Government Digital Service Podcast

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The transcript of the episode follows:

Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. At GDS, we build platforms, products and services that help create a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone. And as part of that work, we maintain GOV.UK, the website for the UK government. GOV.UK is used by millions of people daily. The home page alone is used more than two million times each week. We've been improving how people can navigate the site, taking a user-centred and evidence-based approach. We've previously written about this work on the GDS and Inside GOV.UK blog, and this podcast episode will be your latest instalment in documenting how we launched the new menu bar after an extensive A/B test and how we updated the GOV.UK homepage. It will also take a look at what lies ahead for making GOV.UK as simple as possible for people to use. Joining me to explore this today are Sam Dub and Jenn Phillips-Bacher, who work on GOV.UK in very different disciplines, but part of the same team. Sam, would you mind telling us a little bit about the team and then maybe what you do as part of it?

Sam Dub: We're a team of 14, which in the scheme of GDS and the scheme of government is relatively small. We bring a whole range of different perspectives and expertise to this work that includes designers, developers, content people, researchers, and our job is to make it easier for people to find things on GOV.UK, and my role as a product manager is about making sure we're working on the right problems in the right way. We're getting to the outcomes for users that we want to achieve.

Vanessa Schneider: Sam, thank you for that explanation of the team. Obviously, part of this as well is Jenn. Would you mind introducing yourself and what you do as part of the team to our listeners, please?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: I'm Jenn Phillips-Bacher, and I'm a content strategist on Sam's team. My focus is primarily information architecture and findability. So as a content strategist in the textbook definition of it, it's all about getting the right content to the right people in the right place at the right time. And that's why a content strategist is working on navigation. It's all about improving that mode of getting users to the content that helps them achieve a goal.

Vanessa Schneider: Great, thank you to both of you. While it would be great if we could count on it, but not everyone will have been following the public journey of this work, even though we've blogged about it extensively. So would either of you mind recapping perhaps what's been happening? When did we start changing where users could find our information?

Sam Dub: One of the challenges for GOV.UK is that the amount of content published grows every year. And today it's more than half a million pages, and it might just be one page in that half a million that a user needs. And so in order to find that page, there are, kind of, multiple tactics that they'll use. They might use a search engine, they might use GOV.UK site search, or they might browse through the home page, through a menu bar, through topic pages, to find what they need. And work on that topic system, making sure that users can browse successfully is the focus of our team. There's work going on elsewhere in GOV.UK in partnership with search engines, and there is work planned to improve our own search engine. But the focus for our team right now is browse and how we get that topic system, these menus, the home page, the breadcrumbs, and related links at a content page level, all working nicely together. So users can browse to find the stuff they're looking for. What you've seen go live over the last couple of months are the first kind of public steps of some work that's been happening for around the last year and those public changes have been changed to the GOV.UK home page and a change to the menu bar. So that's the black bar that sits across the top of every content page on GOV.UK. And that's more than half a million pages of the site. And that is GOV.UK's primary navigation. And we've, we put those changes live, we put homepage changes live in December and we put several versions of the new menu bar live in the second half of last year.

Vanessa Schneider: So it's great that you've outlined what changes are taking place, but why was it necessary?

Sam Dub: So the strategy here is about making stuff easy to find, and like, like all good GDS teams, we started with a discovery, and a discovery essentially means validating a hypothesis about a problem. And here it is about understanding what was going on, why people couldn't find things or why people were abandoning journeys on GOV.UK. And in the course of that discovery, we found 3 core problems that users were facing, and they were a confusing information architecture - now this is this is more Jenn's area of expertise and confusing information architecture is not a phrase that a user will come to you and say, "Oh, your information architecture is very confusing". It will be something that you'll notice a user lost within the site and not able to find where they need to be in order to get to the service or the piece of information that they need. So that was problem one. Problem two were issues on smaller devices. So these days, GOV.UK is used most often on mobile, and last year that was, three-quarters of all visits to GOV.UK came from a mobile device, and not all of GOV.UK's pages are optimised for mobile devices. And so that presented navigational problems, and there's a real opportunity there to move from an approach that kind of worked on mobile but wasn't ideal to something that really feels like it's designed for mobile devices, which is where most users are. And the third problem we looked at was an issue of overwhelm. So a lot of users to GOV.UK feel like it's just a lot of stuff. It's the most common phrase that we hear, the most common sentiment in user research will be, "This is a lot. This is too much. I'm not, I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for here". And so in a lot of the design work we've been doing, we've been looking at how to get back to the core principles of GOV.UK that are about a simple, clear experience to make it easy to find things.

Vanessa Schneider: Sam mentioned that as a content strategist, you, Jenn, might have some experience with how to resolve confusing information architecture or sort of what kind of problems that can cause. Would you like to maybe speak to that, Jenn?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: Sure. So information architecture is one of those phrases that you'll get a different definition of it, depending on who you talk to and what their experience is. So I think in my work within GDS, I'm thinking about information architecture as being the bone structure of the website. A good information architecture isn't really something that you point to or see. It's something that is that scaffolding that supports the entire information space so that people can find what they need. And, and it all kind of depends on the raw materials that you have. So what kind of content you have, what kind of data and metadata that you have about that content, whether you've got images, video and so on. So I always think about the UX and information architect Louis Rosenfeld. He talks about there being three tracks of information architecture, and this is where it fits in with GOV.UK. He talks about top-down navigation. So that's the things like the global menu and the user interface components you might see on a home page. And what that does is it kind of anticipates an interest or a question that a user might have when they arrive. The second thing is bottom-up navigation, so that stuff, like bread crumbs or related content links or 'you might also like'-type suggestions or any kind of contextual navigation with content - that might mean like titles and page headings, or even links embedded inside of blocks of text. And then the third thing is, is the big one, and that's search. So that's really for handling those really specific information needs. So the information architecture is kind of this interplay between top-down, bottom-up, and search. And it's that whole, that holistic information architecture that we're starting to make some significant improvements on GOV.UK.

Vanessa Schneider: Makes sense that we want to take care of this. So, yeah, menus and topic pages, they must play a big role in the user experience from what you've just shared. But making changes to how users interact with them, that would have made a bit of a difference out of the blue, no? How do you test this effectively without maybe negatively affecting users because it must be a bit challenging in a live environment?

Sam Dub: So that's a really great question, and I think something that we're quite careful about. We know that for people finding, finding what they need it is a kind of critical task and GOV.UK is part of a whole bunch of essential processes in people's lives. And whilst we want to make stuff easier, there would be significant consequences to making stuff worse. And so we start with quite an extensive process of research before we make any change on the live site. We'll develop prototypes and then introduce those to users in a kind of test scenario in usability research. And a lot of, a lot of ideas often don't make it past that stage. You your your expectations about what will work, they kind of improve over time. But still, there's a pretty high ratio of stuff that when it meets contact with a, with a user, you'll suddenly discover unexpected problems with it. And so we try and catch that stuff early. And then when we do introduce changes to the live site, we want to use a kind of experimental method. We want to make sure that the change doesn't look simpler, but it actually works better. And that's where we'll use a technique called A/B testing or multivariate testing. And what that essentially means is comparing the performance of two different designs. We do that by users opting in to measurement on GOV.UK. When you accept cookies on GOV.UK, you have the option to accept measurement. And what that means is that at scale we can see how the site is being used. When we introduce a new design, we can compare how the new design is being used versus how the old design is being used. What that then allows us to do is look at certain key metrics and, for example, a new menu bar, we would want to see that a new menu bar is being clicked on, and that would be one very simple metric to see whether it was being recognised as a menu and whether it was being used. We would want more sophisticated stuff than just being clicked on. We would want to see a good user journey across the site, so users opening the menu bar, selecting an option and then successfully navigating down to a piece of information or a service. And we can look at those patterns of journeys across the new design and the old design and see which is more successful with users. So this process removes the, the choice out of this process, the, the bias out of the process, we just see what works for users. That's what we go with.

Vanessa Schneider: I was wondering, were there any adjustments to what you were testing with users based on how they were responding to your A/B testing?

Sam Dub: The way we will work on a design for an element as important as a site wide menu bar: very rarely will it be once and done, so it'll be a process of continuous iteration where we're looking at data. And sometimes the changes are significant and sometimes they're smaller. But there are quite significant differences from the first version of the menu bar we put live, changes to the content, changes to the interactions. And I would imagine it's continuing to refine that over the next few months. What tends to happen is that at the beginning, the changes are quite major. And then over time, you move into a process of polishing the design and you're making smaller and smaller changes and smaller optimisations. And we're getting that with the menu bar, I'd say we're at a point where there might be a couple of little content tweaks we want to try, but we're pretty much there we think.

Vanessa Schneider: Jenn, how does your insight as a content strategist feed into the menu bar?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: What I'm thinking about is the understandability of the system as a whole, so can people understand the information that is being presented to them? One thing we look at is understandability of labels. And one of the ways that we can do that is a quantitative piece of research method called tree testing. And what that effectively does is allows us to look at a user's click journey through a hierarchical structure. So our, our existing topic system as an example is hierarchical, you use it to narrow down to a set of more granular categories. So we can use tree testing to understand whether the entry points are understandable for people. Are they going down the right path to begin with? Did they get lost once they're inside of that structure? And in that way we can identify where, where people are getting lost, where we might need to make changes to the language that we're using and where we need further qualitative investigation because we can't, we can't know everything from the quantitative. Often tree testing opens up a whole new set of questions that we actually want to ask humans face-to-face. So it's good fodder for ongoing research, which again feeds into the iterative development of things like the menu bar and the topic system. So it isn't, it isn't right until we know that users can find what they need where they expect to find it.

Vanessa Schneider: And does the tree testing run in the background of the A/B testing or is it something that needs to be set up separately?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: Tree testing is set up separately from A/B testing, and the way that we are doing it at the moment is through a banner across certain sections of the website. So when we have a tree test that's live, you're likely to see it within the topic structure or other pages within the website.

Vanessa Schneider: Great, so that sounds like a really non-invasive way for you to get data on how people are progressing through their journeys without them needing to reveal anything about their personal details. And obviously, as big proponents to agile, it makes sense that we're having a very iterative approach. I was wondering if that was transferable to other parts of our mission to improve navigation because we've talked extensively now about the menu bar, but obviously, that's not been the only area of activity.

Sam Dub: So another area where we're making these kind of evidence-based changes is to the design of core components of the website. And one place where you can see a change that we're really proud of is on the GOV.UK home page, where you see all the topics listed out, the area of the site that you as a user need to click on is now substantially larger. And you might think, 'Well, it's a small change, and it's just, maybe, a design tweak to make the page feel more, kind of, better spaced out'. The change is much more significant than that and actually comes from a different set of user needs. This is about using the website with touch. So users, particularly on smaller devices, I'm sure we've all had the experience of, like, struggling to tap on a link on certain websites. We've all had that experience, maybe where we clicked on the wrong thing, because when you're trying to tap on a link, it's difficult to tap on the right one. Those problems are magnified if you are on a smaller device or maybe have a tremor or a motor impairment. And that, that can be the difference between being able to successfully complete a task on mobile and basically having to abandon and either use a different device or ask someone else to do it for you. So it's quite an important change for us across the site to make these targets so that you have to tap on or click on in order to navigate through the site significantly larger. And we feel that is a good thing for everybody. It should make the website easier and quicker to use on mobile and more accessible in the process. So accessibility, mobile usability, are core principles of the pages, including the home page that we're going to be redesigning as part of this process.

Vanessa Schneider: Sounds like we're on a roll. This kind of work, we've mentioned it before, is never done. So what is next on the agenda for us?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: So a key part of simplifying our information architecture is working toward improving our topic system, making sense of what we call topic browse. So in GDS lingo, we often talk about mainstream browse, and that's what you see on the home page at the moment. And it's the topic-based part of GOV.UK that includes the top categories you might use to browse to content like 'passports, travel and living abroad', or 'working, jobs and pensions'. So they're quite broad categories that contain all of the content that supports top tasks, so the things that most users are going to want or need to do. For example, like applying for a passport or checking your state pension age, so very task-oriented. But in parallel with that, we have something that we often call specialist topics or specialist sectors. And they're similar, similar to mainstream browse in a way, but it doesn't have a predictable home in the same way that mainstream browse does. So that means that users, who are looking for more in-depth information relating to their business or industry or they're working in some kind of advisory or professional capacity, can't navigate to that content without using search. And what's interesting about these two systems is that they kind of do some of the same things, they're hierarchical and there's an element of curation. So content designers or publishers are deciding which of the content in those topic areas is most important and should be prioritised for individual user needs. So what we're looking at doing at the moment is consolidating these two topic structures into a single browse layer for GOV.UK. So that will allow people to get to a broader range of content, and it will do a better job at reflecting the full breadth of content published on GOV.UK. We currently have about 650,000 content items, or pages, which is huge. It is huge [laughs]. And we're only really surfacing a small fraction of that within mainstream browse.

Sam Dub: What we're working on over the next couple of quarters is to combine these two topic systems into a single definitive browse system that will allow users to find anything that they need on GOV.UK. And that's a real design challenge because what we don't want to do is overwhelm users. What we want to do is make sure there's a route to everything the people need without it feeling like there is this huge volume of content for them to wade through. And so we're working very hard on design patterns, using some of the latest thinking within GOV.UK Design System, like accordions, like the grid patterns that you have seen on the new home page. And we're working to make sure that there are simple routes to information and services. But there are also the people who need it, ways they can dig a bit deeper and they can get to the specialist content as they need it.

Vanessa Schneider: So if users have become interested in the work that you're doing, is there any way for them to engage with it? And I mean users, whether they are the end-user, as in a citizen that is going through the process of navigating a journey, or even teams that are running services in government that might be more of a middle person, and they want to improve how their content appears to users. What can they do to get in touch with you and how can they help?

Sam Dub: So if you're a user of GOV.UK and you're inside government, if you're a civil servant, you can get involved and and talk to us through the cross-government content community, so there's a cross-government Basecamp that you can join and we'll be doing any call-outs for participation and collaboration across government using that channel. And if you're not a content designer, you can talk to your nearest friendly content designer within your department or the managing editor. Each department and agency, I believe, has a managing editor. And they're a great, kind of, point of contact between you and GDS and our work. You can also keep up to date on Inside GOV.UK. We're doing our best to work in the open on this and blogging about forthcoming changes through there. And if you're a user, and you are listening to the GDS podcast, you, the blog should be a really good sense of what's what's coming up. But we hope also, for you. That this is a pretty seamless experience, that we don't expect these changes to disrupt anybody. They will be iterative over the coming year and gradual. And because of the evidence-based way that we're working in terms of the user experience, it should be one of iterative improvement because we realised that for so many people, GOV.UK is critical to their jobs, to their livelihoods. And we're careful about how we're iterating. We want to make consistent progress, but we don't want to disrupt everybody in the process.

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: Over the last quarter, we've been collaborating with content teams from HMRC and DWP to test some of our assumptions. And those have been really fruitful and helpful discussions because it's demonstrated to us some of the areas where government publishers might have a slightly different perspective to GDS in terms of how people are navigating the site. And we've learnt a lot about users who use HMRC and DWP services. We're also aware that some departments with active user research communities are also doing tree testing, and that's somewhere where we could really learn from each other. Understanding the mental models of users who use content that is being produced by each of these departments. And over the coming months, we will also be reaching out to departments and agencies via managing editors to review the specialist topics or specialist sector pages that you have on GOV.UK. And we will support those teams with making any changes that are necessary in order to get them to fit into the new topic system. If you're currently working in government and working on things like topic systems or tree testing of your own content, get in touch. We'd love to hear what you're working on and what you're learning.

If you're a person who works in content or works with content, whether you're a content designer, UX writer, content strategist, information architect, content architect: GDS is a great place to work and develop your career and we're building up our content strategy practice a bit more. So even if you don't see a job title that looks quite right, please have a look at the job description and think about transferable skills. Our content strategy team is made of people who've worked in fintech, libraries, social media, journalism. So even if you think you don't fit the title, do have a look at the job description.

Vanessa Schneider: So it doesn't get more straightforward in terms of calls to action than what you've both shared with us. We'll have the contact details on Jenn's research with other departments in the blog post, and you can subscribe to the Inside GOV.UK blog by visiting [insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk] and on the right side bar, you can find options to subscribe to the blog. And if you're more in the mood for listening, you can find all episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all other major podcast platforms, while the transcripts are available on Podbean, goodbye.

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: Goodbye.

Sam Dub: Goodbye.

Why build a product people won't or can't use? Our user researchers share their approach to understanding needs for government’s single sign-on.

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The transcript of the episode follows:

Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. In August, we recorded an episode on digital identity and single sign-on as part of our plans to develop one inclusive and accessible way for people to log in to all government services online. You heard from Will and Helena from GDS, as well as Tom from Veterans UK, who shared how we worked with other parts of government to shape this work. Since then, we passed the digital identity service assessment, integrated our authentication component with the first service, and completed research with more than 800 end users. And it's that research that we want to talk about today. Joining me in this are Lauren Gorton and Charlotte Crossland, both user researchers at GDS in the Digital Identity Programme. Lauren, could you please kick us off by introducing yourself and what you do?

Lauren Gorton: So I'm Lauren. I'm a user researcher on the digital identity programme in GDS, and specifically I work in the authentication team. We look at the credentials that people use as part of the single sign-on. And the first steps of our journey went live in October. So specifically, I focus on the end user aspect of that and focus on the citizen side.

Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic, thanks. Charlotte, could you please introduce yourself and what you do as well?

Charlotte Crossland: Absolutely. Hi, everyone. I'm Charlotte, I'm a user researcher on the digital identity programme, working in the design for adoption team. We've been doing a lot of research with service teams across government. We're building an authentication onboarding journey, as well as looking at identity materials that teams can use to make decisions.

Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic, thank you so much, both. So, not everyone will have listened to the previous podcast episode or read the blog posts that we've written about this work. Would one of you mind explaining a bit more about One Login for Government?

Lauren Gorton: Yes, so One Login for Government is one of the government's major projects at the moment. On GOV.UK there, there are several different sign-ins at the moment, and many different routes users could take. So what we're trying to do is streamline that down, so that in the future, there'll just be one single sign-on for GOV.UK to help improve the journeys for users and reduce confusion for people. That then opens the door to do lots of other cool things in the account space, so that people aren't having to repeat themselves too often in different services, and it helps government to basically join up a bit better.

Vanessa Schneider: Great stuff. I can see the importance in that [laughs]. Obviously, this is a loaded question to ask, given both your roles as user researchers. But I was wondering why is user research so integral to that?

Lauren Gorton: So there's no point in building something if people won't or can't use it. And the only way we know if we're on the right track is if we actually speak to the people who are the intended users. That's probably important for any organisation or business, but it's especially important in the context of government, given how important government services are if people can't access them, that can have a huge impact on people's lives. So we can't really afford to build something which people either can't use or won't use. [For] the citizen side of the research, our approach is to gather insights at all stages of the projects and from as representative a sample of people as possible. One thing is that we're not reinventing the wheel. There have been other government projects that have come before us who've done work on sign-on services. So there's a lot of existing research and insights that we can sort of learn from as a first step. So we, we initially did some very extensive desk research, including research artefacts from Verify, Government Gateway, recent COVID[-19, coronavirus] projects, and, you know, getting lessons learnt from peers in the NHS, who are working on the NHS login at the moment as well. So it's kind of given us a running start, really, to see what worked well before us and what didn't work so well. And we then built on top of that with our own research. So for a variety of different techniques, things like doing interviews with people and conducting surveys, testing our journeys as we develop them and iterating them. And since May, despite the impacts of COVID and issues that we had with research - we obviously haven't been able to go out and actually talk to people face-to-face, we've had to adjust how we work and do everything remotely - but despite that, yeah, we've managed to speak to over 800 end users, as you mentioned, since May. On top of that, it is really important to call out that once something's live, it's not live and then done, so now that we're live with the first steps of authentication, we've also got thousands of users who are now going through the live service and we're getting insights from those people as well. So relying a lot on our feedback form and also the analytics that runs for our service to better understand, "OK, so these are real people, using it in a real-life scenario: how is it working for them, and working, we keep improving it." So it's kind of that balance of we're doing a lot of the research with people to help prep them, optimise before we go live. And then as it's live, we're still monitoring it and trying to improve.

