3 ideas to shape the government digital vision

Tomorrow I am joining a roundtable to help shape the future vision for UK digital public services.

In the spirit of working in the open, this is the first of 2 blog posts sharing ideas for the digital centre of government. In the next post I’ll expand my thoughts on feedback in digital public service design, which is a question we’ve been asked to respond to at the roundtable. To start with, here are 3 things I believe the digital centre should focus on:

A vision that tells a realistic story of how digital services create better outcomes for people, and solves problems they care about

New technology like AI will change how we design and build services. But at the same time future digital public services are not about the technology — they are about improving outcomes for people. The vision needs to tell that story, and give us a vision of a world worth fighting for that is centred around people not technology.

I want to see a digital vision that responds to real problems people face, like finding a job that fits around childcare, and that shows services asking users — did the service help? Is it working for you? Show that digital services are not only about intent but delivered outcomes.

The technical and social infrastructure that makes transparency easy and cheap to implement in services

For public digital services to improve, they need to show they can be trusted. One key way to do this is through transparency, which is often missing. This isn’t a new idea — many digital governments and private companies are already being more transparent about how data is used or how decisions are made. In fact the tools to make common transparency infrastructure are already here, like design histories for UI changes and verifiable data to check data use.

Transparency should be meaningful to the people who need it. At IF our work shows us that this means using transparency as an input for user experiences, where the interface becomes self revealing. Our research tells us that transparency is most effective when claims are provable, which is only possible with transparency infrastructure that can track changes over time.

Strategies that help teams prepare for the transition to what’s next (because it’s already here)

While it’s easy to get caught up in technology trends or hype, software itself is changing as are user behaviours. Services have always been built around people’s needs, using what technology can do. With new technologies like generative AI, these capabilities have grown fast, as have the risks. I want the digital public centre to guide this new era of software, so technology use aligns with democratic values.

We need strategies and service patterns that help teams respond to, and manage, the big changes that will keep coming. Changes like these:

• The Strategic Intelligence Assessment from Companies House shows how much harder it’s become to verify humans, and how much easier it has become to create accounts programmatically at scale.
• Digital wallets show that services are no longer “end-to-end”, instead they are being componentised into building blocks. For example you can make payments within a WeChat message, or see local forecasts attached to a gig ticket all within your Apple Wallet.

So many great ideas have already been shared from new to old blog posts, prior art, books, you name it. The future for digital public services in the UK is also something that I’ve written about before, with Rachel Coldicutt and Natalie Byrom. And even with all these ideas that have already been shared, there are voices that are missing — I think about that a lot.