Improving government services
Step by step
After my frustrations of service design consultancy work — never getting close enough to implementation to do the real design work, I moved to the Government Digital Service in the hope of getting my hands dirty. It’s almost like working in-house, but not quite.
Rather than designing government services, GDS helps government design better services.
When trying to get government to do this, we face 3 major barriers:
Firstly, government is really old. In fact the UK government is one of the oldest in the world, and most of the services it provides were never “designed” but rather emerged out of policy built on policy and archaic systems and processes.
Secondly, there are a lot of people in government (often unwittingly) designing services. From policy to operations, people are responsible for critical aspects of a service, but they are not always working in a joined-up way.
Thirdly, government organisations rarely own a whole end-to-end service, because the user needs we want to frame services around cut across organisational boundaries. Take starting a business as an example — to reach that end goal users may have to interact with up to 12 different government organisations, but these organisations aren’t necessarily working together.
GDS is a bit like a service design agency within government. We sometimes directly help departments redesign services on a case by case basis, but this approach doesn’t scale at the rate we need to fix services. We don’t have an army of service designers to deploy on the 100s of government services that need work. And work doesn’t stop just because a service designer isn’t there to facilitate the process. So how do we scale service design in government? We need to give government the means to make services better, in an ongoing and iterative way that cuts across functions and organisational boundaries.
I’m service design lead for the gov.uk programme at GDS. My work focuses on two main things: how gov.uk improves the experience of using government services for citizens, and what the gov.uk team is providing to government to help them improve those services.
The work I’ve been doing over the last few years has focused on achieving these goals. The very tangible piece of work we’ve done is to introduce a new feature on gov.uk called step by step navigation.
This navigation pattern was developed to help users through end-to-end services on gov.uk. It gathers together and organises all the pages on gov.uk that help users with each task they need to complete to achieve an overarching goal, like learning to drive or visiting the UK.
This makes services easier to understand and use — but improving the user experience of an as-is service is only the first step. The real value is in how the step by step supports government to work better to improve services long term. It’s about changing the way government works.
Step by step helps government to scope services from the user’s perspective. It cuts across what each organisation delivers, and it gives those organisations something tangible to collaborate around.
Through facilitated workshops to build step by steps, gov.uk is helping departments to map out the as-is journey through a service. In some cases, these workshops are the first time the people responsible for different parts of a service have interacted. The mapping process helps them understand the ordering of steps in a user’s journey, where those steps are broken, who owns what in the service and how it connects to other government services.
From these workshops, departments have gone on to improve the content in their services to make it easier for users to understand each task they need to complete. And where the service is too complex to explain in a simple way, they’ve started to address the underlying service design and policy.
As we scope and build more step by steps with organisations we have an emerging list of government services being validated by the cross-government teams who own them. This list will help government by giving them something to orientate around. When doing any improvement work they could ask: What service am I working on? Who are the users and what are they trying to achieve? What step am I working on and how does it join up with the other steps? How does this service connect to others? What other departments do I need to collaborate with?
Gov.uk is where most of government’s services live. It’s the only place where we can aggregate information about services onto a single platform, agnostic of organisational boundaries. We have a unique opportunity to build this list of services with the organisations who deliver them, so it becomes the single source of truth about what services government provides and how they connect.
Step by steps also provide a structure upon which we can aggregate end-to-end service performance data from across the whole service, so it can be used to diagnose sources of failure demand and iterate in an ongoing way. A single data point doesn’t give us the context we need to see what’s going wrong, but through the context of the step by step, we can start telling meaningful stories about how users are experiencing a service and make strategic decisions about how to improve things.
GDS is like a service design agency working on the inside, but through gov.uk we also own one of the main citizen interfaces with government. We’re in a unique position to make end-to-end services better by helping the organisations that provide those services to understand them. Through step by step, we can help government understand, visualise, collaborate on and improve the services it provides.
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Kate Ivey-Williams is the service design lead for GDS’ gov.uk programme. She has worked with dozens of UK government departments to create 42 step by step service navigations.
