needs of users, understand the things we’ll need to measure to improve the service, and explore technology and...
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Interesting stuff from GOV.UK blogs
A couple of weeks ago, we updated the index page for all the blogs hosted on GOV.UK. To mark this, we thought it would be a good idea to highlight some of the interesting stuff that teams across...
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Individual Electoral Registration – changing the way we register to vote
Today we launch the digital service for Individual Electoral Registration (IER). This is our first major transactional service delivered all the way to live as an agile project. There are lots of...
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We need interaction designers to help transform digital services
This is a picture of designers working at DVLA, MoJ, HMRC, GDS and HO meeting up at the Home Office last week to share design patterns. This is something we do regularly as a design community. As we...
View Article13 interesting things about how we do content design
We don’t just write the content for GOV.UK – we design it. The steps sound simple, but they’re fundamental to the way we work: understanding user needs, designing content that meets those needs, and...
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Meeting the standard regardless of size
In April 2014 the Digital by Default Service Standard went live, and since then all new or redesigned services have had to be assessed against all 26 points in the standard. Here at GDS we run service...
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Improving the Norwegian user experience
I’ve just got back from speaking at a workshop for Norwegian government web editors on how GOV.UK keeps its focus on user needs and maintains content quality. I thought I’d share some reflections on...
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I fought the law and the users won: delivering online voter registration
Last week we launched a new online service allowing people to register to vote. This is a big deal. This is a really, really big deal. You can now get on the electoral roll in just a few minutes, even...
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The tricky topic of governance
When we’re working with the 25 exemplar services, the transformation team often get asked how to govern service delivery in an agile world. By ‘govern’ we mean how people steer, direct and assure...
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Find us elsewhere online
As well as this blog, GDS has a small selection of accounts on various social media networks and other web services, and we thought it would be useful to publish a list of them here. First of all:...
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How we make films at GDS
We’ve made quite a few films in the last year or two. Recently, a few people have got in touch to ask how we do it. The long answer to that is very long. We could write a whole manual on it (and...
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What we mean when we say “service transformation”
There’s a letter that gets sent out to some elderly people who make claims for Carer’s Allowance. It opens with these two sentences: We have decided that you meet the conditions for entitlement to...
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Making prison visits easier to book
HMP Rochester is one of a handful of prisons that helped the Ministry of Justice test early versions of a new digital service, the Prison visit booking exemplar. I went down to Rochester earlier this...
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Some interesting things about digital transformation
Government is building digital services that are simpler, clearer and faster to use. GDS is working with 8 government departments to build 25 exemplar services. By March 2015 we aim to have...
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Prison visit booking: using digital analytics to inform alpha development
We often think of digital analytics as simply counting website visitors, visits and pageviews. However, this guest post by Jim Williams, a product analyst at GDS, and Tony Duarte, service manager on...
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What’s the design process at GDS?
Lots of people ask me what our design process is like at GDS. I thought I’d write some of that down in a place I can point to. It’s worth saying that we don’t follow this slavishly. We’re flexible and...
View ArticleMaking things open, making things better
Every time you save a document on your computer, there’s a short string of characters at the end of the filename – the stuff you see suffixed after the dot. Those letters perform an important task....
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