I’ve spent the last 2 years inside the walls of the government, across more than 1 department.
I know there’s a lot of interest and mystique around what happens in there. So, here goes. This is what Gov’ digital is all about. From somebody who worked there for long enough to know inner workings, but doesn’t work there now so can be honest. It’s probably a worthwhile read to anybody thinking of joining.
Departments (which citizens don’t care about)
Those of you who are in the government won’t need this bit. For the rest of you, you might be interested to know that behind the GOV.UK brand are tonnes and tonnes of departments. All of them have their own Chief Digital Officer (some better than others, I got a good one), all of them have their own policies. Some love their customers/citizens/users some seem not to. What very few of them realise is that nobody outside of government gives a toss which department they’re dealing with — they’re just dealing with “the government”. Could you really tell me the difference between Border Force and UK Visas and Immigration? DVLA and DVSA? Do you know what the Cabinet Office does? No. Nobody cares. Which is recognised by GOV.UK, but not so much by the departments themselves (yet). Which brings me to…
GDS — Government Digital Services
The people of the Gov’, like most big organisations, love acronyms. GDS is a new department set up a few years back to be the custodians of digital within government. The Gov’ at the time got in some really big guns, the design element of which was Ben Terrett.
GDS have a really difficult job. They’ve sort of put themselves in the firing line for all of government. You’ll hear non-digital people moaning about GDS’s approach to getting stuff done all the time, when what they actually don’t like is having to work harder to make things better, and, you know, CHANGE.
GDS design, now lead by @LouiseDowne (who’s a pal, but is probably miffed with me for being a diva and leaving for a bit), are in a unique position of being able to make changes to the way government does digital, not just a department. Remember that first bit about departments? Well, it’s probably worse than you thought. Anyway, GDS, they’re the guardians of digital and they’re the people who decided to make one good brand across government. They’re also the people who decide how we should make digital services…which relates to…
User centred design
GDS brought user centred design, a difficult process to sell in some respects, to an organisation (the gov) who are hardly famous for being approachable and happy to help. Every new digital service made on a gov.uk address is meticulously tested on real users. There’s tonnes of prototyping and usability testing goes on during development, so they’re confident the interaction works, but most importantly there’s up-front user research to help define what the service actually does. Which leads on to…
Service design
Service design isn’t just UX design rebranded, it’s more. It’s not just about user interfaces and interactions, it’s about finding out what users need and catering for it from start to finish, beyond the pages of the digital element. It’s happening government-wide, and designers all over the place are ruffling feathers when they try and change process and policy, not just buttons and boxes. It’s actually one of the hardest things being a government designer, the constant fight to convince people that your remit is the whole service, not just a bunch of screens. It’s hard graft, but rewarding. Services are designed in phases — Discovery, Alpha, Beta, and Live. Most of the service design work will happen early on, and that will turn in to interaction design whilst making the thing, and service re-design later on. Maybe I should explain…
Service assessments
There’s this list. A sort of commandments type list of “stuff you should do to do it good”. There are 18 “service standards” and when your project goes from phase to phase you’re sort of grilled a bit about whether you’re actually designing a user-centred, usable service, or just an online form based on what somebody told you to do. You know a project is getting it fairly right when they don’t bother preparing much and still ‘pass’. One big plus with Gov’ design is user centred-ness, the other is…
Being open
Open source your code. Design in the open. Share your work. Be honest with people. Basically, the civil service is doing everything the politicians don’t. Whilst I agree with this morally, the tech echelons (not you, devs, I mean the suited ones) can, in my experience, take issue with this. A lot of the Government old-timers have this weird hoarding thing — they crave data (which they then mis-manage) and they love to pretend every system is a matter of national security. The digital community cares less, but that’s another of the perennial challenges of Gov’ digital, overcoming unchanging attitudes from people outside of your team.
Conclusion
Trying to change Government from digital outwards is a massive challenge. The digital people are far more than the name suggests, they’re a small team (relative to the size of the civil service) of people who make out like they are trying to make websites more user centred, but they’re actually fighting to make the government more citizen-centred and empathetic. It started with user-centred website design, it’s become human-centred service design, and one day soon it’ll be citizen-centred policy design. I‘ll probably do a John Terry — wait until the end, go back, get my full kit on and collect the trophy without letting on that I only played for a few minutes of the game.
Here’s a video about what they do. Look out for my potato-like head:
