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It takes 2: how we use pair writing
I’m Sue. As a content designer at GDS, it’s my job to write content for everyone. This means I write in the simplest way to help our users do things that are often complex. To make sure the words we...
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Introduction to the new induction
A good induction should feel like checking into a beautifully designed 5-star hotel. You should be greeted on arrival and someone should be there to pre-empt any questions. They should relay essential...
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Being transgender at GDS
This week is National Inclusion Week, and Cabinet Office is publishing its first ever Gender Identity and Gender Reassignment Policy. I feel like this is a good opportunity to write about my...
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Management by the team, not the managers
When we created the People Board, we said it had been set up to "make GDS a better place to work". By way of a quick recap, the Board is a small group of people who are: elected by everyone in GDS...
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Platform as a Service team takes even-handed approach to meetings
We’ve all been in group situations where the discussion is dominated by the most confident or the loudest people in the room. The less dominant or newer members of the group hesitate to voice their...
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How the Sexual Health: 24 service used GOV.UK patterns
We’ve talked before about our plans to create a set of patterns and tools that people building government services can use. The idea was that creating these templates would free up teams so they could...
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Designing the register creation process
When designing services or creating content, we always start by thinking about user needs. It’s our first design principle. The principle states that we should focus on ‘user needs, not government...
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National Get Online Week: what we’ve been doing
This week, there has been a series of events running across the country to celebrate National Get Online Week. This is part of the government’s plans to make training in basic digital skills free for...
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The GDS mission: support, enable and assure
Last week, I attended the fourth Transforming Together event. Colleagues from across government came together to talk about some of the big issues facing us. The main thing we learnt was that we need...
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Help us give government better data about services
Front page of the prototype The Performance Platform measures how government services are performing. The team that runs it made the decision to carry out a rediscovery of its work and we blogged about...
View ArticleGDS welcomes 2 new senior hires
In my last post, I wrote about how GDS needs to make a commitment to collaborate with all government departments. We need to work together if we want to transform the relationship between citizen and...
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How users feel about webchat
Webchat is a channel for support that allows users to talk to advisers through real-time online text chat. The Government as a Platform team recently carried out a discovery into how services around...
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7 things we learnt on our US visit
The US government runs an International Visitors Leadership Program, which brings together future leaders from around the world. It’s had over 350 current and former heads of state attend, as well as...
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Building better assessments for digital services
We’ve blogged before on how the Standards Assurance team at GDS is working in collaboration with people from across government to improve the way we assure things. One of the ways we assure new...
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Making our flooding content watertight
December 2015 was the wettest month ever recorded in the UK. More than 17,000 homes were flooded in England alone. Photo by Allan Harris, used under Creative Commons Licence Around Christmas we were...
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Celebrating our 5th birthday
GDS turns 5 this week (officially on Thursday 8 December), and we’re celebrating all week. There will be cake (inevitably), but also a few other things: we’re going to spend some time on this blog...
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Digital transformation: an update from down under
Last year, the Australian government set up a team tasked with transforming government to make services easier to use. It was called the Digital Transformation Office – recently renamed the Digital...
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Now we are 5
It’s half a decade since GDS was founded. When it started, it was just 14 people. In those days, it had more of a startup culture, with a very small staff working to build the early prototypes of...
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A problem shared is money saved
It is said that users don’t care about the structure of government. They don’t care which department does this or which agency does that. In the Standards Assurance team we have the same approach. We...
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Looking sideways in the product and service manager community
A recent product manager career path workshop I recently rejoined GDS after 3 years away – at the University of Bath and the Scottish government. Back then I was an associate product manager. I’m now...
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