Vanessa Schneider: Well, there's a lot of work going into it, I can see, and it's really heartening to hear that you're taking on the lessons from the past. And actually, that probably relates to the work that we're doing with other departments because they have existing identity solutions, don't they, Charlotte?

Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, absolutely. So our approach from gathering insights from service teams in government has been a bit different from doing research with end users - it's a bit of a different dynamic. The real key to this is collaboration. So like other government platform products our users are peers working across government. I've been working with a range of roles, from product people to service owners, researchers, designers, developers, even data [analysts], both across central and local government. And it's been really fundamental to tap into, again, the existing work that's there; digital identity is a well-trodden area across government. It's a fundamental, it's been creating a space of trust and being as open as possible with teams and departments. It's important that we take aspects of that into our approach, not only internally within the programme, but taking that approach externally across government. Yeah, if the whole team is supporting and involved in that session, we have the capabilities and materials to produce really rich, UR [user research], building up that trust and developing relationships is far more important because they're the teams that are building and developing the services themselves in their everyday lives.

Vanessa Schneider: Obviously service teams will have also conducted user research for their services with end users. How did that integrate into sort of your knowledge base?

Lauren Gorton: Yes, so that was a part of the desk research that we did, kind of, in Discovery Alpha. We went through hundreds of different documents to, to try and understand that. But, as well, we've also since had sessions with teams so, the basic digital service, so they have a really good component for certain aspects of the authentication journey. So we're trying to make sure, again, we're not reinventing the wheel. So if things have worked for, for their end users, it's going to work for [our] end users as well. So we've been, we've met with them, tried to understand the component, looked at some of the data behind it and have applied that, aspects of that, to our own journeys as well.

Vanessa Schneider: Neat, and obviously, this could be really interesting for folks, depending on how long we're going to be in these unprecedented times or with the future of work being maybe more remote working: How was it conducting user research while maybe not having direct access to people?

Lauren Gorton: Good question. So, yeah, that's, that's been difficult. I think it was definitely for user researchers, just in general. It's hard if, you know, you're not in the room with them. And something that user research just needs well to do is to have, like, a good rapport with the participants. And it can be hard to try and build that up remotely and so, you know, reassure people and calm them down remotely over a video call. So, yeah, there are different frustrations to it, particularly if someone runs into an issue in the middle of a session. We can see the screen and what they're doing. But if they go onto a different device because they want to search something on the mobile phone, we can't see what they're doing and we can't help them, so that's caused challenges as well. So it's been a big challenge for communication, I think. But there are, there are positives to it as well. It's quite nice to have a video call with someone, they dial in, you run the session, if it goes well, and then you can just dial off, that's the session done. You can go, go grab a coffee, [laughs] to then try and absorb what you've just learnt. So yeah, there are nice things to it as well.

Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, definitely echo Lauren's point around that interaction, and no matter who you're researching with, whether it's citizens or service teams. It's really difficult to get that rapport up online compared to in-person, where you can read people's body language, their tone, it's a very different dynamic. And I think what's I've learnt the most about doing research with service teams is that they are our peers and, as we've mentioned before, digital identity is a well-trodden area, and it's about collaboration as much as it is user research with those power dynamics that are often associated with it. I think as well, on the analysis side, so we're really fortunate to have tools that really help bridge those gaps from doing analysis in-person to remote ways. They've yeah, they've been so valuable.

Lauren Gorton: Charlotte's raised a really good point there as well, which I totally missed, but afterwards with our colleagues when we're trying to, like, go through what we've learnt in the session. That's been super hard as well because we're not all just sat around the table together with notes and writing on a whiteboard. So yeah, that's been a real struggle as well.

Vanessa Schneider: I think that a lot of listeners can relate to the difficulties that you face, the challenges that have presented themselves. But it is nice to know that there are some things that have helped or some things that are manageable at least, despite the circumstances. So that's really encouraging. So it's great to see that we've got these partnerships going with other departments. How do these partnerships come about and why is that so important to us?

Charlotte Crossland: Great question. So we're collaborating at multiple levels in government departments, so recently colleagues have kicked off strategic department-level work with the big departments and these will continue to be expanded on. We're also working directly with services at service team-level, as well as clusters of services, to give us a really wide and deep view of requirements. So we've been building on from the robust thinking that– of digital identity that already exists within government. The collaboration has shaped the programme thinking, so the development of the roadmap, the functionality requirements, to prioritise in specific work, such as exploring low levels of confidence, which our team is currently looking at. So, as mentioned before, in the previous Digital Identity podcast, as well as collaborating externally, we need to reflect internally and learn from Verify. So to do this, we're ensuring inclusivity is at the core of what we're doing. We're not using third-party or private sector identity providers to verify users' identity. We're not taking a one-size-fits-all approach. We're designing for the needs of service teams, so doing research with service teams has really sought to address these last two points. I think one of the key collaborations, for example, the one with DfE [Department for Education] has come about through one of our key findings, actually, so this is around cluster services. So end users of cluster services are likely to see the benefits of a reusable set of credentials more readily as they're able to use the same authentication username and password to access them. So we've spotted clusters in well-known departments like HMRC [HM Revenue & Customs] or the Home Office initially, but we've also found clusters in all sorts of places across government. So users of Companies House, [HM] Land Registry, farmers using Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] services, drivers using DVLA [Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency] services, as well as teachers or students using DfE services.

Lauren Gorton: Yes, so with our end user research, we've always been researching around the single sign-on and how that benefits our users. The single sign-on is the solution that we feel best helps to meet other user needs we found in research. But to do so in a way that also meets people's expectations and fits mental models as to how people look at government. So in terms of user needs, like, at its simplest level, our users need to be able to access government services, they come to GOV.UK with a task in mind, and that's kind of what they care about doing [laughs] and all they care about doing. They need to be able to do that without having to understand all the complexities of government and have to try to unpick that. So a user shouldn't have to land on the GOV.UK home page and say, "OK, today I'm trying to do this task. This service owns that task. This service sits in this department and that department uses this sign-in. So I need to go over there and specifically it's these credentials I have to use if I can remember what that-- what those credentials are". So, you know, users shouldn't have to do that. And it's not just the case, you shouldn't have to do it, but it also doesn't fit into how they look at government. So we found in our research, and this is general, because mental models, are general, not everyone thinks this way, but a lot of people, sort of, look at government and they see it as a single entity. We talk about "the" government and, you know, that, that's how people see it. They don't think about all the complexities behind it. And as part of that, we have heard people in research sessions and participants saying, you know, "I expect to just have the one account because I'm dealing with the government. I need a government account to talk to the government". So that's what we've, sort of, had coming out of our research sessions. And whilst we've heard that in research sessions prior to going live, again, since going live, we've also seen some data that also supports this too. So for instance, we have our feedback form, which people using the live service can come to. One of our most common themes in our feedback form is one we call "queries outside of our scope". And that's just basically for anything that's actually to do with a different service. So what we are seeing is a lot of people hitting our journey, going into our feedback forms, and they're leaving this feedback about different services or they're saying, "I can't sign in" and, you know, when we go back to them, we unpick it, it's because they're trying to sign in into, like, a Gateway or a Verify [account], because they want to do something with their tax, for instance, they've, they've come to us in error. So we are seeing in live that this confusion is a problem. It's the same with our analytics as well. We're seeing people coming to our journey, trying to sign in and having to go down those unhappy path routes because they're confused about whether or not they do have an account. And it's one of those things from a user perspective, that so long as there are multiple accounts out there, that confusion will exist to an extent. There's only so much we can do with research and design. So the more services we get onboarded and the more we reduce the number of sign ins, it's kind of the only way to really completely get rid of that confusion for people.

Charlotte Crossland: Definitely, teams that have Sign-in already have seen account confusion from end users, it's a very well-known problem. I think, similarly to Lauren's point around service teams, so authentication and digital identity isn't a straightforward team need. So teams often integrate with identity as part of bigger changes and plans they're going through within their delivery cycle, but related to that. So checking people's identity documents is a really onerous process for service teams and government. It's really costly. Identity checks might not be up to scratch, so ultimately online identity checks could save teams a lot of time and money. It's also important to add to that, the offline routes will always be fundamental, so users and service teams will always need offline routes.

Vanessa Schneider: Yeah, definitely important to stress we're not taking anything away from folks. We're just trying to make it easier. We're trying to make it, one, single safe, reliable, fast and effective way for everyone to log in to government services online. That's the mission. So earlier you mentioned trust, and then you also talked about how our new solution isn't going to use third-party providers to verify people's identities. Is that linked?

Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, so on the identity side, our research has been really addressing exploring service team mental models around digital identity. So really digging into how teams feel and talk about identity, understanding the types of language that they use. Equally, we've been understanding how services decide on the level of confidence of an identity check. So who's involved in that decision-making process? What are the roles and teams in the department that are integral to this? And I think there's a really interesting design challenge of how we can effectively communicate how teams go about choosing an appropriate level of confidence that maps back to GPG 45, or the Good Practice Guide. There's a lot of evidence that shows GPG 45 doesn't equip teams to understand what identity profile or level of confidence is most appropriate. The guidance doesn't explain how this choice will affect a services' end user journey. That wasn't the aim of the guidance, but equally, the level of confidence the service chooses should be informed by the service's risk appetite.

Vanessa Schneider: You did talk about your research reveals there are clusters, for instance, in different departments. Are we working with all of them? If not, why should departments be working with us?

Charlotte Crossland: So it's really that sharing of knowledge and insights and that collaboration that can make digital identity a possibility in government, so teams, practical things that teams can expect from the partnership is like access to the technical documentation that we've been testing, so they've really got to shape what that looks like, they've been able to play around with it. How does that work in their integration environment? It's been really insightful for both parties involved.

Vanessa Schneider: Well, in that case, I really hope more teams will register their interest in the private beta. As after all, as you said, you know, earlier adopters will reap greater rewards in the situation, really shaping what gets done. So Lauren, I know on your side specifically, there was quite an innovative approach with respect to how we use user insight to provide a full picture of the complexities of user lives. Can you explain a little bit more about what that involved?

Lauren Gorton: So that was from our Alpha assessment. So, so during Alpha, rather than using personas, which are the traditional way to basically group your users, we used mindsets instead. So the difference really is that, whilst both tools are used to group your users, you can't focus, unfortunately, on everyone individually, we need a way to, to group our users so that we can see the different types of people using the service, and we can include those in the design process and refer back to it. Personas do that by quite heavily focussing on demographics. So you might create personas where you're having different age ranges from your users represented, represented, different ethnicities, gender - even things like do they have an access need? And then what you do on top of that is say, "OK, so what goals will these different types of users have when they're trying to use a product or service?" So that's how personas work with that very heavy demographic influence. Mindsets are different in that we don't think about demographics at all. Instead, we're trying to group our users based on shared behaviours and attitudes in a, in a particular situation. So mindsets focus much more on the different ways people might behave and the reasons which are driving those behaviours. So sometimes personas are the right tool to use, but there is a risk of things like stereotyping and subconscious bias. And to be honest, just in our, in our context, because our users are everyone in the UK plus international people it is kind of hard to use personas because we'd have to make tens of personas to try and represent that, which just wouldn't be manageable or usable. So we needed a different tool to approach grouping our users to make sure we were designing for everyone. And mindsets kind of naturally [laughs] for researchers are a way to do it. So specifically, we developed our mindsets during Alpha whilst we're doing initial prototype testing. We kept hitting this, the same problem in our journey, that at the point in our journey where we needed users to either create an account or sign in, we were seeing a lot of people choosing to sign in, which was just a bit odd because this was before we'd gone live. So obviously GOV.UK Account was a new account. In theory everyone should be choosing to create an account at that point. And when we spoke to people in the sessions to understand what was happening, what we realised was they were getting confused. They had existing government accounts like a Gateway account or a Verify account, and they were trying to use the credentials from those accounts to, to sign in at that point. They weren't understanding that this was a different type of account and many of the people and different teams in the project looking at different areas of single sign-on, they were seeing the same results as well. So we kind of knew it was a common issue. Naturally we tried to test lots of different variations of the journey to try and resolve that confusion. But the more we were looking at it, the more we could see, there were these, sort of, 5 common groups of participants that we could see coming out of it, and those were the groups that ended up becoming our mindsets. So these mindsets were basically focussing on how much previous experience these participants have of using government services and having government accounts - how confused would they then get at this point in our journey? And really importantly, how were they feeling about that and how were they reacting, what were they saying? So, for instance, participants with very little experience of government services, who didn't have previous accounts, they showed absolutely no confusion at this point in our journey, and their attitude was very much, "OK, fine. If this makes sense, what do I do next?" So those were our clean-slate mindsets, because effectively, that's, that's what that group of users were. But then on the other end of that spectrum, we have participants who, you know, they did have an existing account, like a Gateway account, as an example, and they used it quite frequently. And when they hit this point in our journey, they were getting really confused about what to do. They're trying to sign in, and they weren't understanding our error handling about why they didn't have an account and they were reacting really negatively to it. And there were different reasons why they were reacting negatively. But they kind of all revolve around the issue of single sign-on and the fact that we have multiple sign-ins and accounts that exist today. So for some participants it was the case of, they had a Gateway and it was the only account they'd ever needed because they'd only ever done stuff relevant for Gateway. So they thought that was a single sign-on, and they thought it was a single sign-on because they had the expectation they should only need one account when interacting with government. And for other participants, it was more the case of, they were just frustrated because they'd need to create another account. That's another set of credentials to remember. And they also need to remember where to use those credentials. So, yeah, we found these different groups coming out and ended up with five mindsets overall, which we were then using to input into our design process.

Vanessa Schneider: So you mentioned the Alpha assessment. Can you share a little bit about the feedback that you received?

Lauren Gorton: Yeah, so, so within our Alpha assessment. So we had another user researcher, one from Department for Education, who was our assessor for the user research aspect. So. They were very happy with the mindsets approach. They thought it was a good way to look at user needs and to try and understand our users. So we actually followed that up with a session where we kind of explained mindsets and they did another cross-session where we broke down user needs in a better way. So it was kind of turned into a cross-learning opportunity so that, that was, that was quite nice to do.

Vanessa Schneider: Great, thank you for giving us this overview of mindsets. I was wondering how it might be relevant. How does it strengthen the understanding of complex user needs, maybe beyond single sign-on?

Lauren Gorton: Yeah, definitely. So mindsets they're, they're not unique to single sign-on, they're a really nice tool to use if you want to group users in a different way to personas. So how mindsets were most helpful for us, is, you know, we had a problem that we were trying to understand better why this problem was happening, why people were behaving that way and the reasons driving it. So with our mindsets, they were really useful in designing error scenarios in particular. So we knew, “OK, we've got these groups of users. And at this point in our journey, this group in particular is going to struggle. And the reasons why they're struggling is this. So do we need to put content here to help? Do we need to change the design pattern? If we do that, is that going to impact a different group of mindset?” So it gave us that kind of better picture of how to design with our users in mind and also really help with our user needs as well. So we already had our list of user needs that we had insight on, so we could sort of look at those user needs and say, "OK, do any of these apply more strongly to different mindsets? Therefore, do we need to think about those needs more so when designing for this particular group" and in reverse, we could also say, "OK, now we have these mindsets and we're understanding a bit better why people are behaving the way they are. Can we now see new user needs that we missed before?" So yeah, it's a really nice tool to use that is a general tool. So it goes beyond single sign-on and is really a good way for other government teams to, to better understand the way people will behave and the reasons why.

Vanessa Schneider: You've done user research with citizens now, you've done user research with other departments. How does it feed into the development of the programme?

Lauren Gorton: Yes, so one of our next deliverables in the authentication team will be around account recovery journeys. To create a GOV.UK account, you need to link it to a mobile phone number so that you can authenticate with SMS codes. So when we went live with our MVP [minimum viable product] in October, we knew that account recovery was missing, as a gap for anyone who then loses access for their mobile phone. So it was kind of on our radar as being something that we, we knew we need to-- needed to address at some point after October. Since going live, we have our feedback form, which is one of the best ways for research to really feed into that sort of roadmap and what to work on next. And yeah, in our feedback form we're getting the feedback from people that they are hitting this issue. So that was something that was already planned to do because we'd identified it as a design gap. But the feedback form is helping us to say yes, no, this is definitely a right priority to pursue because people are experiencing that in live. And similarly, also on the themes of mobile codes: again, the feedback form data is also now telling us that the codes are an issue for anyone who lives in a poor signal area and people with international phone numbers, so that's helped us to identify, "OK, actually this is, this is also our next priority the team needs to pick up". So, yeah, we've done some extensive desk research on an alternative to mobile codes, including looking at the whole cyber aspect and security. And we're now doing the design work to introduce an alternative to SMS codes that we can add in as an option for anyone who's either struggling as, as they've told us in our feedback form or who just, they would prefer to use an alternate option.

Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, so I guess our work feeds into both the authentication and the identity product, so our work stream is really committed to delivering and inviting service teams into that auth[entication] onboarding journey. So we're now accepting private beta partner requests for service teams and central government. We'll also be doing groundwork around how to add an account to that onboarding journey, and we'll be looking to publish the technical documentation live on the product page. We're also feeding into the identity stream of the programme as the identity onboarding journey will follow in the third quarter of 2022. So we're really doing that groundwork of developing materials to help teams make decisions around identity strengths, around levels of confidence. And this will ultimately play a central part to that identity onboarding journey. And I think it's not just a one-way approach, so we've been working with identity experts within the programme as well to create an identity tool which uses questions and answers to help teams understand what identity strength could be appropriate for their service. So that's helping us really to bridge that gap between the guidance that is already out there and helping teams make decisions and initial feedback from research has been really fascinating. So by translating some of the logic that GPG 45 sits on, we've been using that and turning it into a really more interactive and accessible format for teams. And we're seeing teams really play around with the tool, and it's really empowering them to consider what solution might be most appropriate for their service. And we're also seeing how these materials could help teams navigate conversations with security or risk teams within that department.

Vanessa Schneider: Brilliant, so you had mentioned the registration for the private beta. How exactly do folks get involved? What are the steps they've got to go through?

Charlotte Crossland: So the easiest way to get involved is to go to sign-in.service.gov.uk. You'll see the GOV.UK Sign-in product page and there'll be a section there saying "Register your interest". So whether you're interested in log-in and authentication or identity, you go to that form and fill it out and then we'll be in touch. And then from there, we'll do a half-hour chat to understand your service at a high level and you'll be then in our pipeline, where you'll be triaged to the relevant next steps.

Vanessa Schneider: So if you're part of a service team in government and if all of this has piqued your interest, get in touch. And if you want to go back to the previous episodes on digital identity and other topics, you can listen to all episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms and the transcripts are available on Podbean. Goodbye.

Lauren Gorton: Bye.

Charlotte Crossland: Bye.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) talks how to start a career in tech. According to a Tech Nation Talent report, young people could be wrongly counting themselves out of a fulfilling career because they’re worried about things like their skills background, where they came from or their lack of “network”.

We asked 3 of our developers to respond to the report’s findings, and hopefully put some of those myths and misconceptions to bed.

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The transcript of the episode follows:

Louise Harris:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast, and our last episode of 2021. Today, we’re going to be talking about careers in tech. Now chances are, if you’re a regular listener, you’re probably already working in a digital, data or technology role. Maybe in government. Maybe in the public sector. Maybe somewhere else entirely. 

But hopefully you’re aware of, and are sort of bought into, the long-term career opportunities, flexibility, creativity and satisfaction that a job in tech can bring. But unfortunately, according to a Tech Nation Talent report - that’s not the case for everyone. They surveyed a thousand 15 to 21-year-olds and tuned into almost 80,000 Reddit conversations to understand what young people in the UK thought about a career in tech.

In that research, 32% of men and 45% of women worried they didn’t have the right skills to pursue a tech career. And 24% of women and 21% of men said that tech careers weren’t for - and I quote - “people like them”. People in the UK feel that there are barriers standing in the way of them getting into tech. And they’re potentially counting themselves out of a great career as a result. Which is bad news for them, and bad news for all of us too.

Because diverse teams are better. Teams that reflect the society they serve are more effective. And teams where you can bring your whole self to work are - frankly - happier teams to be a part of. And that’s what we’re trying to build here at the Government Digital Service.

So we decided to dedicate this episode to anyone who is thinking about starting a career in tech - whether they’re 22 or 62 - but who’s maybe been put off by a little voice (or a loud one) telling them they shouldn’t or can’t. 

Joining us now are senior developers Rosa Fox, Iqbal Ahmed and Kelvin Gan. They’re going to reflect on what the research found and hopefully, put some of those fears to bed. So Kelvin, Iqbal, Rosa - over to you.

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Hi to everyone I'm Iqbal and I'm a senior frontend developer at GDS, which is at the Government Digital Service and joining me today, we have Kelvin and Rosa, who are both senior developers as well. We're here today to chat about some common misconceptions about pursuing a career in tech. I've just been handed a list of things that people, particularly younger people, seem to think about tech careers, and I'm excited to find out what the three of us think about these sort of myths or preconceptions that people have. 

So the first one we have is “I don't have the skills to work in technology”. So Rosa, what do you think about this common preconception?

Rosa Fox: 

Well, firstly, I think that there are many different jobs underneath the umbrella of technology. So it's not just coding skills. So at GDS, we have jobs such as being a developer, where you do do coding. But we also have designers, project managers, delivery managers, performance analysts, content designers. So, those jobs all require lots of different skills, and you probably already have a lot of those skills. So it could be things like breaking down problems, communicating, being creative, helping other people. And so I'd say you probably already have a lot of the skills. And if you feel like there are some skills that you don't have yet - yet being the keyword - then there's always options to learn. 

What do you think Kelvin? 

Kelvin Gan: 

Totally 100%, I agree with that. I think as well the main thing with a lot of people is that learning on the job as well is a big thing for us, like we have apprenticeship schemes, so you can join us as an apprentice. We put you through a bootcamp as well. So Makers Academy is a London-based bootcamp. And you spend, I can't remember how many weeks, 12 weeks or something like that with them and you get taught on the job and you’re mentored by us as well. We've got a mentorship scheme within. 

You’re not expected to know everything on day one. I mean, even I as a senior developer, like I've ok doing this for over a decade and every day I'm learning something new, like it's totally OK to turn up and go like, I need help. I need to learn this. And I also know people who switch careers later on in life, so they want to learn coding. They just do it, you know, you can teach yourself as well. A lot of people we've been working with have taught themselves. Yeah, I don't think you need to worry too much about it.

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I'd say probably one of the big things I would say is like, just try different things out and just see what you enjoy. And I think like, you know, if you do enjoy it, then just get stuck in and just try and learn what you can then. Definitely, as Kelvin was saying, yeah, once that you get into the job and you get stuck in and you kind of get a real feel for it and just the learning, you’ll just learn really quickly, just pick things up really quickly. So, yeah, thank you for that. 

So onto the next one. A common myth is “I don't know anything about tech. I’ll never be able to get a job”. So Kelvin, what do you think about that?

Kelvin Gan: 

I-I don't think people nowadays really know nothing about tech because we're using tech every day quite honestly, like you've got a phone; you’re using tech you're on, I don't know, whatever social media of the day is, whether it's TikTok or something else. You know you are interfacing. Sorry, interfacing is such an icky word [laughs]. But anyway. [laughs]. You are using tech every day. You just don't really know it. And if you are in- if you enjoy using tech, that actually is the spark. That's the beginnings of it, you know. And more than anything, it's really about curiosity, like you’re using tech and you kind of thinking: ‘how does this work?’ But the other side of it is: ‘how do people use tech?’ ‘How do people benefit from using tech?. And actually that’s like product thinking, for example, like, how can we–or design thinking you know; how can we deliver services to people that are useful? Will make things better for their lives? That kind of stuff, it’s not just about learning the ins and outs of the technical aspects of how things work. 

What do you think Rosa?

Rosa Fox:

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think yeah, you mentioned like phones and social media and technology. And technology just powers so many things; like the way that we consume music and videos, banking, gaming medicine, the energy industry. I read the other day that apparently there's a 100 million lines of code in a new car. So there's probably so many ways that you're using tech without even realising it. So I think whatever your interest is, there's probably a way that it intersects with technology somehow. So that could be quite a fun way to get started.

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think I've worked with colleagues that have done, had a degree in fine art. Someone else had a degree in history. You just get like so many people just coming into so many ways to get in. And the team was saying earlier, like apprenticeships and we’ve got these Fast Stream sort of opportunities as well. There is loads and lots of ways to get in there. So yeah, yeah, yeah, tech is everywhere. 

So, yeah, so next one we have is that we have to do lots of unpaid internships or work experience in order to get tech jobs. So what do you think about that, Rosa? 

Rosa Fox:

Well firstly I think you should never have to do unpaid work, and I think it's, you know, it doesn't create a very good balance in society for people to have to do unpaid jobs because obviously you need a certain safety net to be able to do that in the first place. So if that's not an option for you, then I'd say, don't let that stop you and don't give up. You know, you might be able to find apprenticeships or junior positions or ways that you can learn on the job. I'd also say there's a lot of things that you can do to kind of teach yourself - you could go to maybe technology events. There are lots of free meet-ups that you could go to. There's loads of resources online that you can learn from. 

And also kind of maybe looking for someone that can give you a bit more advice about tech careers, even like messaging people on LinkedIn or social media and asking them some questions because often people are quite you know, flattered to answer questions about themselves, and about working in tech. So you know, they might know of some openings for you know, for ways that you can learn skills, hopefully whilst you're still getting paid as well. 

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Kelvin, what do you think?

Kelvin Gan: 

Yeah, I totally agree about not doing, not even having, hosting unpaid internships because that's just exclusionary, and it's not really what we're about here at GDS. But again, you know, hammering home the thing about apprenticeships, they’re a perfect way of getting started, and we're really behind it at the moment. We've got new apprentices starting just early next week, in fact. And I know a bunch of them from years gone past have gone on to graduate into junior roles and have also been promoted into mid-level roles. And they're just great and they really enjoy it as well. And then others have gone on to work somewhere else you know. We put that investment in because we want to put back into society as well as, you know, getting good people through the door to come and work with us. 

And again yeah, like Rosa was saying, there’s loads of meet-ups. A load of people will turn up and also coach you, Rosa and I have done that in the past as well. I think Rosa you're still doing that right? I haven't been doing it as much during the pandemic, but yeah, go along to, like loads of free resources, online meet-ups. Great thing about the meet-ups is that you get to meet people who are in the profession and so you can ask them questions straight off, like face to face or online. They also host like, I was going to say Slack channels for people to ask questions. And I also saw a meme today, a tweet today where someone’s son asked them when they saw them using Slack: “oh what’s that? Is that Discord for boomers?”. And that really hurt [laughs]. So in case you don’t know what Slack is. It's kind of like Discord.

Rosa Fox: 

I will add as well as going to community things, a thing that can maybe help you with finding work is to build a portfolio up. So, you know, a portfolio sounds quite a fancy word, but it could be like, you know, a short blog post or building small projects. They don't have to be anything complicated, just any small thing that you can learn, even doing a tutorial. If you put that up online and show people that you're actively interested in learning then people will probably be interested in giving you feedback and maybe even a job.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. Like, GitHub is really good; a good place to post code and things like that. And if you show like an active GitHub profile; so you know, even just any tutorials or things like that, it’s a really good place to kind of put those up there and just show your kind of keenness and passion for coding and learning and things like that. So. Cool. Yeah, thanks for that. 

And the next one we have is that: “it's not for people like me”. So like the tech career or something, might not be for you know, certain people. So Kelvin, what do you think about that?

Kelvin Gan: 

I would 100% disagree with that. I think the, for us, the key thing for me, anyway, when I'm working with someone is whether they think about who they're working for. Not the sense of not who your employer is, but who your end user is. Like, that's the way, that's the kind of person I like working with. And that's the kind of people we get in. We come here to do the work for, to help people really at the end of the day. And if you've got that kind of philosophy and attitude, then I don't really care what your background is, where you live, where you come from, whether or, what your first language is, what your favourite food is, all that kind of stuff. Like whether you went and got a university degree. Nah you know, if you come in and work with me and what you care about is what we're delivering for the user, then that's it. And that, you know, you like tech. Enough.

Rosa Fox:

Yeah, agree as well. I think kind of like we mentioned earlier, technology is absolutely everywhere now, and it has so much impact and influence on society. And you know, if you use technology, then you should be able to influence how it's built. And we want a diverse range of voices and people working on the products because, as Kelvin mentioned, the products are used by a diverse range of users. So, you know, more perspectives, more different types of skills and more different types of talents, that's going to create a more diverse team and that's going to make much better products. So, yeah. No, you've always, you're always going to have things to bring to the table and things that might be different about you are probably things that could be really, really useful for the team and you should always you know, be proud of your differences because they make you who you are. 

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Yeah. Go for it Kelvin.

Kelvin Gan:  

Sorry. And one thing I was going to add to that is like, we, you know, I personally like to advocate for people to bring their whole selves, bringing in that difference, it’s exactly as you were saying there as well, Rosa. Sorry, Iqbal go on.

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Yeah. Yeah. No. And I was gonna say that at GDS you can see people are keen to kind of spread opportunities to, you know, just try and go out there and try and interact with other of communities and people from different, diverse or backgrounds. And I think GDS is quite keen to get people from different viewpoints and things like that. And that's something, yeah, I think we're very keen to get people in. And yeah, and I'm very proud to sort of work at GDS, because the services we provide, there's no alternative. So you're applying for your driving licence or something like that or paying for some sort of government service, you can't just go to a different website and you know, buy that thing. It has to–we need to make sure what we have is available to everyone. So, yeah,yeah, so that's something that's really great about working at GDS. But yeah, cool cool. Thanks for that everyone. 

And the next one we have is: “there aren't many tech jobs around or near me. So that could be a myth some people are using to potentially hold them back.

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Cool, Kelvin, any thoughts on this?

Kelvin Gan: 

I think for us in particular, at GDS, we support remote working and we're very flexible as well. And like in terms of having to go to an office like we have our three main hubs at different corners of the country. So we've got London as our base. We've also got Manchester and Bristol and so those other parts of the country, you know, we've got these hubs for people to get together and meet and work together anyway. So hopefully it'll be a bit closer to you. Yeah, you know. 

It also gives you an opportunity sometimes if you want to go and move somewhere else in the country and work somewhere for a bit, and then you can jump any, like tech jobs are everywhere in the world. So I think that's pretty cool as well about the industry.

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Yeah, and also another thing is I think, like Rosa was saying earlier, tech isn’t just Developers and people like that. I mean, there's loads of other opportunities like Product Managers, User Researchers, Content Writers, Delivery Managers. There's so many things. It’s always changing and evolving all the time as well so. Yeah, there could be more jobs out there, it’s just maybe widening the fields and thinking about other things that you might be interested in. 

Cool. So the next one we have is: “I don't know anyone who works in tech and don't know where to start”. So, Kelvin, any ideas about this? 

Kelvin Gan: 

Yeah. So it goes back to finding the meet-ups and networks; you know, like they can be quite varied and niche in themselves as well. So say, for example, you might be someone who has a Raspberry Pi through school or you got given one or whatever. And a lot of meet-ups around the country are centred around that. People who have those want to get together and talk about how they play with theirs or do stuff with theirs, you know. And that's a good in. That's how you can get to know people. 

The other thing as well, is the kind of code clubs in the area and just go along, meet them as well, like just introduce yourselves to people or start one, like Rosa did! And it's all online as well. Like, you can join a chat somewhere and say: ‘Hey, I'm really keen to learn JavaScript, I’m totally new to this thing’ and people are going to be like: ‘Oh, great. Welcome to the family, here’s some stuff with, you know, we think you can get going with. Oh if you're stuck with this, this is the way we fixed it’ - that kind of stuff. You know, it's nothing to be frightened of. We're a pretty welcoming bunch. You know, we as a culture, we will–like to kind of help each other out a lot as well. 

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Cool. Nice. Rosa, any thoughts on this?

Rosa Fox: 

I guess I'd add to that to say using social networks can be quite good as well. I know that social media isn't for everyone, but for example, on Twitter, when I first started working in tech because, like I said, I didn't know anyone that really worked in tech, I just followed lots, lots of people, and I barely really post on there. But I do still go on there and read sometimes. So that’s quite a good way to learn about things, learn about conferences or events that were happening, watching, reading their blogs, reading reports that they posted. I know that there are a lot more kind of Instagram tech bloggers now that are really interesting and also people on YouTube. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of people that are posting about tech online and lots of great people to learn from. So, yeah, that would be my advice.

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Cool, yeah, I was actually helping out some network and some group of coders, and they asked if I would mind just providing some mentoring and I really enjoyed it- it was really nice, just like people would just book a calendar invite with me and we just did it online. And it was just 1 on 1, some people were brand new and didn't know much and asked me some questions. And yeah, I really enjoyed it. Really liked sort of chatting to the people. So what you'd be surprised that there would be people out there if you did reach out to them that they’d be more than happy to spend some time with you and help things out. And I do actually know a few graduates actually that reached out to people on LinkedIn. And surprisingly, they got quite a few responses back and a lot of help. So I'd say LinkedIn is really good as well so if you do see anyone, just try and sort of send out a few messages - you just never know. 

Cool and now we are onto the final one, which is: “it's no fun to work in tech”. So Rosa, what do you think about that? 

Rosa Fox: 

I think working in tech is really good. I mean, it's a job where, you know, you get to build things that potentially I mean, on GOV.UK, millions of people use our products every week. So it's amazing to go from having like a plain text file on your computer, writing some code. And then as a result of that, you've got something that people can actually use and interact with. And I think that's like really amazing. It's nice to be able to you know build things that help people and again, that people can use. 

It's also a really creative job. So I think people assume that working in tech is quite like nerdy, and it's just the people that don't see the sunlight  you know sitting in the basement coding all day [laughs]. But actually, it's not like that. There's a lot of collaboration. It's very creative. You know, you have to kind of think of an idea and make it happen. 

And also, the tech industry is generally like, it's quite fun. You know, the tech offices are generally quite cool. They’re usually made in a way that there's space for a lot of collaboration and communication. And I think my favourite thing about working in tech is that you're always learning, things are always changing, it's always evolving. So you never get bored. Sometimes it can be a blessing and a curse because there’s so many things to learn. But as long as you’re kind of like, try not to get too overwhelmed by the enormity of it and just, you know, start small. It's amazing what you can even learn in like one hour. Have a break, do something else and then come back again. So, yeah, I think that's definitely my favourite thing about working in tech.

Kelvin Gan: 

Yeah, definitely. Like it is a deeply rewarding role as well. Like Rosa, you're talking about like building something useful you were on the Critically [sic: Clinically] Vulnerable People Service at the start of the pandemic, and that is like mind-blowingly useful, actually like life-saving, you know, sending food to people who are isolating and can't get out at the beginning of the pandemic. And that had so many people involved in it as well, didn't it? And like again, for me as well, working on GOV.UK, the impact that we have on people's lives is so like, it’s a huge responsibility, but it's super rewarding. And then there is the fun aspect to it as well, like you are working with like a huge discipline, sorry a huge variety of disciplines and the types of people who are just really, really great people and really fun to work with.

Iqbal Ahmed: 

Yeah, one of the other big things I've noticed as a sort of Frontend Developer is the focus we have on accessibility. So as I was saying earlier in terms of making sure our apps work with uh screen readers and other sort of accessibility tools, like we spend quite a bit of time on that. And yeah, I've just never had that anywhere I've worked on so, and I've worked quite a few years in the private sector. And so, yeah, I really kind of enjoy that at GDS. And also as Kelvin and Rosa are saying, you get to work with Service Designers, Content Designers, Delivery Managers, there's all these different kind of disciplines that you kind of all work together when you produce something and you get like really good feedback from it as well. It's like a really good sort of rewarding sort of feeling. So, yeah. No, amazing, good stuff. 

So I think that's brought us to the end of our conversation. So yeah, just like to say thanks to Kelvin and Rosa for chatting to me today and sharing what they know about a career in tech. Hopefully, we've convinced you to think again about whether a career in tech is right for you and - hint hint - to keep an eye out for opportunities to come and work with us at GDS. So you get to work with great people like ourselves [laughs]. And also you can find more about GDS and the work we do at gds.blog.gov.uk. And we also have a podcast and we're also on the socials @GDSTeam and we’re, yeah, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram. And you can find the latest job opportunities just by searching for GDS careers on Google. So thank you very much, and thanks again to Kelvin and Rosa as well. See you later, bye.

Louise Harris: 

So big thank you there to Iqbal, Rosa and Kelvin for sharing the myriad ways you can find, and get into a career in tech - whatever your background or starting point. 

Don’t forget, you can also find all of our other episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms and our transcripts are available on PodBean. 

Thank you for listening - and see you in the new year.

We take you from A to B as we find out how the GOV.UK Design System and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs working to help make maps in public services better.

You can help us to make our podcast even better by completing our short, anonymous survey.

The transcript of the episode follows:

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Louise Harris:

Hello, and welcome back to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Louise Harris. I'm the Creative and Channels Team Leader at GDS and your host for today. Before we dive into the episode, I've got a quick favour to ask: if you are a regular listener to the GDS podcast, please take a second to fill out our quick 2 minute survey to tell us why you tune in, what you like and what you don't. You can find a link in our blog post and the show notes for this episode. Anyway, on with the show. 

Today we're going to be talking about maps, more specifically maps in public services. Here at GDS, with a little help from our friends, we've started to explore how to make public sector maps more consistent, easier to use and accessible for users. Sound good? Well stay with us because there are lots of opportunities to get involved in this work. Whether you're in central or local government, wider public sector or even outside. To get us from A to B on this interesting topic, I'm pleased to welcome Imran Hussain, Community Designer for the GOV.UK Design System, and Cathy Dutton, Head of Design at Defra. Cathy, Imran, welcome to the GDS podcast. 

Imran Hussain: 

Hi Louise, thank you. 

Cathy Dutton: 

Hi Louise. 

Louise Harris: 

It's great to have you both. So I've introduced you to our listeners, but you don't need an introduction to one another because you go way back. Is that right?

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, we do. We used to work out Defra together, not so long ago actually. Before I came to GDS. So I was the Communities Lead at Defra and I worked with most of the communities in the user centred design space and with Cathy being the Head of Design. We got to work together quite a lot. And it was lots of fun and it's sad that we don't work together anymore. So it's absolutely brilliant to be on this podcast with her again. 

Louise Harris: 

Cathy, I hear on the grapevine that GDS sort of semi poached Imran over from Defra - have you forgiven us yet? 

Cathy Dutton: 

Yeah, almost. It helps, we-we still get to work together. So it's all good. 

Louise Harris: 

So you've both decided to join forces and try and unpick this kind of a sticky challenge of making maps that are used in our public services more accessible, more consistent and, well, just, better. Imran, I'll start with you because I think you and others in the GOV.UK Design System are gonna have a big part to play in coordinating these efforts. But for those listeners who maybe don't know much about the Design System or design in government in general, can you give us a quick kind of whistle stop tour into what the GOV.UK Design System is, what exists to do and what your role as a Community Designer involves? 

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, of course. So the GOV.UK Design System is a suite of tools that helps teams in government quickly build usable, accessible services for GOV.UK. You can find it in more than 3,000 repositories on GitHub, and they use different elements of the Design System. On GOV.UK alone, it's used on over 7,000 individual services. But there's many more outside of it as well. So, yeah, it's vastly used and really, really popular, and we kind of need it in government. My particular role is Community Designer on the GOV.UK Design System team: I work with the community. I kind of create space for collaboration to happen, which is really important because we're a contribution based design system. So most of the ideas for components and patterns and things like that come from the community and the community actually build a significant part of those patterns and components as well. So we just kind of do the finishing touches on the team. 

Louise Harris: 

So that, to me, sounds like it's almost as much about the people as it is about the tech or the design stuff. Right? So it's about creating that environment where a sense of community can really take root. 

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, that's that's absolutely, really important. 

Louise Harris: 

Thinking about this maps work, is that something that's kind of come up from the community? 

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's completely come from the community. And it just came about because it kept coming up on Design System calls. It kept coming up in our forums, people asking about what's the best practice with how to do things maps-wise. And we keep getting help desk tickets around maps as well. We-we've got 2 levels of users on the Design System team. We've got you know, the end users, which are the general public that will use these maps, but our primary users, I guess you could say, are designers and user researchers; and yeah, whether they're interaction designers, service designers or content designers across government who use these components and patterns. So it, it clearly came up as a need and we didn't have the relevant components and patterns to be able to serve their needs at the time, so we-we started this collaboration. And it-it was Cathy that really kind of kicked it off because they, they came up with some things and just kind of said: 'hey, where do we share this?' [laughs]. So now we're creating a space where everyone can share things. 

Louise Harris:

Oh, that's really cool, Imran. Cathy, it sounds like maps is something that Defra's been thinking about beforehand. 

Cathy Dutton: 

Yes, so maps is something that comes up in discussion in Defra a lot. We have weekly drop in sessions that are often around like how we can do maps better. They've been a lot of our services, like flooding and farming, and we did our first accessibility drop-in session last week as well. And the whole top--a lot of topics were about how, how we can make maps more inclusive. So because we speak about it a lot, we try to start documenting some of the stuff we talk about so we don't just repeat the same conversations. And I think it was last summer we started to create our own version of like what mapping standards could be or the beginnings of map standards and guidance - really high level stuff, just like when to use a map, some of the findings we've got, some of the best practise bits - and we, we put them on GitHub. And then for me, that's been really useful because part of my job is speaking to all the designers. So whenever we have someone new join or whenever someone gets in touch and says like: 'we're doing a map, where do we start?', I can kind of point at the, at the standards. And that's how we got involved really. I think I came to one of Imran's calls on a Friday and was just like we have this thing, how can we share it across government because it's not a pattern or component? Or how can other people in government input and improve it for us? 

Louise Harris: 

And how has that been then? Being able to tap into that wider community across government and see you know, this-this baby that you've been creating in Defra, how has it been watching that grow?

Cathy Dutton: 

It's been really good so far actually. The mix of people on the panels that Imran's put together has really helped because we've got, like our efforts were mostly from interaction designers, service designers and content designers. So it's been good to get people from different backgrounds, software development, data specialists and get their input and see what, where they're coming from when we talk about maps. That's been really useful. It's been really good for our designers as well. There's a few Defra people on the panel. So just getting them exposed to like different ways of thinking or different, different, what's the word I'm looking for, constraints around mapping or how we do good maps has been really helpful. 

Louise Harris: 

And have there been you know, themes coming through in terms of what teams are kind of struggling with when it comes to maps? 

Cathy Dutton: 

I think so, yeah, there's one particular one in Defra that, we, we kind of go to shape tools quite early and trying to make a shape tool on a map like draw like something out, a position on the map is really hard to make inclusive and accessible. And so that seems to come up quite a lot and could be one of the biggest challenges. We've tried to just start saying it in a different way to see if that maybe helps and just say like a lot of stuff in Defra is: 'can I do this activity in this place' and just trying to find different ways that people could do that. But if we do need a map, obviously it's useful to have standards.

Imran Hussain: 

And we-we've just been talking about standards recently, and there was a few different areas that came up like Cathy said, because we've got that really multidisciplinary steering group. We talked about: we wanna include features on architecture, what technology, user interface, data visualisation and accessibility. So those are the different areas that have come up already in terms of any sort of standards or principles that we will design. 

Louise Harris: 

There’s already quite a lot of energy and interest in exploring this issue. Do you have sight of your end, end goal at this point?

Imran Hussain: 

For, for me, it's always based on what the community want to do. So we asked the community and we've put the steering group together, and what people want is really practical things that they'll be able to use in their work. So it's nice to have, you know, the things that Cathy mentioned about getting people together, getting them to learn from each other, we do absolutely want that to happen. I think people want to have real, tangible products or things that they can kind of use. So in a, in a, we've got like a short term and long term aim that we've been talking about amongst the steering group. And the long term aim is to kind of set best practice and develop specific things that people can use. 

In the short term, what we're going to do next is probably get together and set some best practice and create some principles, some design principles for maps across the public sector. And we see that as the first step where we get everyone pulling in the same direction. People understand what good looks like and hopefully start changing their practise to try and work in with those kind of principles. Once we have those and we kind of help proliferate those around in the public sector, then I think what we will try and do after that is start to create those specific patterns and components that people can then utilise in their services. So you know, we've shown people what good looks like, what the principles are, then we start getting more specific with: let's design this element of mapping and get that same community in to give us their best practise and we'll create a component that everyone can use. 

Louise Harris:

You talked a little bit, Imran, about us having 2 users of the Design System; we've got our ultimate end users: so the people that live in our communities, my friends, your friends, our parents, our colleagues who are gonna be needing to use government and public services; and also our kind of primary users in this context: the service owners and designers and content designers that are going to be building these services and maybe using maps. What's the impact for them if we don’t fix this work?

Cathy Dutton: 

Yeah, the biggest, the biggest problem is probably making maps that are accessible and inclusive because it is, they can be quite complex. As soon as you have a map, suddenly you've got layers, you've got keys, you've got things that fly in and out. So it's been, it's been about making them accessible and making them work on mobile devices as well, where some information is hidden. We always have, like one of our standards, one of the first 3 parts of our standards I think, is that if we use a map, you have to make the information available outside the map as well. But that is also quite tricky depending on what the information is. So that's something that we always come back to is like, how can we make maps inclusive? 

And then I think as well, we've started talking a lot about sustainability in, in, in Defra, in design in general. And so like maps are quite data heavy. So they're probably not the most efficient way we can use data either so that's something we're starting to talk about more and more as well. And then even just like as you're prototyping ideas, you really want to prototype stuff like quick and use throw away code and testing and try again. We haven't found yet a really quick way to test maps because i-it's quite an effort to do a map in a prototype. And so even just that kind of stuff is a problem. Like if you want to quickly test something, how do you quickly test a map? And we always start without a map, is our default anyway. Start with the, the very bare minimum and see if there's actual need for a map. 

Louise Harris: 

Yeah, it's really interesting, and I think there's, there's maps and there's maps, right? I think some people might immediately jump to maps as navigational tools, getting us from A to B. But actually, as you've talked there, sometimes they're conveying data about a particular area.

Cathy Dutton: 

Yeah, I guess flood, flood is a good example. So the flood maps: you can find out your risk of flooding on a map. I think it was traditionally with icons on maps, which is another, another problem for, for inclusivity. So in that service now, they've done a really good job of using the map as like a secondary tool. So you can find out everything you need to find out about your flood risk. And then if you want to do it on a map, you can. And so that's like working well in that area. Yes, some maps are interactive maps and some aren't, some are just information. The interactive ones are harder, like if we're talking about the shape tool again. We're still trying to work out how you would make a map where you've got to draw shape on it. How can you do that outside of the map? And if you have 2 ways to do it, is that more efficient or is there 1 way? I'm always wary of like 1 ways, 1 way, like there's never one solution for everything. 

Louise Harris: 

Well it sounds like that's why you know, working towards these standards is such a good first step because it’s, it’s a pretty big problem, pretty broad area that maybe no one’s got quite right yet.

Imran Hussain: 

I think it's important to recognise there's a lot of good work out there currently. So there's lots of departments doing really exciting stuff. And i-it was just by chance that I knew Cathy and she's happy to discuss these kind of things with me, that she came and she shared her work; and they told us about, they-they did some great work with accessibility and tried to apply some principles that usually wouldn't apply to maps - like hover over text and highlighting text and things like that. They tried to apply that to maps, and a lot of people don't. But it-it's just by chance that I found out about the work she's doing and we were able to share it. So a-and part of the problem is that if we don't create that space where people can share and feel comfortable sharing and they think that it's going to actually go somewhere, then it'll just stay in silos in different organisations across the public sector and we'll have pockets of best practice. There'll be no consistency and it'll only be people in the know that find out about it and try to implement those kind of fixes. So it's a real great opportunity. 

I mean, it's really intimidating to try and fix maps, which I keep joking about: 'oh, Imran, what are you doing on maps?'. We're trying to fix maps in the public sector, but it literally is as wide as that, it's an open goal, you know? There's...no one's got together so far and put the effort into building a set of standards or deciding what good kind of looks like. So as far as I'm concerned, anything that we sort of achieve will be a step forward from where we were before. There's lots of great stuff out there, we're just, you know, I'm, I'm really just kind of collecting it together. I've, I'm, I've got no expert in [laughs] maps, no expertise whatsoever in maps. I'm not a designer, but I'm, I'm good at collaboration. So like, I'm just gonna get all these brilliant minds, put them in one place, get all the goodness from them and will try and put it into a nice, accessible, quite easy to understand format that everyone can kind of share. 

Louise Harris: 

And what do you think Cathy? It sounds like it is an intimidating area for designers to be looking at and thinking about. But it’s obviously something that you at Defra have been doing.

Cathy Dutton: 

I think 'cause, just from being in Defra for like the last 5 years, I've seen how much like because I'm not a map expert either, but there's people in my team that really are. And it's taken them years of working on like flood services and working on maps and spatial information. The knowledge they've built up and the research they've collected and stuff, it just, it's, it's taken them so long and I kind of feel like now they are really, real experts in mapping and that helped us do our standards. But then I think it was just like if every other--I thought that if every other department was doing the same thing, like it just makes sense that that's something we should just do collectively. 'Cause I know that we were lucky enough to have funding to spend a lot of time looking at inclusive maps. But if that can help people who haven't got as much funding or time to sort of start from a slightly higher position by using our-our standards or even them helping us with our standards, then that just seemed like a thing we should be doing. So I'm just, I'm just basically trying to share the great work that the people in my team have done that I didn't do anything of. They all did it and just, it just felt like it was good enough to share. 

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, we're, we're, we're both just here to take credit for other people's work [laugh from Cathy], really. [laughs] 

Louise Harris: 

Aw, I, I think you’re both far too nice to take credit for anybody's work. It feels to me like you’re championing this work. 

So we’ve got GDS involved, we have got the lovely folks at Defra involved. Imran, are there any other organisations that are kind of throwing their weight in at this stage?

Imran Hussain: 

What I can tell you is we, we originally planned for 60 people at the first workshop and it sold out within 2 days. So we-we had to invite 100 people to the first workshop and it sold out, the next batch of tickets sold out within like another day. So there's a lot of demand and a lot of people are willing to take time aside from their job to kind of participate in this and really make this a thing. So we're really, really grateful for that. I think there's more people, like I said, hearing about it all the time. And the people who work in this area are very, very passionate, and I'm really lucky that we found something that resonates with people. 

We're central government so there's a lot of departments from central government that get involved, especially the map heavy departments. There's quite a few people from HM Land Registry, for example. But there's also people from wider public sector. So there's really good representation from local gov, who use maps in their services quite a lot. You know people finding schools, or trying to find their way around. There's a lot of map usage over there. But even just recently, someone from the police GIS service reached out to us on Twitter and see if they could kind of get involved, and someone from Ordnance Survey did as well. So it's, it's growing all the time and as far as we're concerned, the more people we can get involved, the better. Whatever principles we create, the more voices we have, the more robust they will be and the more applicable they will be to different sectors. So that's, that's really, we want to cast a wide net, get as many people involved as possible, really collaborate and come up with products that everyone can use.

Louise Harris: 

So it sounds like we're in good company already, but for our listeners who might be interested in this, is it just designers that you think can contribute to this body of work or are you looking for expertise from other disciplines as well? 

Imran Hussain: 

No, absolutely. It's, we need people from every single kind of discipline to really help this kind of work. Obviously it's really helpful having different types of designers: service designers to understand user needs; interaction designers to really help with implementing fixes for those user needs; we need developers to help design components and patterns. But I think, like user research, for example, is a really key part of this making sure we're meeting people's needs and we understand those needs. So you know, having user researchers as part of it; content designers to help us write guidance; like--and as we said, we're dealing with architecture, technology, data visualisation, so professionals in technical architecture and people who are experts in data and mapping - it's all really, really useful and everything will enrich the work that we're kind of doing. And I mean the--right now is an absolutely brilliant time to get involved because we're still scoping all the problems. So we've, we've set design principles as our first kind of goal. But longer term, we're still kind of scoping exactly what direction we're going to take. So anyone who gets involved can really help shape this collaboration and really input their viewpoint and perspective and that will enrich the overall project. So, yeah, we're very excited if anyone wants to get involved and we'd love to have more voices, as I said before. 

Louise Harris: 

And Cathy, I want to come to you now because while you're involved in this work, you've also been a partner to the GOV.UK Design System in the past as well. So maybe you could share a little bit about what that was like, what it involved for you so that people who are maybe thinking about getting involved or want to know a little bit more, can understand what it's like and why it's great. 

Cathy Dutton: 

Yeah, the Design System working group - I think it's still called that - I was on for a couple of years. It's a quite a small panel of people, I think, from all different departments in government. And they basically just review submissions to the Design System to make sure that, I think it's around like checking quality and making sure that we're consistent, but also like making sure that everyone kind of--well I thought it was like making sure everyone felt like a part of the Design System as well, because it's like, it's a central tool but it's for everyone. So that's kind of the reason I love being on that panel, was that like you felt like you owned a little piece of it and you could contribute and have a little voice, so that was really nice. 

Imran Hussain: 

I'm sorry, Cathy.

Cathy Dutton: 

[laughs] Yeah. 

Imran Hussain: 

I'm sorry, I'm apologising because Cathy had been on the working group since the start and I was the one that asked her to leave even though we're friends. [laughs] 

Louise Harris: 

Absolutely savage folks. Savage. 

Cathy Dutton: 

Wasn't that the first thing you did? 

Imran Hussain: 

It was. It was though. Sorting out the working group. [laughs] No. But yeah, it's, it's really nice to have this relationship with people across kind of government and like knowing Cathy, I knew she'd take it in the right way. She, she did always say: 'hey, if, if you want fresh blood to come in, please let me know'. And it, and it just gave us an opportunity at the time to really rebalance the working group to be more representative of the wider population. So we brought in lots of different roles. We brought in a more equal gender balance. We thought about neurodiversity and made sure there were people with different ways of thinking on the, on the Design System working group so we could represent their needs. We also thought about race, ethnicity, background, all sorts of things. And we're getting better. It's still not perfect, but it's much, much more representative of the wider population. And what we are starting to do, what, what we've said is people who leave the working group, it doesn't mean they're gone. I-it just means we're giving other people an opportunity to come in. So we're starting to kind of rotate our members a lot more. So people will come in, they'll stay on it for like a year, a year and a half, and then they'll pop back out and they might pop back in.

Louise Harris: 

And Cathy is the proof of the pudding of that, 'cause she may not be a part of the working group anymore, but she's a big part of what you're trying to do to fix, fix maps in services. So thanks for letting us drag you back Cathy [laugh from Cathy]. 

Louise Harris: 

And if people are interested in, in getting involved or about find--in finding out more, what should they do? 

Imran Hussain: 

I think the main things are: I-I'm quite available, so feel free to kind of like, get in touch with me, I'm on all the Slack spaces that I can get onto [laughs]: local-gov Slack, like cross-gov Slack. On Twitter as well, my usernames: @ImHuYorks - I-M-H-U-Y-O-R-K-S. But just get in touch and I can like add you to any of the platforms that you will have access to. The main chatter is going on, on cross-gov Slacks. There's a map in services channel.

The other really easy way that anyone can sign up though, is to join the Design System mailing list. So if you Google GOV.UK Design System, pretty much on the homepage near the top, it'll say: 'do you want to get updates?'. And you can join our mailing list. And that's the way that any information about collaboration, workshops will come straight into your inbox and you'll get pinged about it before it happens. So that's probably the easiest method for most people to get involved. 

Louise Harris: 

Sounds good. We'll make sure we include links to all of those pages and sign ups in the blog post that goes alongside this podcast, too. 

So there you have it. We really want you to get in touch and help us on our journey towards improving the usability, accessibility and consistency of maps in public services. Thank you to my 2 guests, Imran and Cathy, for expertly guiding us through this really important topic, championing this work and, please forgive me folks, getting this important user need on the map. If you've enjoyed today's episode, and want to learn even more about the GOV.UK Design System - and let's face it, why wouldn't you? - you can tune in to our February 2020 episode of the GDS podcast where you can hear GDS's Tim Paul talk more about the roots of the Design System and its impact.

And you can find all of our other episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms and transcripts are available on Podbean. So thanks for listening and thank you both again. Goodbye. 

Imran Hussain: 

Thanks, Louise. Bye. 

Cathy Dutton: 

Thanks, bye.

Wondered how to migrate a 24/7 product to a serverless platform? We chat about initial user research, developing DevOps skills and the benefits of GDS's approach to this type of tech project.

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The transcript of the episode follows:

Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today, I am joined by Jonathan Harden, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, and Kat Stevens, Senior Developer and co-Tech Lead on GOV.UK Pay.

GDS has many products that rely on our expert site reliability engineers and their colleagues to maintain and improve their functionality. Such as GOV.UK Pay - one of GDS’s common platforms that is used by more than 200 organisations across the UK public sector to take and process online payments from service users. Jonathan and Kat recently completed a crucial reliability engineering project to ensure that GOV.UK Pay continues to operate at the highest standards and provide a reliable service for public sector users and their service users. 

We'll hear more about that in a moment, but to start off, can you please introduce yourself to our listeners? Kat, would you mind starting?

Kat Stevens: 

Hi I'm Kat Stevens, I’m a Senior Developer on GOV.UK Pay. I've been working at GDS since 2017. And before that, I was a developer at start-ups and small companies.

As a co-Tech Lead on the migration team then, I'm kind of jointly responsible for making sure that our platform is running as it should be. That our team is working well together, that we're working on the right things and that we're, what we're working on is of a high quality, and is delivering value for our users. So it's like balancing that up with software engineering, making sure that you know, that we're being compliant. It's very important for Pay.  Software [laughs] engineering is so broad: there's like security, reliability, performance, all of those things. So yeah, it's kind of thinking about everything and---at a high level.

Vanessa Schneider: 

I'm glad somebody's got a high level overview. Thanks, Kat. Jonathan, would you mind introducing yourself too?

Jonathan Harden: 

Hi, I'm Jonathan Harden, and I am Senior Site Reliability Engineer on GOV.UK Pay. I've previously worked for a major UK mobile network operator, in the movie industry and for one of the UK's highest rated ISPs.

So all of GOV.UK Pay's services run, have to run somewhere. Being a Site Reliability Engineer means that I'm helping to build the infrastructure on which it runs, ensure that it is operating correctly and that we keep users’ cardholder data safe and help the developers ease their development lifecycle into getting updates and changes out into the world.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Hmm..exciting work. So you both worked on a site reliability project for GOV.UK Pay. Can you please, for the uninitiated, introduce our listeners to the project that you carried out?

Kat Stevens: 

Yeah so recently, we finished migrating GOV.UK Pay to run on AWS Fargate. So previously Pay was running its applications on ECS EC2 instances on AWS. That's a lot of acronyms. But it basically means we were maintaining long-lived EC2 instances that were running our applications. And that incurred quite a high maintenance burden for the developers on our team. And we decided that we wanted to move to a serverless platform to kind of reduce that maintenance burden. And after researching a few options, we decided that Fargate was a good fit for Pay, and we spent a few months carefully moving our apps across to the Fargate platform whilst not having any downtime for our users, which is obviously quite important. Like Pay is a 24/7 service, so we wanted to make sure that our end users had no idea that this was happening.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Jonathan, how did you contribute to this migration?

Jonathan Harden: 

So obviously, I've only been here for three months, so and the project has been going on quite a lot longer than that. But this is the kind of task I've been involved with, uh, several times now in the last few years at different companies. And so when I joined GDS, it was suggested that I join this project on Pay because I'd be able to contribute really quickly and, and help with the kind of the, the long tail of this migration.

So a-anybody else that's been in an SR- that works in SRE capacity will know that when you do these kind of projects, you have like the bulk of the migration where you move your applications, like your frontend services that users actually see when they go to the website and the backend services that processes transactions. But then you also have a lot of supporting services around that. So you have services like: things that provide monitoring and alerting, infrastructure that provides where, where do these applications get stored when they're not in use and like where do you launch them from. And there was, there was still quite a bit of that to tie up at the end. And the team, it's quite a small team. As a lot of SRE and infrastructure teams do tend to be. And so when I started, I joined that team and I've been helping with the, the, these long tail parts of the migration. Like in a lot of software engineering, the bulk of the work is done very quickly and the long tail takes quite a bit of time. So, so that's the kind of work that I've been helping with in the last few months.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Great. Kat, as co-Tech Lead, what was your involvement in the migration?

Kat Stevens: 

Let’s see where to start. So when I joined the Pay Team, which was around October 

2020, we were in the early stages of the, of the project, so we'd made the decision that we needed to migrate and that involved things like analysing, like co-cost benefit things. I-It doesn't sound that exciting, but it was actually quite cool looking at all the different options. So, for example, it meant that we could keep some of our existing infrastructure. We wouldn't have to move our RDS instances for, for example. We could keep our existing security group, subnets - all that kind of glue that holds all the application, like infrastructure together. 

Then there was quite a lot of planning of how we would actually do this, how we would roll out the migration application by application. We've got around a dozen microservices that we were going to move one by one. And figuring out what good looked like. How would we know that the migration is successful. How do we know whether to roll back a particular app.

So for the actual rollout of migrating sort of one application from EC2 to Fargate: we basically did DNS weighting. So we could have both run--versions of the app running alongside each other, and then you can have 5% of the traffic going to new apps, 95% to the old app. And you can gradually switch over that weighting and monitor whether there are any errors, whether like the traffic suddenly dips and things aren't getting through. So that was all part of the plannings. Like what, what stages would we reach to say like, that yes, we're confident that this change has been positive. And like having a whole, like overview view of what's happening when. Estimating things as well - that's alway, always pretty, [laughs] pretty difficult. But we, as the more apps we did, the quicker we went and we sped up on that. So that was good.

And yeah, there's a whole bunch of other things we, we had to get involved with over the last few months as well. So that's things like performance-testing the whole environment to, you know, we wanted to have confidence that the new platform would be able to handle like the high levels of traffic that we see on GOV.UK Pay. Also we wanted to look at how we would actually deploy these apps. Having more confidence in our deployments, moving to continuous deployment where possible. So while those things weren't like directly impacted by Fargate, doing this migration like gave us the opportunity to explore some of those other improvements that we could make. And yeah, I think we've really benefited.

Vanessa Schneider: 

That makes sense, it's always nice to not just keep things ticking over, but making big improvements, that feels really rewarding, I think. Can you give us an impression of what the situation was before the migration maybe?

Kat Stevens: 

On our previous infrastructure, we were running ECS tasks on EC2 launch types - so those are sort of, relatively long-lived instances that we had to provision, patch, maintain. And the developers on the, on the rest of the team, and I--we're not necessarily infrastructure specialists, but when developers on our support rota would end up spending sort of like maybe 5, 6, 7 hours a week just maintaining our EC2 instances, we kind of realised that something had to change [laughs]. And use it, moving to a serverless infrastructure, it's just completely removes that burden of having to provision and make, roll our AMIs, our machine images. We, that just doesn't happen anymore. And we've freed up our developers to work on features. And yeah, the, the infrastructure burden on Pay is just so much less.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Oh, that sounds really helpful. I’m not sure if migrations are an every-day kind of job for site reliability engineers or software developers, so I was wondering if there’s anything that stood out about this process, like an opportunity to use new tools, or a different way of working?

Jonathan Harden: 

So yeah, it's fun to work with new tools. But there, there, you get to--part of working here, and something I've seen in the time I've been here already, is that we don't rush into those decisions. So it's perfectly possible to see the, the new hot thing in the industry and rush straight for that without a good understanding of what are the trade-offs here. Everything has some trade-offs. And here at GDS, what I've found personally is that we put a lot of effort into understanding what, what's involved in the change; what will the experience be like for - I mean, the customer experience, the user experience, people actually paying for services, that needs to remain rock solid the whole time - but what's the, what's the experience like for developers? So developers have a cycle. They, you know, they write code, they want to test that code somewhere, they want to get it approved and push it to production. And, and so right now, we're undergoing a process of replacing some of our deployment pipelines. And as part of that, we're, we're in the early stages of this, but we're doing real research into how will our change of that be for the developers. And there's something really, really, really rewarding about looking at the different options available, seeing what is the new, the newest cool things, are they where to go? Do you want to go to something a bit, a bit older and a bit more stable? Is there a happy medium? What will the experience for developers be like there? What will the maintenance burden be like?

And one of the things for me here is that I'm seeing that e-even down in the teams, it's, these decisions aren't being taken by somebody higher up saying: 'we're going to move to this thing, make it happen'. And instead we've, we're doing research down in the teams that are going to do the work, speaking to the developer-- we're going to be speaking to the developers and surveying all the developers about what do you want from not just the change to stay the same, but change to make an improvement. And it's really, it's exciting to work with the new tools and the new possibilities, and it's also exciting to be involved in making those decisions.

It marks quite, it was quite stark for me when I first started and I was told this, this major project is going on and it's likely to be 3 to 6 months before we start work, start work on doing it because we're doing the research up front and it's happening in the teams. People are spiking on cool things. Which means even if it's technology that you don't get to use eventually, or that you choose - not don't get to, but choose not to use eventually, you know, the teams are helping to make this choice. You get to try out a bunch of different technologies. And one of the great things with that at GDS is: there are different parts of GDS, and different parts of GDS are using the tooling that is suitable for their area, that makes their area best, work best. And that does mean that there's scope for if you decide I want to work on this other cool thing and this other team are working on it, you can move into one of the other teams and work on that new cool technology.

Kat Stevens: 

I mean, I-I-I agree totally. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to move to Pay was to get more experience working on the infrastructure side of things. On a previous teams it was more sort of stuff like cool software engineering. And on Pay, I've learnt more Terraform than I [laughs] ever thought was possible to know. And loads of other skills like: I've got so familiar with like all the, the intricacies of it as well. And kind of like sort of pushing it to its limits almost, and trying to get the best out of the tools for our, for our team and for our projects. And yeah, it's, it's, it's been really exciting. I mean, one of the new shiny tools that we've been looking at was cloud watch, and we use it for running our smoke tests now. And that was part of the, we kind of like rolled that into the, the Fargate migration project because it seems like a good way of us, like checking that our deployments were working correctly. It took a little bit of wrangling for it to get, fit that into our deployment pipeline. But, but it is really cool sort of like seeing the new thing just falling into place. And now it looks like some of the other teams are following us and using that, that tool as well. So it feels, it feels [laughs] quite nice to be a trailblazer.

Vanessa Schneider: 

No pressure to get it right then [laughs]. What were some of the things on your mind when you were making those selections then?

Kat Stevens: 

We wanted to make sure that we'd made the right decision. So we did spend a fair amount of time actually analysing all the options. In the end, we, we went with Fargate, purely because it meant that we could reuse some of our existing infrastructure.

Overall we kind of prioritised what was going to be the lowest risk in terms of how we were going to do the migration. Like would any sort of mi--you know, would we need any downtime; would this impact like our, our paying users; would it impact on like our service teams, the actual sort of government departments who use Pay; would it im-impact other developers who were actually trying to build new features. And if they've got a platform that's shifting underneath them, that's always going to be difficult. So we were really trying to go for an option that met our needs and like achieved our goals of reducing maintenance burden, saving costs as well, obviously. And yeah, [laughs] just making it, making like Pay an easy, you know, simpler and easier to be a developer on. And weighing that up with, you know, what, what's this like you know, new and shiny thing, like what's all this. Like you know, because there's so many tools out there. But if it's going to take us like a huge amount of effort to actually migrate to them, then I--is that benefit actually going to pay for itself or not? So we, we actually did quite a lot of the investigation analysis, a big spreadsheet [laughs] trying to calculate how much like developer time like in hours per week of what's being spent on infrastructure maintenance and kind of trying to estimate what-- how that would change when we moved.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Cool, that sounds like the bigger picture view the co-Tech Lead would have of course. Jonathan, any, any benefits that stood out to you perhaps?

Jonathan Harden: 

The, the process of trying these things is really interesting. One of the things that we do at GDS that is not something I've ever experienced elsewhere, I know it does happen elsewhere in the industry, but is, we have what I call firebreaks. So they're a gap between quarters. Now when I say quarters, we're not like planning so these 12 things will happen in the quarter. We are, like our team is running a full Kanban approach because we're an infrastructure team that do some support. And one of the things with those firebreaks is they're a week long. So I've worked lots of places where you do hack days and hack days are great but one day isn't really very much time to truly try something deeply. On the firebreak, you get the opportunity to work, to try something that might-- you know something's coming up. You know you're going to do this migration. You've got some thoughts about, 'ooh, there's this technology. I've heard it's great. I can give it a real try and I can prove to other people that this is something we should seriously consider, especially if it's really exciting for you'. Or you might use the opportunity as well to, to scratch an itch that's been bugging you.

So like I-I- just to give you an example of what: we've just had a firebreak. And during that firebreak, we saw several different versions of Terraform. For people that know Terraform, some of them were the versions that use the older version of the language - so HTL1 - and some of them with the version that used HTL2, and it means they're not very compatible. So I used that firebreak as an opportunity to upgrade all of our Terraform to get everything up to the very latest. And like that's really scratched an itch for me. And that's not necessarily super exciting for everybody, but for people that have to work on this day to day, it is very, very, very [laughs] exciting. And, but other people did spikes on trying out a whole deploy-- new type of deployment, which is part of what we're doing going forward. And I'm seeing across the other teams, the developer teams, people trying spikes from potential product features, it's very exciting to see those things happening in other teams and people really trying out, and not just a quick hack, but like really trying: 'can we get somewhere with this, and what's the opportunity for using this in the future?' And it's what people wanted to work on. And that's really, really, that was really exciting for me as, as a part of the research, like the ongoing research, the fact that they happen every quarter. It's very exciting.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Kat, firebreaks - what’s your opinion, are you a fan?

Kat Stevens:

Obviously at GDS like our quarters like, you know, we do carry over work between quarters, but it is nice to have that, that week or so where you can just like think about something else. You can, it's, you can recharge, you can reset little bit, you can try something new. And having like the, like the support from senior management to do that as well and have that space to experiment and try out new things to fail as well, I think that's so important. And even if your product like, never makes it outside a firebreak, you can, it will stick in your memory. And so when 6 months later they say, 'oh, maybe we should try this' and you can actually say: 'that might be a disaster. I remember it from my firebreak' [laughs]. Or you've got that background knowledge to just give context on a wider discussion, perhaps. I think it's so useful. 

And also it kind of gives you an opportunity to potentially collaborate with people who y-you don't normally work with or with people in different roles as well. So rather than just us working within the migration team or the feature teams, we can kind of chop and change. You can work with like User Researchers or Content Designers and do just the things you wouldn't normally do. And or even if you just need a little bit of time to do some housekeeping or tidy ups and stuff that's, like Jonathan said, is just scratching that itch. So I love, I love a firebreak.

Vanessa Schneider: 

It sounds like the firebreaks have been really productive then - are there any other wins you can share from the migration as well perhaps?

Jonathan Harden: 

One of the interesting things, for me one of the interesting things about working in Pay specifically in GDS, is that we have to maintain PCI compliance because we're taking payments. Now that's not something I'd ever done before coming into Pay. So the, the first thing I did in Pay was learn about PCI and spend some time learning about what it, what it means to be compliant. But part of that is called protective monitoring. So you have active scanning going on looking for 'is anything nefarious happening over here, has anything goes wrong over there'. And that means that you, people have to spend time responding to those reports. And those reports, you occasionally get a false positive. But spending all that time dealing with those reports and investigating them like that's, that's all been freed up now.

But that means we can focus on future improvements more. So we've, our, we have a new environment to test performance of the application in. W e're going through a process at the moment of making it so that that environment can appear when it needs to appear and go away when it doesn't need to be there. And that, of course means saving money, which you know, we work in the Civil Service, this is taxpayer money. This isn't like venture capital, it's the money that all of us pay in tax. And so it's like even more important to make sure that we're spending the right money. It's not to not spend money, it's to spend the right money and only the money that you need to spend. And so we're able to spend time making sure that we can have that environment scale itself down and scale itself back up and use that learning of scaling up and down those environments to start working on potentially auto-scaling the other environments so that they respond to meet demand instead of needing to be at the capacity for peak demand all the time.

This is, the-these are quite exciting things in themselves, but like we wouldn't have, we wouldn't necessarily have the time to do these smaller improvements that, you know, that will save money. They'll make a big difference in how much we spend.

Vanessa Schneider:

What about you Kat, any thoughts?

Kat Stevens: 

Yeah, so previously while the majority of our apps were running as tasks on EC2 instances, we did have a couple of Fargate apps running. And people were a bit nervous about updating them and deploying them. But now we are deploying to Fargate everywhere, suddenly, it doesn't seem so much of a big deal anymore. And so we've been able to kind of demystify some of those extra auxiliary apps. We've had really good feedback from the developer team saying like: 'this is great. We don't even have to, you know have like a, mental energy spent on worrying about this app anymore'. And that's kind of like the same for our other sort of, the, the bits and pieces that go under the radar. So this is something we're kind of looking at now is: how do we make sure our NginX proxies are patched and up to date and get deployed quickly, and it's not going to be a, a huge mental effort even [laughs] to kind of even think about how do we do this: 'we don't do this very often. Am I going to have to look this up again?' We can automate more of these processes and just have a more stable and reliable platform.

Vanessa Schneider: 

It can be intimidating when you don’t do a process frequently, just wanting to make sure you get everything exactly right, I think a lot of people can relate to that, but it’s so good [laughs] everyone’s confident now!

Kat Stevens: 

Big factor but yes.

Vanessa Schneider: 

So, obviously, Kat, you aren't a Site Reliability Engineer, but working on this project has given you the opportunity to upskill in the area. Is that right? Is that a common practise? Is it, is it normal for Software Developers to sort of take on a project like this to learn these things? 

Kat Stevens: 

It's interesting. I think the role of a Software Developer at GDS, it can be so broad. And there's so many different types of things you can work on. I was working on Python projects for a couple of years. And I've sort of like, dipping my toes into a bit of Ruby and bit of JavaScript. And...but, but the previous team I was working on, the infrastructure was very stable and there, there wasn't really any, a huge need to like revamp it or do any major bits of work on it. So while there was a couple of bits and pieces ad-hoc here and there, it kind of felt like the, the infrastructure side of the whole software engineering ecosystem, [laughs] for want of a better word, the, the, the infrastructure side of it was, was a gap in my knowledge. And so it's been really good to be able to move to Pay and like roll up my sleeves and get stuck in and you know like, figure out all these IAM permissions, what, what needs to be done where and actually sort of like get, getting that experience in like lifting the hood and seeing what's powering the, the actual software underneath. And almost like going down through the layers and yeah, [laughs] it's been, it's been really eye-opening actually. Like...previously, I would have never described myself as doing any sort of DevOps side of things, and I was actually quite like scared of Bash scripts. And now they are, yeah, well, I wouldn't say second nature, but they're not so scary anymore [laughs].

Vanessa Schneider: 

That's a great outcome in my books. Jonathan, is it common practise to have somebody come in like that for you? I mean, obviously you've not been at GDS for a long time, but I was just wondering how this compares to the private sector.

Jonathan Harden: 

So lots of people want to be a Site Reliability Engineer, it's a very kind of hot field. It's a very cool area to work in. And I don't just mean across the industry. I mean, I think that's a, I really, really like this role. I've put on many hats over my career and this is the one I'm enjoying the most by a long way. But, so in a previous company, I was like leading a team of infras-- there we were calling ourselves Infrastructure Engineers, but we were hiring Site Reliability Engineers. And actually, we found that it, it was, in some ways it was better to have a more diverse team in previous role as well. I mean, like, I always believe it's better to have a diverse team anyway in all aspects. But having people from a software engineering background and people from a systems administration background, like a traditional SysAdmin background, bringing those people together, especially if you've got one or two experienced Site Reliability Engineers already, works really, really well. People want to upskill into this area. Upskill isn't even necessarily the right word. People want to move into this area. It's not that it's an upskill, it's, it's, it's sideways. It's a different kind of role. And it means that they're very enthusiastic and they really want to learn these things and they want to demystify the scary things like Kat was talking about. So me personally, I've been, she mentioned Bash, I've been using Bash for many, many, many years [laughs] since about 2001, I think something like that. So that's not scary for me, but for people who haven't worked with it, I can help them with, like you know, I can help people and I can mentor them and I can show them good practises are.

Vanessa Schneider: 

I don't think I've heard a better recommendation for folks to become site reliability engineers - keep an eye out on our vacancies as there are continuously opportunities at GDS to work on exciting projects like this migration, or broaden your skill sets. But just to recap, would you say there’s anything you’re particularly proud of as a result of this migration?

Kat Stevens: 

The--like the actual how we did the rollout itself like with zero downtime. I thought that was pretty cool. But also maybe kind of like in the ways that we actually worked as a team around it as well because it was quite a long running project. And I think there's some interesting parts about how we like re-reassured ourselves that we were doing the right thing. Like, you know, regular retrospectives, firebreaks like we've mentioned, like how we dealt with unexpected work coming along because [laughs] as well as being like the migration team, we are also kind of the infrastructure team. So any kind of unexpected bits and pieces that came up, it would be our team that, we would have to like temporarily pause the migration work and pick up you know, whatever it was. So how we responded to that and you know how we communicated with each other, I-I think that's kind of a whole, a whole other podcast in itself almost.

Vanessa Schneider: 

It sounds like there is an amazing community that you can tap into to keep up to date, make sure that work isn't being duplicated. And clearly there’s a lot to be proud of regarding the product performance. 

Jonathan Harden: 

Yeah, so something that I found a little different here from other places I've worked, even larger organisations, that actually really helps with the sharing of information: so we, we have various like show and tell type catch-up meetings but for a wider than just your small area of the, of the business. So we have a catch up every week amongst all the infrastructure people. And there we all talk about what are we working on right now; like what things are we looking at in the future; are there challenges that you faced; how is the business as usual stuff going in your area. And conversations often come out of that into: 'oh, you're trying out this new technology?' Or you might, because we have it every week, you might mention like: 'oh we're starting to look at this thing' and you'll hear other people's opinions on either the thing you're trying or what you're aiming at or what they've done.

So we, I was mentioning we're doing this tuning our deployment pipelines, so we have a-a few peo-teams are all doing that as well. And so we have a channel where we're talking about that. And as people are trying things, they're putting in that channel like what they're trying, how it's going, like what the challenges they faced are and, you know, asking for help as well: have other people tried this; what, did you manage to solve this issue or that issue. And I really feel like the collaboration across parts of GDS and the wider Cabinet Office is, is really, really good. within the infrastructure side, it's really good. There's definitely like beyond the infrastructure I do attend, we do have show and tells where people get to show like the thing they're working on that's not just infrastructure related, and that's been, that's really good as well for just understanding like the wider landscape of what's happening across Cabinet Office. And that's that's really, they're really helpful to communicate those things and to work out: 'are we working on the same thing'; 'are you about to start working on the thing that I'm working on'; 'have you already done this and can you give me some pointers'. And that's really good.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Yeah, it’s nice that you've had the opportunity to share your learnings with the community. Do you have any, maybe, more personal reflections on this work perhaps?

Jonathan Harden: 

Yeah. So working at the Cabinet Office, it's the first time I've worked for the Civil Service and I'm very aware it's, it's different than the other roles that I've had because I'm like, I feel like I'm kind of helping wider society. We all have to pay the government for all sorts of things. And Pay supports many different services, including - on a previous version of the GDS podcast, you talk to some of the product people from Pay, and I listened to that before I joined Pay, before I joined GDS, and it was really interesting to hear the esoteric services that we have - but of course we have some, we have some bigger services as well and other government departments coming online all the time. And knowing that the infrastructure we're working on supports the ability for the public to pay things that they need to pay to the government or they want to pay, you know, they, like you said, they might be buying a fishing licence or something like that. And that's, knowing that we make it easier for people to do that and that it's done in a way that focuses on the accessibility of the service so any member of the public can try and pay through us and will have, not reach barriers like their screen reader software can't work with the service. 

These are, knowing that I'm giving this back as part of my role, it makes a big difference to me as an Engineer. It's, it's, it's kind of the first, one of the first times where I've not have some kind of crisis around like, 'oh, am I giving back to society, wider society?'. And now I really feel like I am. And that's a real big part of what's making me so happy here among working on a fantastic team and a great org, and on cool technology, of course.

Vanessa Schneider: 

That's so lovely to hear, Jonathan, [laughs] thank you for sharing. If you are similarly minded and want to try and help wider society, do keep an eye on our careers page. That's: GDS careers dot gov dot uk [gdscareer.gov.uk] for openings. It could be in site reliability engineering, it could be general software developer, it could be very different, but we're always looking for new folks to join us and bring their perspective into the organisation. 

Thank you to Jonathan and Kat for joining me on the episode. If you like it, you can listen to all other episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast, like Jonathan has, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms, and the transcripts are also available on PodBean. 

Goodbye.

Jonathan Harden: 

Toodelo.

Kat Stevens: 

Goodbye!

Our Collecting Information From Users team and a guest from the Home Office share how we’re helping people in government to create accessible, affordable digital forms.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS.

Today, I’m chatting with colleagues about our work supporting teams across government that collect information from users using online forms, paper forms or a combination of the two. We've been partnering with other government organisations to investigate how they're currently collecting this information and what kind of help they might need. Because right now, almost all of the forms on GOV.UK that have been downloaded around 7,000 or so times are PDFs or other document-based forms. Usually they are inaccessible, hard to use, and on average teams spend 8 minutes more on processing the information they collect, compared to online forms. This is bad for users, and also bad for government, as it’s inefficient and misses opportunities for using the data for analysis. Worse, these kinds of forms are growing by approximately 6% every year and we estimate it would take the existing form-building service teams more than 70 years to convert just the existing PDFs into HTML forms.

So I’m joined by Harry Voss, Senior Product Manager, and Moyo Kolawole, Senior User Researcher, from GDS, who are part of a team working on a solution that will make it much easier to digitise existing forms, and make it simpler for people in government to create new digital forms - even if they don’t have technical expertise. I’m also joined by Suzanne Mycock from the Family Policy Unit in the Home Office, who has been contributing to the research our team is conducting.

To kick us off, Moyo, would you please introduce yourself to our listeners?

Moyosore Kolawole:

Sure. Hi I'm Moyo Kolawole. I'm a Senior User Researcher on the Collecting Information from Users team at GDS.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great, thank you. Harry how about you, would you please introduce yourself?

Harry Vos:

Yeah, sure. Hey, folks, I'm Harry Vos, I'm a Senior Product Manager at Government Digital Service. Um, I've been around for like 4 years or something, err, and, err, yeah I’ve been looking at forms and how people collect information from members of the public and businesses, err, since December. So I've been really lucky to be working with some amazing people across government. Thanks for having me.

Vanessa Schneider:

No worries, thank you. And finally, Suzanne, would you like to introduce yourself as well, please?

Suzanne Mycock:

Hi there. My name's Suzanne Mycock. And I'm a Guidance and Forms Editor. I work on the Guidance Rules and Forms team, part of the Family Policy Unit within the Home Office. Err, our team manages 3 of the main tools needed to implement policy, all of which are vital for caseworkers and customers. So that's coordinating secondary legislation, managing guidance and managing application forms.

Vanessa Schneider:

Suzanne, as I mentioned, there is a mountain of work to be done to improve forms, but maybe it would help listeners if you could start us off by explaining how the process of creating or editing forms works for you?

Suzanne Mycock:

So for us it tends to be led by policy teams, so if a policy changes or if a new policy comes into play, sometimes they'll need a, a form to to support the work that they're doing to collect information from end users or applicants. Now, it's not just a case of a policy team coming to us and saying we need a form, we need a paper form, can you go away, create that for us? It’s kind of bigger than that, because it depends on a number of factors.

Many of our forms are now on GOV.UK, they’ve been digitised and, um, that they sort of stand for quite a number of the forms that we used to, we used to be responsible for. Um, that number has has shrunk. But as you just said a few moments ago, we are sort of being asked to create sort of bespoke forms, um, for low usage routes, really, or forms that may not need to be around for years and years. It might just be to suit for a short term policy or a, um,  intermediary policy.

So what happens is a policy team will come to us and say that they need a form. Um, we will then take that to a board and it is up to the board then to decide whether the form will, um, exist as paper or whether it will be digitised on GOV.UK. Um, and as I say, err, that decision basically comes down to the cost, the usage and how long that form would be needed for. So it's kind of, it's all kicked off by policy and rules changes and policy changes. And then if it's decided that, yes, it's it’s suitable to go, err, on a paper, paper form, the policy team will come to us with a basic set of questions that they want to ask, the information that they want to extract from from the applicants. And we will then go away and we'll put that onto, um, our software.

We'll try and build them a form as best as we can that meets accessibility needs, because that obviously is our number one priority, making sure that everything that we produce or try and make sure that things that that we produce going forward is, um, now and going forward, should I say, is as accessible as it possibly can be. Although we do have, sort of, some legacy forms, um, that are based on paper and can only be printed out and filled in by hand.

The, the work that we have on forms tends to come in sort of peaks and troughs so we can be extremely busy on forms, um, or we can have no work to do on forms for, for a while, because as you're probably aware, we don't just work on application forms, we sort of cover a wide spectrum of work than than just application forms. But it tends to be driven largely by things like policy changes. Now, they tended to happen a couple of times a year, but just recently we've sort of had, sort of several changes, um, throughout the year. So, um, we've sort of had a few, a few peaks this year and sort of late last year, err, for various reasons.

But again, it depends on the sort of the, the extent of the changes, because sometimes they're very minor and it could just be changing one question, err, which takes no time at all, or if it's a case of building a brand new form, um, that can actually take with some of the software that we use, um, believe, err, to like, can take a good sort of three days to, to build and pull the accessibility text behind that.

And the reason it takes so long is, is partly because the, the software that we currently use is no longer supported. So it's becoming slower, more clunky, more difficult to work with, and, um, it's very unstable. Err, so that sometimes means that if it's not behaving like it should, it can take us a little bit longer. Err, and of course, it depends how long the form is as well, so if it's a brand new form sometimes it can just be a couple of pages. Other times it can be a 40-page form. Um, so it, it depends on, on those different factors, really.

Policy are the ones who inform whether, whether a form is needed. Um, and policy teams will work with legal representatives, obviously, to make sure that the content of the, the forms is, um, sort of legally upstanding. Um, but it will also work with operational staff to make sure that the, the form is capturing the kind of content that they need to be able to process application forms. Um, and then decisions are also made by the senior management team when it goes to the board to decide on whether it's going to be paper form or whether it's going to be purely, um, digitised. So it's, um, it can be a very sort of fast moving environment, err,  depending on sort of the, the nature of what it is we're involved with, because obviously we've been involved with some sort of high profile areas.

Vanessa Schneider:

I'm actually curious to hear what you think works about this process and what doesn't.

Suzanne Mycock:

I think for, for simplicity purposes, the process works quite well. People know, err, where to go to, to, to ask about forms or to ask for changes or new forms. Um, so I think that works pretty well. People know, um, where they can get that information from.

When people do want changes to forms, it's quite a, err, cost effective way of, of making those changes because we don't have to go to a third party and ask them to make those changes. We can actually physically do it on our team. So it's a cost effective and easy way to make and maintain forms.

I like to think that we are sort of continually striving to make sure that we produce accessible forms, um, accessibility to, to us is obviously ensuring that a, a product is available and can be used by everyone. Um, so that would mean that people with certain conditions or disabilities can access exactly the same information as everybody else and that it is easy to access and to use. And it is something that we are aware of, um, and we want to get better at, at doing that.

We try to talk to specialists. So, um, accessibility specialists in the department and sometimes in other government departments as well to sort of try and glean best practice from them. Um, we are aware of our responsibilities under the accessibility regulations, which is why really we’re, we’re keen to get involved with this project, because the more we can do, err, to make our forms accessible, the better, because we just want to create a service or a product that is going to work for everybody and to take our responsibility seriously. So whilst we may not be 100 percent there, I think we've sort of certainly got the, the ethos on team to to and have the desire to want to be there. And we are happy to engage with anybody who can help us get there. So, um, I, I think we're, we’re doing OK, but we could do a lot better.

Vanessa Schneider:

That makes sense. I was actually wondering, Moyo, you've been conducting a couple of research sessions. Do the things that Suzanne is highlighting chime with what other people on panels have said, or are the responses very varied across what works for them and what doesn't work for them when creating forms?

Moyosore Kolawole:

I think a lot of what Suzanne has said has resonated, um, a lot across the different form builders that we've been able to speak to across government. There’s this real desire to be able to fulfil these accessibility kind of guidelines, um, the 2018 accessibility guidelines. But there is a lack of kind of like time or a lack of, um, knowledge around how exactly to do that. And I think it’s, err, a barrier, like the process of creating accessible forms or knowing what to include to make forms more accessible for, for instance, um, users who might have visual impairments and therefore, you require screen readers to access information how to best design forms for them. There's, it's almost like, a lack of knowledge around how exactly to put it in practice to be able to fulfil these, um, WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines.

And so I think there's a real desire for a solution that not only tackles the problem of inaccessible forms, but also helps kind of upskill those who are creating the forms, um, to learn more about how they can also, you know, be better at thinking with accessibility in mind while designing. Um, so I think a lot of what Suzanne has said has definitely come out in our research.

Vanessa Schneider:

Well, it makes sense that others feel the same way. Um, I was wondering, Harry, there are clearly common themes that are emerging. I was wondering if there's anything that you have a bigger picture on, err, besides potentially the accessibility point that, um, that really speaks to why this needs tackling.

Harry Vos:

So, I mean, our vision being that every single form on GOV.UK is, err, accessible, easy to use and quick to process. And it's in that order, really, I suppose, because accessibility is, is really about, um, people's, err yeah, people's rights under the Equality Act and people, you know, not being discriminated against right. How do we make sure that everybody can complete these forms first time, err, not sort of like battle through this thing that is really tricky to use and get stuck and we've got to call up because I don't know I don't even know what question you're asking me here. I don't actually have that information.

So there's this whole, whole thing that's kind of like around this form design and then and then also about like sort of speed of processing, a lot, we hear from a lot of teams that, um, you know, so many forms come in, err, to to their to their team inbox or, err, to to their in, in, in some circumstances in their post tray, err, and and and the forms don't have the information they need to make a decision about that person or that business or that sector.

And, and so, you know, it was kind of interesting to pick up on what Suzanne was saying around, you know, the policy role as having to work with those operations teams to actually understand like what is it that you need to make that decision about a person. And I suppose if we can if we can speed that up, um, you know, just simply through making sure, does does that form have everything they need to make up the decision, um, err, through you know, the things like sort of validating that that the information that is submitted is is is in the format that we would expect. Um, so if someone has put, err, the, the date of application instead of their date of birth, you know, is that something that we can we can be like, oh that's a really obvious thing. Like, um, well, let's let's fix that. 

So we should see some improvements there as well. And, and, and we reckon, err, just through some, some simple changes to, like, how the information gets collected, should be able to speed up, err, things by, on average 8 minutes per per form and in terms of that just having the right information to make the decision. Um, so it's going to vary from service to service and from form to form. Um, but there's some kind of big improvements we want to make there.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit more about the scale of what you're trying to tackle here.

Harry Vos:

Yeah, it's a it's a it's a big it's a big challenge. Um, I’m not going to lie, err, there’s, there's over 5,000 form pages on GOV.UK and, and each of those, err, can have, you know, any, anywhere, anywhere from between sort of one and in some cases hundreds of of of different forms attached to those pages. Um, so it's a really big, err, challenge.

And and and like you mentioned at the start, um, most of them remain solely as sort of document-based forms, err, which, err, you know, which despite everyone's best efforts, sometimes do you have accessibility problems. And so, um, yeah, it's a really big, it's a big challenge. And I think it's something that the appetite is there. So you know we heard, you know Suzanne you’re mentioning you know you really want to you and your team have got accessibility at heart and you're thinking about how to make this service as easy as possible for people to use.

There's lots of teams that, that that sort of want to do the right thing, err, and, and, and, try and improve those forms. Um, but, yeah, sometimes the sort of software isn't always there, um, for people to sort of, err, to to make those improvements. So it feels like a good opportunity. And yeah, we're hoping that, yeah, if you're if you're listening and the, this issue resonates with you, you know, we'd love to hear from you and find out how we can help you and partner up as well, um, because this is not something that the Government Digital Service can just solve ourselves, we're not just going to sit here and magically make this problem go away. Err, you know, we need, we need to sort of come at this together as as government collectively. So, yeah. Really keen to sort of meet and meet new people and and and listen and and find out about your problems.

Vanessa Schneider:

It definitely feels rewarding being the convenor of this kind of work and, and trying to get everybody, err, around the table on this issue. I was wondering, how are we approaching this process? Obviously, um, we’ve, we've been doing some research. That was the discovery phase. What else, what else is happening?

Harry Vos:

So, um, after we’ve kind of wrapped up our, what we call our sort of discovery research, so trying to understand more about this sort of problems, and whether this is something that our organisation is well positioned to actually affect, um, we kind of like concluded like, yes, this is a problem, that it's not going to sort of go away, and also that, yes, we think we can affect it.

So now we're really in that stage of, OK, we know that there are different ways of, of, of creating a form. Um, and, you know, we have a hunch that, um, online forms that are using, err, sort of web browsers to sort of complete forms and things like that, err, can be more accessible than, err, some of those document-based forms. Err, and that you can do that in a way that doesn't demand that the person creating that form has a sort of strong accessibility awareness because, um, well, Suzanne’s team, like you've got lots of, err, accessibility awareness. Um, sometimes the software isn't, doesn’t always help with that. But, um, there are other teams that are maybe more sort of policy specialists and, and, and people who’re trying to really understand, like, OK, what are the decisions that we want to make about people, err, to, to sort of provide them with some sort of public good, some public service, thinking, maybe more in that sort of like the sort of policy intent space. Err, and, and, and, won’t have those sort of specialist skills. And that's, that's kind of like that, that that should be fine.

And and I think that's the thing we really want to test is, you know, can we provide, um, better, better tooling to, to create those forms, err, without having to to demand that everybody is a specialist, err, designer, or accessibility person or um, that sort of thing. So, um, yeah, we've got a bunch of different, um, prototypes, if you like, of, of different ways of creating forms. Err, and we're going to be working with, err, people like Suzanne to try and sort of test out, OK, if we if we're using this this way of making forms versus the existing way and also what effect does that have on the quality of the forms and the accessibility of the forms, their ease of use, err, that sort of thing, so really excited to sort of start testing these.

It's, it's one thing to sort of try and understand the problem and do that sort of user research and that data analysis in that sort of exploratory phase. But now, when we’re, like, starting to test things, we can say things, like, actually let's - before we get too carried away with it - let's actually find out if that's going to work. So for me, that's the really exciting bit.

Really our goal is to to to compliment some of those existing forms, err, with with online forms that can be completed in a Web browser, err, on on a phone or, or anything, you don't need a printer, don't need any sort of special software to sort of edit it and start completing that form. That's, that is the goal. But, um, in 2018, err, 10% of the UK adult population, err, weren’t using the Internet. So there's clearly a whole bunch of, of people that we must support, err, and continue to support with, err, the existing forms that, that might be more designed around, err, print use.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, Moyo, so Harry's obviously giving us this big overview of what will, what will come up, I was wondering how do you then in practice carry this work on?

Moyosore Kolawole:

Yes, so we're doing some really exciting kind of user research. Um, I think there's a real need to understand our users better.

And one way in which we're trying to do that is like Harry’s saying, testing out these prototypes and kind of seeing behaviour in action: Can our intended users actually even, um, use these ideas that we've come up with in our team huddle and think this will work. Does that actually work in practice? And so I'm really excited to start kind of testing out behaviour in action.

And the way we're doing that is by setting up, um, a research panel of form builders across government with a variety of experience. So if you’ve touched a form once in your entire professional career or you’ve, you’ve just like spent 3 to 5 days working on forms in a given period, like we want to speak to so many different types of civil servants across government who have this, um, experience with form building to become like part of our panel. And our panel basically looks like, um, just being an ongoing research partner with us. When we, err, come up with these ideas, coming in like ripping it to shreds and being like this wouldn't work for this reason because our team is structured in this way or this sounds like a really great way of meeting this potential challenge or I like this idea, but let's reframe it in a different way. I think those people, everyone has a part to play in product development, not just people whose job title kind of reflects a DDaT role. So by DDaT I mean Digital, Data and Technology professionals across the civil service.

I think everyone - from the users that we're intending to solve the problems for, up until the team who are creating the product - have a part to play in, like, kind of, like, defining how this product, um, develops. And so in our research kind of sessions that we’re planning out, we’re testing out some of our riskiest assumptions, um, things that could really like test our product when we come into development, um, things such as do people even need a form builder? is one of our riskiest assumptions that we need to test.

And this is a time to do it in our alpha phase, where we've understood that there's a problem and we're trying to now understand what the solution to that problem is going to be. We, we’re making sure that we're being really kind of broad and wide in our thinking of how to solve the problem, but making sure that we're trying to solve the problem with our users in mind. And that comes right back down to ensuring that our research sessions are really kind of, like, full with people who have a variety of experience, who have a variety of, kind of, like, knowledge around the form space to really help us understand what works and what doesn't work.

And I think one thing that for me is quite exciting due to my background is that, um, this is also a behaviour change project ultimately. It's not just product development. We're trying to understand how can we shift people away from doing X to do Y. And I think a lot of the time what came out in this exploratory research is that, established ways of working are really like kind of confined and that ultimately like kind of impacts how people create or view the creation of forms. And so if we are trying to create a product, we don't want to just slip into established ways of working.

Why would we use a GDS, for instance, form-builder or something that GDS promoted for us to use? We need to ensure that people understand, like this is why we believe this tool is better to use for form creation than this tool because of these reasons. And this is what, how we think it will help you in your ways of working. And so we also need to do some kind of thinking and research around how our users behave around form creation and what we can learn about how we need to kind of like create, um, interventions or triggers or nudges to encourage people to change their current ways of behaviour with the view of accessibility in mind. Um, and so we're doing kind of really interesting parallel research at the same time, we've got that testing, but we've also got that behaviour understanding, um, element as well, which I'm really looking forward to.

Vanessa Schneider:

So you mentioned the alpha phase. Do you mind just telling me quickly, what does that refer to?

Moyosore Kolawole:

Yeah, sure. So in any kind of product life cycle, you split it into the discovery, alpha and then beta stage, um, and the discovery stage is mainly where you kind of explore the problems faced, you have knowledge that there is a problem. You're not quite sure exactly what it is. You're using that space to explore all the different facets of the problem before coming down to, OK, this is exactly what problem we're going to tackle, um, going forwards. So the alpha phase, um, is when you take that problem that you've identified and you start kind of concept testing solutions to that problem, you're not defined to, um, a specific solution. And it's all about kind of like using that space to explore different ways to solve the problem that you've identified in that discovery phase, before moving onto the beta stage where you're starting to test out some prototypes that you probably defined normally in that alpha stage of how are you going to, like, solve the problem. You start testing out with private, um, partners or collaborators who can give you ongoing feedback about how your product is doing and to solve that problem. Um, so that's really what an overview of the kind of product life cycle is. Um, and so when I say we're in the alpha phase, we're in that stage by where we’re, we've got the problem, we understand the problem space a lot more. But now we're trying to, kind of, idea around how exactly to solve that problem.

Vanessa Schneider:

No, it's really wonderful to get an insight into how methodical your approach is. I hope that's very comforting to people who haven't even heard about this work that it's ongoing and who are interested in contributing to it. Like both Harry and Moyo have mentioned, if it sounds like this might help your service team, why not get in touch with us and help us in building a solution that will work for everyone. It doesn't matter if you are in Digital, Data or Technology, Moyo did say, um, if you have anything remotely to do with forms, this could benefit you. This does bring me to Suzanne. I was wondering how it was that you became involved with the GDS team. What convinced you that this was worthwhile doing?

Suzanne Mycock:

I think for our team, I, I, I'd like to think that we, we want to be an exemplar, um, as far as sort of forms creation is concerned. Um, and I think I kind of, sort of, said to, to Harry at the time, it was music to our ears, because the more help we can get to create the forms that we want to create, that the better, really. Um, and we sort of looked to, to people such as Harry and Moyo and, and various other colleagues who have more experience than we do and who probably, um, are better placed to, to tell us what, what we need to do to meet accessibility requirements.

So to work with, with you is, is absolutely fantastic for us because it just gives us, at the end of the day, it’s going to give us the confidence to know that we are producing the right kind of forms for the people that use them. Um, and that ultimately is, is our goal.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you. Um, so to take things back a couple of steps in time. This isn’t new work. Technically. Harry, I think you know a little bit about the history of this. Would you mind sharing with listeners why this is different?

Harry Vos:

Yeah, for sure. Like I said, I've been, I've been looking at forms since sort of December time, but there are a whole bunch of people that know way, way, way more about forms than we do. So, yeah, whether, yeah, it's learning from Suzanne, whether it's learning from, um, the amazing group of people in the cross-government form building community. So, so people that have been, you know, testing out different form building technologies and approaches that we can learn so much from.

So and and and going back even further there was a team at the Government Digital Service called the GOV.UK Submit team, and they were also looking at sort of similar problem, at around how to how to sort of tackle all of these these these document based forms on GOV.UK and and make them much easier to use. And sort of quicker to process. I think, I think there's a couple of things that that, err, that we can sort of, err, many, many things we can learn from that community and that group of people, if you like.

So one thing is the actual way that form building works on a sort of technical level of how do you configure the questions and how do you make sure that once you've done that configuration, the resulting form is accessible and easy to use and quick to process. A lot of that really hard work’s been done. And so we can sort of learn from, from all those teams, which is just, yeah, we're extremely grateful for.

Some of the technology that they’ve developed is, is, is really, like, advanced, err, when it comes to sort of building accessible forms. And we think that, um, although that might be targeted at, err, sort of digital specialists as the users, if we can take advantage of of some of those technologies and but make them sort of simple enough for for for someone who isn't a sort of techie person, err, to use. Um, we think that there is a lot of benefit we could get from sort of reusing that. Um, so as opposed to us just starting completely from scratch. So then that way I think we're very fortunate.

Suzanne Mycock:

That's kind of great for, for somebody like me to sort of hear, because we're often deemed to be forms experts and we're not because we don't you know, we're not specialist designers. And sometimes it can make you feel a little bit exposed sometimes, when people come to you and expect you to have the answers for everything and to be able to build something um, when we're not really equipped with the right, err, sort of knowledge to do that, we're not really the experts.

So if, as, as Harry's kind of said, we could sort of pinch bits from from platforms that especially designers do use and make it, um, simple to use for people like myself who who don't have that specialist knowledge, but people come to, to create the forms, that would put us in a very sort of, err, good position really, um, and give us a confidence as well to know that we can use this the software and equipment that we've been given. But neither are we sort of expected to be sort of a specialist designer, or a specialist as such.

Harry Vos:

Suzanne if, if it’s, if it's any consolation. I studied design for, for like four years, err, and I still don't know my way around some of these softwares are just really quite complicated and, err, and then and then we try and sort of use that for forms because it's the sort of best thing we've got for now, like that it's always going to be a little bit of, err, a strange transition. Just kind of reflects moving from sort of paper to digital, if you like. So fingers crossed we can find something.

I suppose that where things are slightly different is so since the GOV.UK Submit team, um, the accessibility regulations sort of came into force the, sort of, following year. Um, and, and I think that's really sort of changes prioritisation, if you like, um, because whereas before the focus was maybe on the sort of efficiency side of things like can we reduce the waiting time to hear back about an application or whatever government service they're trying to access. That might've been sort of the goal back then. It is still sort of one of our goals, but I suppose, it’s kind of looked at things in a broader perspective. So when you broaden things out, you start to look at, um, you know, some of those lower volume services as well. So, um, you know, a lot of the Digital teams, they’re typically working on some of those higher volume services like get a passport, things that are sort of very commonly used, you've got some brilliant digital teams across government behind them.

You go down a little bit and so you start to look at sort of under 100,00 transactions per year, you start to go down into that sort of median volume bracket. And then there you've got some sort of digital teams maybe working on something for some of the time. So just to sort of roughly explain that model. Um, you've generally got a technology platform that does the sort of form building, but actually that is designed for specialist designers and user researchers, err, and developers. Um, that's a platform that then supports a team of people to then go and support the policy and the operations teams that are going to be designing and running that form, providing a service to them. And that's just like a really brilliant model that works fantastically for those medium volume services. You're going to get something like that that’s, that's really easy to use, accessible, quick to process. That, that's great.

But unfortunately, that approach is still too expensive for the vast majority of services because the vast majority of services are actually quite low volume. So you've got a lot of, sort of what we might call, like, niche, niche services, but, um, like “pay tax as a minister of religion” or “apply for an exemption for, err, electronic waste”. Err, yeah, this is kind of like fairly like specific niche services the government has to provide, and, and that ultimately won't ever be able to sort of afford like a full digital team on them, or even, a sort of a digital team for sort of part of the time. And so it's like, okay, that's the majority of government services. What can we do to help, help those teams take, take advantage of, of online forms and things like that with those goals of accessibility, ease of use and speed of processing in mind.

Vanessa Schneider:

It's true, our government services are for everyone. So don't be shy, listeners. If you don't work on forms, maybe you know somebody who does: get in touch with our team. How can they get in touch with you? How do they get involved with this?

Harry Vos:

That's a great question. Err, our team email address is [email protected] Now that's a real mouthful.

Moyosore Kolawole:

But yeah, we're really keen that throughout this entire process of kind of concept, testing, product development, et cetera, we’re really collaborative, um, with a whole variety of people, from people who are just really interested in what we're doing and those who have any sort of experience in this whole form creation process across government, no matter what your job title might look like. So we'd really encourage you to get in touch and keep up to date with what we're, we’re doing, if you have the relevant experience. And also just like super interested in our work, we'd love to hear from you and learn from you, um, as we go through this entire process.

Vanessa Schneider:

All right, so thank you to our guests for joining me on the podcast, as it's such important work to tackle this challenge and supporting your colleagues across government who may not have that much resource or knowledge, as we just shared. Just to remind listeners, again, if you work on a service that requires information from users and you use forms to collect this information, please get in touch with the team so we can ensure that the solution works for you, too. And if you like this episode, you can listen to all other episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast and all other major podcast platforms. The transcript is also available on Podbean. Goodbye.

Harry Vos:

Thanks for listening.

Moyosore Kolawole:

Thanks for listening, bye.

We discuss lessons learned when it comes to digital identity, the importance of cross-government collaboration, and how other service teams can get involved.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS.

Today, we will expand on our plans to remove unnecessary complexity by developing one inclusive and accessible way for people to log in to all government services online. An easy way to prove their identity just once, that also gives them control over who has access to their data and why.

I'm joined by Will Myddelton, Product Manager, and Helena Trippe, Senior Service Designer, both in the Digital Identity programme here at GDS, as well as Tom Stewart, Assistant Head of Modernisation at Veterans UK, that have been working with GDS to test their technology and processes. So let's start with you Will, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?

Will Myddelton:

Of course, Vanessa. Hi everyone. I'm Will, I'm a Product Manager on our Identity workstream. And what that means is on Digital Identity, we've split the work into 3 streams. We have one for authentication, we have one for identity, and we have one for managing data. And my work is to lead the work on our 3 teams that are thinking about the identity part of that puzzle. And as a Product Manager, really, my role is to set the direction that we're going in. And the way that we really do that is by building a shared understanding between all of the different teams so that we all understand the problem that we're working on, with the goal that we can work as the wonderful autonomous human individuals that we are. 

Vanessa Schneider:

Fantastic, thank you Will. Helena, how about you, would you please introduce yourself?

Helena Trippe: 

So my name is Helena. I'm a Service Designer in Will's team and in the Digital Identity stream. I have been in the programme since, for-for a year now. And it's really, really fantastic to see the excitement growing both within the programme and also across service teams for the work that we're doing. And it's growing in momentum all the time.

And my role within the team has really been to act as a little bit of a glue. We're a multidisciplinary team: we have User Researchers, we have Interaction Designers, we've got Business Analysts and trying to make sure that we are feeding in a lot of the learning back into the product development as we iterate and learn from service teams.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great. Thank you, Helena. Finally, Tom, would you like to introduce yourself as well, please?

Tom Stewart:

I'm Tom Stewart. I work for Veterans UK, a pillar of Defence Business Services, part of the Ministry of Defence. I'm the service owner for a service called the Armed Forces Compensation and War Pension Scheme. Essentially the, the service is: if you are, if you are a service person or you were a service person and you have an injury or a condition that you believe is attributable to your time in the service, then you may be entitled to some form of compensation. And we're, we're digitising what was previously a bit of a paper heavy service. I run, I-I lead a little multidisciplinary team. And my role was the, the kind of overall responsibility for the development and the, the operation and the, the continuous improvement of the scheme.

Vanessa Schneider:

Fantastic. Thank you, Tom, for introducing yourself as well. So there are people who might not be following GDS's work within the digital identity space, it's hard to believe, Will and Helena, but can you tell me about what your team has been working on?

Will Myddelton:

Anyone that's been working in government over the last 10 years knows that GDS has worked on a product called Verify for a long time, and Verify came from a really good place. It is a real common need of service teams to be able to check the identity of their users. We knew that right after we made GOV.UK right back at the start of GDS and Verify was started to address that need.

The pandemic was a, a really big event for digital identity in the UK. Verify usage shot up. But at the same time it magnified all the problems that there were. And so in last year's spending review, the government committed money back to GDS, which given some of the reputation we've got for doing digital identity in the past, but we're really honoured to, to be trusted to do this, to tackle digital identity from the centre of government once again.

And so what we've been doing since really 1 April - like that's when our, our funding settlement came in and we've got a year of funding - is we've really been trying to work out what the right approach to tackle digital identity this second time around is.

And we've had to be really open with ourselves and with the people that we speak to. And believe me, people around government are open with us about what we've got wrong with Verify. But we've also had to be open to the fact that there were some things that we got right in Verify that we're going to continue. So since 1 April, we've done a discovery period on identity and we did twin discoveries, one into the needs of end users and one into the needs of service teams.

And then from June until where we are now, we've been in an Alpha. And so what we're doing in our Alpha is experimenting with different ways that we can do digital identity better at GDS for the whole of government; and particularly how we can, this time round, design a digital identity product based on the needs of service teams.

Because my observation from having worked on Verify in 2015 and then having worked on, like, the next generation of platform products that we made in GDS - like I was involved in the Notify Alpha and Beta and I worked on Pay and I worked on all those Government as a Platform Products - is that by the time we started those, we'd changed our stance on how we thought about developing products for the whole of government.

By the time we came to 2015 and did all those Government as a Platform products, we had to instead develop things that were so good that services wanted to use them. And we developed a number of ways of thinking about product development for platforms that are going to be used by service teams across government in that 3 years, 2015 to 2018.

And so really why I'm here and what we're trying to do in our Alpha is, we're trying to apply those techniques to a very, very complicated and slightly overwhelmingly complex space of digital identity. We're trying to design a product that solves digital identity for the UK users of government services in a way that service teams will adopt because they love it.

Helena Trippe:

And if I can add a little bit of the how, I guess, in terms of how we've been delivering that: we started very early on, even in Discovery stage as, as we've moved into the Alpha, kind of honed that a little bit more, to work very collaboratively with service teams, engaging them early on and trying to really put things in front of them so we get their feedback quite quickly and working iteratively to, to make sure that we can test their expectations. We can understand kind of how they understand identity, what are their mental models around it, that we can also start testing how we are communicating these things to really get feedback really quickly and iteratively and kind of engage them throughout the process. So that's, that's kind of something that we started through the discovery and are continuing to do that through the Alpha. And I believe we'll continue to do and, and grow as we, as we move on.

Will Myddelton: 

We're, we are trying to make it easier to access government services where every user has a single set of credentials, typically username and password, that they can use to access any government service in the future so that users don't have to remember lots of different passwords, but also so that like new and exciting things can happen with the future of digital services, where we can start to think about sharing data more easily between services.

And so a key part of that: digital identity is no longer a standalone thing for us. Digital Identity is really a feature of your login to government or your GOV.UK account.

So at the point at which a service like Universal Credit knows that, it needs to know that you are who you say you are to pay you our money, the idea is that you will be logged in with your account, you will do an identity check that will allow Universal Credit to pay out money to you. But then that identity check result will be saved so that every other service that you use after Universal Credit doesn't have to go through the same process. So there's a huge user benefit there, which means you don't have to do this very difficult process again and again.

And there's actually a huge government benefit there, which is that we can start to design services that expect you to be who you say they are, which, which opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Thank you so much for sharing with us, yeah, what, what you are working on. I was wondering, why is this work important for government service teams?

Will Myddelton:

That's a really good question. So...like with all the platforms that GDS makes for government service teams, we've got 2 sets of users and the really obvious one is the end users. And it's really important that we get the identity journeys right for them. But the less obvious one and the one that it's always taken us a while to work out how to design for are service teams around government. So we've done maybe 50 different interviews and research sessions so far with service teams about identity over the last 6 weeks.

And I think there's, there's kind of a few big reasons: one is that it makes identity checks easier for their users. Checking people's identity documents is often quite an onerous process in government. You might have to go down to the Post Office and hand stuff over. You might have to go to have an interview with a passport examiner. You might have to send your passport away - like there's lots of examples where passports are sitting in envelopes in government like processing centres, and that means the user doesn't have that passport for a long time. So services care a lot about their users. And so making things easier for the users when it comes to these difficult things like proving your identity, that's a really big benefit to the service teams.

A second thing that has come out of the research is that, services care a lot about including all their users. So one of the things when we talk about identity that service teams are very worried about is that, yeah, there can be a digital journey that might work for people that have like high strength identity documents, like passports and driving licences and are able to do things digitally online - and that's fine for those users.

But services are very worried about people that don't fit into that group, and that's a lot of people. And so they're worried about that for a couple of reasons. One: because the people that run services are generally really good people and they care. Like they just care, and they want to include everyone that should be able to use their service. And if we're running an identity check and that's the thing that excludes them, then that's a real problem.

But the other reason that service teams care a lot about this is: cost. And it costs service teams an awful lot to, any time someone can't do something in a kind of automated routine way, and that service team has to do manual processing or they have to procure a contract with a supplier so that the people can go and do things with them. So there is actually like a quite a hardcore cost saving element as well, which is that the less inclusive our platform is or identity checks are, the greater the burden of cost, time and effort the service teams have to bear.

Really, what guides all our work at GDS about platforms for service teams is that: we think that service teams should be able to spend their budgets and their time and their human creativity solving the problems that are unique to their service and identity is not really a unique problem. So really behind all of our work is this goal to save service teams time and money by not focussing on problems that everyone has, and instead to be able to focus on their unique users and the service that they're doing.

Helena Trippe: 

I think in terms of the findings that we've been seeing through the research, is that service teams really want to be able to do the right thing. So as part of the, the product page concept testing, we started to see that as they kind of engage with information, particularly around like choosing the right level of strength or understanding what documents can be used, they're constantly kind of making those calculations in their head around kind of what's the right trade off, for the sets of users that I'm, I-I need to kind of make sure that I get through my service.

But also, I think another aspect, that for me was really interesting was that we, we also need to kind of be, be aware that we're trying to kind of give them the tools and the information also to make a case internally; to be able to help them convince, I guess, external and internal stakeholders and decision makers about why this is a good thing to, to, to use in the dot. And that, that was really, really, really mind-blowing, at least for me [laughs], in terms of making sure that we can get them to see themselves in, in, in the tools and the information that we're providing.

Vanessa Schneider:

That’s great to know. Obviously we have a service owner present which is priceless, so if you don’t mind me asking, Tom, what are your thoughts on this?

Tom Stewart:

Yeah, I thought perhaps I could add a bit of colour to some of the things that Will and Helena are saying. So when you consider our users, you know, a great deal of our users are, are veterans right? And I say the word veteran, and, and I'm going to guess that many people listening today, your, your mind immediately went to a 90-year old Chelsea pensioner with a red coat.

But of course a, a veteran can be 17 years old, a veteran can be someone who's had one day’s service, accidentally shot themselves in the foot and, and are, are out of the service. And that person is still, is still you know very much a veteran. But that person is a, you know, a lot more digitally literate than the, probably than t-t-the Chelsea pensioner.

I suppose what I'm saying is the, going back to Will's point, i-it was about inclusivity. You know, that's very much at the front of our minds as we, as we develop this service. Cost, yes, i-it, but, of course it factors in. Making it easier for our teams, yes, absolutely vital.

But the, the, the last thing that I don't think I've heard mentioned yet is also, it's about, it's about plugging into the kind of strategic landscape. So my, my ability to, to verify users, has, has a much wider applicability for our business. So, yes, it's great I can use it for Armed Forces Compensation, War Pension - fantastic. But there's so much more that I can do with that. And actually, once we have done all of the work with the integration et cetera, we can quickly pivot at that point to right, ok, we've cracked this. We're answering a whole question. Now what can we do for these people over here? 

Helena Trippe: 

What we started to see as well is particularly from speaking to local authorities - so we have been speaking to a few local authorities as part of the, the, the research process, that almost identity is an enabler for them to do all sorts of things, including getting staff onto the systems to be able to allocate work or do casework or, or process council tax information. 

Vanessa Schneider:

That is brilliant to hear. So I know that within 4 months, you've talked to more than, I don't know, it's been hundreds and hundreds of end users, multiple dozens of service teams. I'm really keen to find out what it is that you've learnt so far?

Will Myddelton: 

Yeah, I mean, there are new learnings too. So talking about the approach we've taken, I think it's important to talk about that, that we take 2 different approaches when we're thinking about designing the service team.

So, so the one that we talk about mostly here is, is a very bottom-up approach. It's recognising that services are delivered by small groups of motivated people working in a really distributed government, where actually sometimes the lines of communication and control from the top of the department are not always clear. So sometimes sitting at the centre of government, it looks like you can make a change around government by speaking to the departments and that that will filter down. But our experience with Government as a Platform is that's, that's absolutely the opposite of what's going on here. 

So we have a 2-pronged approach to how we think about designing with service teams. One is that we, we, we want to speak to people who are working in service teams, any people - Product Managers, Technical Architects, caseworkers, policy people - because these are teams of people and they, they vary considerably around government, so we want to speak to people who are thinking about identity.

And the reason we want to speak to them is: we need to be able to do a user-centred design process with those people that might include, like interviewing them about their context and their needs or showing them prototypes of what we're doing and seeing how they land with them and how we're talking about it or like actually watching them integrate with our system. So when we're, got some documentation, sitting them in with Developers and watching them go through our onboarding steps. And all of that is in service of: we're trying to shape the product to meet their needs and then we're trying to communicate about the product in a way that makes it clear that we meet their needs and then we're trying to make the product easy to use so that there are no barriers to them using it.

Unfortunately, in government, like there is no like recruitment agency that goes out and finds us service teams and there is no list of service teams in government. So what we really have to do, and we learnt this on Notify and Pay and Government as a Platform, is we have to generate hype about what we're doing and then have people come to us. And that's a really good test for us, because what it says to us is: if what you're doing is not exciting, you're not going to generate demand, which doesn't give you people for research, which means you can't generate a product that meets user needs. So it's a really high bar for us to go through. But that's the bar that, that makes this stuff work for us; is we have to generate excitement and then turn that excitement into research sessions with people that haven't seen our product before and then use that to develop a product that really excites people. It's like a little virtuous circle.

So we spent a bunch of time setting up that process and part of why we're on this podcast and talking about it so that anyone that hears this that works on a service team or knows people that work on a service team is thinking about identity, we would love you to get in touch and take part in our research. It's fun. Like we are really, you know respectful people, we're here to understand your stories. And you will get to play with the early versions of our prototypes and our product and you will get to influence direction. So that's the bottom-up approach.

But we also are not naive. We understand that there is a top-down approach as well. So we are out engaging with all of the major departments that provide identity solutions. In the last couple of weeks, I've been in really quite amazing sessions with HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs], DWP [Department for Work & Pensions], Home Office - these people that have been grappling with identity for years, and they're very graciously sharing their learnings and their challenges and things that they should tell us to watch out for.

But Vanessa, what you really asked is what we've learnt, so one of the things that we've learnt is that we, we do have to be able to talk about how we're different to Verify, because people that think about digital identity know about Verify. And unless we mention it, it's the elephant in the room. So, so there are 4 ways that we're different to Verify. 

The first is that we're really focussed on the idea that this is for everyone this time. We didn't do inclusion well enough on Verify. We've got a team of people, we've got objectives, long-term objectives and goals in our programme, set around making sure that we don't exclude people. So that's one really big way.

A second way that we're different is that we don't have what are called third-party identity providers. So the way that Verify worked is you would have to pick a private sector company to verify your identity. And what it really did was it separated us from all the performance data that we should have been using to improve the system, because all of that was hidden away from us in these third-party companies by design. But it meant it was really hard for us to make incremental improvements to our product. 

The third way that we're really different is that we're not taking a one-size-fits-all approach. Verify had a very much all-or-nothing approach. You set the level of identity that you wanted and people either passed or they failed. And if they failed, firstly, the service didn't get any information about why they failed or what they'd passed on. And secondly, the user had to enter all that information again next time around. None of it was saved.

So we're experimenting with lots of different ways this time that we can take a much more nuanced approach to help pass across information about the 'was successful' to the service teams so they can pick that up and do their own checks on the service if they need to. And on the user side, anything they've already entered and already passed is saved for any future identity check.

And then the final way, which you'll hear me go on about and you are hearing me go on about till I'm blue in the face, is that we are designing with the needs of service teams from day one. So I know we said that it can't all be about what's different from Verify, but it is really important for us to talk to teams about what is different from Verify as a way to show that we have learnt.

Helena Trippe:

In terms of the findings, but also I guess what's really exciting from a service design point of view is that we've also been kind of trying to understand, how - within the constraints that we, we need to operate within - so, you know, making sure that we deliver something that's easy to use, that's simple enough, so that it's not too complicated in either for us to build or for service teams to integrate with, having and exploring, I guess, where the identity check might be fitting in within a service journey.

So we started to see from the early discovery work, but also some of the prototype testing that we were doing on the product page, how people were kind of trying to understand as well, “well, how do I fit the identity processing, the identity journey within my, within my own kind of service journey?”.

But also kind of, again thinking through those trade-offs that they're making. So: “ok, so if I put it in the beginning of the journey, will that create too much of a barrier for my users? Or if I put it at the end of the journey, will that allow me then at least to collect all the eligibility information that the applicant has submitted and then take a view as to whether the applicant can actually go ahead with this particular identity journey or another identity journey that might be available?”. So that, that was really interesting to, to see and kind of see the appetite as well for, for that. 

I was just going to add, I guess that, a thank you, actually, for your service teams. I think they've been incredibly generous with their time, incredibly generous with their knowledge. We've, we're learning. And it, and no, no matter how many times you go out to speak to people, you kind of always, I'm always amazed at how, how generous people are in terms of sharing their time, their knowledge and what they've, what they've learnt. So a big thank you.

Will Myddelton:

Yeah, I-I-I totally agree with that, Helena. So I think that, from the 50 research sessions we've done with service teams about identity so far, I think there's 3 big questions that we know we need to answer really early on in that service team’s experience of our product.

So the first one is: “what on earth is an identity check and how does it fit in with my existing service?” And the reason that's so important to answer is because until we've, like, communicated the ways that our identity checks can fit in, you know, whether it's at the beginning or the end or at multiple points in a service, is really difficult to talk about, like the other benefits of them, right? 

As soon as teams understand that, they move on to the second question, which is, “ok, fine. But how do I know this is going to work for all of my users?” And the research that we've done over the last 2 or 3 weeks has really led us to think that there's 3 ways that we need to talk about that.

One is we need to talk about how accessible our product and our identity checks will be. But to be honest, service teams just expect that we will do that and we expect that we will do that as well. So that's more of a reassurance than a, a big question. 

The 2 things that we really need to talk about and be clear when it comes to inclusion are: what documents people can use - because services are very aware that not everyone has passports and driving licences, so we need to be very clear that our system allows people to use many more documents to prove their identity than simply driving licences and passports - and secondly, and I think the thing that has emerged really strongly from the research, is we need to talk much more convincingly about what it means to do identity checks in different channels.

And then the third question that we need to answer, which, let's be honest, is not a question of any service thing comes to us with, but as a result of the way that we're thinking about the product, is: “what are these 3 strengths of identity check or 4 strengths of identity check? And how do I pick the one that is right for my service?”

And I think this is the hardest thing that we face because it's quite a weird, abstract thing, these strengths of identity check. Because for each strength of identity check - we, we call them low, medium, high and extra high - you might choose a higher strength if you're doing something risky, like paying out money, and a lower strength if you're doing something less risky, like letting a user view some non-controversial data about themself.

But it's really hard to help services see themselves in that strength system because what you're doing in that strength system is you're trading off, like, risk of fraud and risk of security by going higher, but the higher you go, the fewer people are going to be able to complete that check because the harder it gets. And we're, we're really focussing on how we can explain that in a way that makes those trade-offs obvious to users.

And I think if I step back from those 3 questions, I think we've learnt something bigger in the last few weeks, which feels like a bit of an 'a-ha' moment for us, which is that the strength of the check plus the document that the user brings and the channel that the user does it in, combines to create a unique user journey for that context. And because it's combinatorial - there are 4 strengths, you might have 10 documents, each of which can be checked 2 or 3 ways across 4 channels - you're talking about hundreds of unique user journeys.

And so I think the thing that we've learnt over the last few weeks is that our core challenge is helping service teams understand what is going on with that weird, like, multiplicity of user journeys because they're going to be sitting in the service’s journey. So they need to know, before they even think about how to integrate, they need to understand the implications of those things. 

And I'll say, I'll say one more thing that we’ve learnt: there is sometimes a tension between the things that our service team users need and that our job is to resolve that tension. So on the one hand, service teams need widely inclusive identity checks, and on the other hand, in research, service teams expect to be able to do things like specify which documents they will accept or which channels their users can use.

But actually, if you think about the user journey, is the result of strength plus document plus channel: the service only gets to choose the strength. Because the user gets to choose the document they have and the user gets to choose the channel. Services can't choose the documents and they can't choose the channels because that widens the inclusion of the product, which is a bigger need for service teams. And we've learnt that there is sometimes a tension between the, the different needs that service teams have. And we're going to have to do a better job of explaining why our product has decided to, to do things in a certain way.

Vanessa Schneider:

Well, I was going to ask you, Tom, Will mentioned a bit earlier in his answer that hype is necessary in order to generate interest of service teams. Is this conversation the kind of hype that drew you in?

Tom Stewart:

Absolutely. I-I-I love this conversation. I love the process of, of user research from beginning to end. I can absolutely attest to the, to the fun part that Will mentioned. We're having some great conversations with, with GDS and your teams just now. I-I'm particularly sensitive around content, around the language. So I, so I think I've been particularly challenging with some of your content design team about, the use of particular words and things like that. You know, all in, all in, for the best possible reasons, you know, to get the, to get the best result, best product.

We've, we've also had some particularly interesting conversations in Defence around that, again, the, the levels that, that we've been talking about. And a-again, I'm sitting here nodding away, whilst Will was talking. So, again, some really rich conversation.

To get back to your question, it was about the hype. And absolutely, yep, yep. We've, we've been caught up in that. We are encouraging it. We are, we're helping that, we're helping that, that that hype, we're helping to keep that going basically. I've been involved in this work for some, well really from its inception.

And I-I think it's absolutely a vital part of my role that I go back to Defence and I'm really, really quite loud about this work, you know. Anyone that will listen, anyone I think should listen or should know about this is hearing about this work because of the work that we're doing in Veterans UK. The, the, the hype is essential.

Vanessa Schneider:

[laughs] Brilliant. Well we're always looking forward to new listeners. I was wondering, how is it that you found out that this work was happening? How did the first contact to the GDS team get established?

Tom Stewart:

So, so I was one of those teams where Verify was a, an integral part of our, the technical solution. But we, you know, we engaged uh, with GDS and said, “right, how can we-- you know, presumably you've, you've got something in the pipeline. You know you're developing something new. How do we, how can we help you with that? You know, how can my, how can my user research assist you? You know, how can my Service Designer assist what, what you're doing over there? You know, can we, can we share our work?”

Vanessa Schneider:

That makes a lot of sense, it's great to see that the relationship has been such a productive one from the beginning. Well, in that case, Will, Helena, I just want to know, are there more opportunities for service teams to get involved with you? How do they do that if it's the case?

Will Myddelton:

I mean, yes, of course, there are. Like we're, we're, we're built on the goodwill of colleagues around government. Our products are only as good as the amount of, like, colleagues that volunteer their time to take part in research sessions.

The easiest way is to go to: sign hyphen in dot service dot GOV.UK [sign-in.service.gov.uk] and you'll see the GOV.UK sign product page and there's a big button on there called 'register your interest'. And whether you're interested in just login and authentication, which is what that page is mainly about, or whether you are interested in identity, if you register your interest on that page, one of our researchers will be in touch with you to do a preliminary interview to understand what your needs are, and then we triage that and you will be involved in one of our research sessions that is most appropriate to you and your service.

Please get involved. And some of the kind of research that we're likely to do over the next few months: some of it is like concept research - like there's going to be this product in the future, like how do you talk about how it would meet your needs or what wouldn't meet your needs? So that, that's really helping us design what the future state is, which then helps us design all the steps to get there.

And we also simultaneously doing research on the authentication products that we have launched first. So that's about like the first use of that as in your team. So if you want to integrate authentication and GOV.UK accounts into your service, you can, we're going to be doing research with people that look at the, the onboarding steps. Because what we've learned from doing these platform products in the past is that: it's not easy to onboard these platform products. And the way that we need to talk about it gets shaped by you know, round after round after round of that research.

So yeah, we really value that. And like Tom has said, we think they're actually quite fun experiences to be part of as well.

Vanessa Schneider:

Right, brilliant. So you've heard it, folks, get in touch. We've clearly covered a lot of ground already, but I was wondering maybe, Helena, you could start us off with telling us what's next for you.

Helena Trippe:

So, as Will suggested, we've kind of, as part of the, the, the research that we've been doing in the past 6 weeks, we've been very much focussing maybe a year, 18 months ahead, looking at the future of, the future state, of the identity product: trying to understand how teams and service teams engage with those concepts to also understand whether we are understanding it in the right way as a programme and have consistency, in terms of what we're talking about, particularly around kind of strength levels.

But I think for, for us now, there's a lot of focus on supporting as well the onboarding for the authentication journey, including looking at some of the support models in the service, management models around supporting users and service teams to link up with the authentication side of things and the sign on side of things. So that's quite exciting. I think we're very much trying to explore the extent as well of the self-service kind of model for support and what we can put in place to make sure that people feel supported, but also that it's not too much of a burden for us and service teams to, to be able to deliver that.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great, Tom, how about you, where do you see this going next for you?

Tom Stewart:

So we, we're squaring up for a Beta assessment towards the autumn this year. Which is very exciting. And there's a lot work going on just now to work out, to, to work out where precisely this work with GDS, where that lands. Like you know, should I, should I postpone the Beta perhaps for a more, for a more complete service or do I just turn up at the Beta with you know, very clear plans as to what my, what my plans are for the future and hope that I can still make a compelling, convincing case that we should be able to go live in the interim. So there's a lot of really rich conversation going on around that just now.

And otherwise, the plan is to-to very much pester you and GDS and make sure that we, that we stay as close to the front of the queue as possible, to continue working with you to continue to take your advice, but also hopefully to continue to have some of our advice received in kind. So, yeah, very exciting times for us in general.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Well, consider yourself forewarned [laughs] Tom told you he'd pester you. Will, do you want to round us off with what you think's up next for you?

Will Myddelton:

So we got a new Director, Natalie Jones, who's joining us in September. And that's really exciting. She comes with a huge amount of experience of delivering really innovative and you know, worthwhile, usable, workable digital identity products with the Home Office. So we're really excited about Natalie joining our programme.

Beyond that, identity work goes through its alpha self-assessment in September. So our identity teams are all hyper-focussed on that. A little bit nervous. Little bit excited. Getting people from around government to mark our work is a sign of a robust assessment process. And so we're, we're proud to take part in that. But it is also you know, tough, as anyone that's been through service assessment will attest.

And we are going live with the first service that will be using GOV.UK Signin for authentication, and that will be in October. So that's a really big deal for us. And Helena talks about we're focussing on supporting the delivery of that. So we're downing tools on some of our identity concept work for just a few weeks so that we can make sure that that launch goes smoothly because all of our identity work builds on top of the authentication work.

Vanessa Schneider:

I have to say, I am really excited by the picture that you're painting, so I can't wait to see how it goes. 

Thank you for joining me today on the podcast. It's been really great to hear how GDS is co-designing this work with other parts of government, hearing how it's being received by those parts of government, and just making sure that it's a truly collaborative product that works for all users, whether that's citizens or colleagues in the public sector. So just another reminder, in case we haven't said it often enough, if you are a service team in government and you're interested in becoming an early adopter, or if you work in a public sector service team more generally and want to share your experience for our research, you can visit the product page, that's: sign hyphen in dot service dot gov dot UK [sign-in.service.gov.uk] and you can register your interest. That was snappy. [laughs]

You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean. 

Goodbye!

Will Myddelton:

Goodbye. 

Helena Trippe:

Goodbye. 

Tom Stewart: 

Thanks everyone. Goodbye. 

We talk coding, solving common problems once and share some of the exciting challenges our developers, engineers and technical architects are working on.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Louise Harris:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Louise Harris and I head up the Creative and Channels Team at GDS. In this episode, we're talking about our wonderful technologists. The Site Reliability Engineers, Technical Architects and Developers who work in multidisciplinary teams to engineer solutions to our complex architectural needs, evolve our infrastructure and tooling to keep us resilient and online, and develop digital products and services used by millions of people across the UK, and that are emulated by governments around the world. 

Technologists are a mainstay of how we help government transform and tackle complexity for users. Think about GOV.UK: it's actually 50 front and back end applications that are independently hosted and maintained that enable us to host over a million pages, deal with millions of visits a day and fend off regular Denial-of-Service attacks. But thanks to our technologists, all our end users see is a single site they can access day and night to get the information they need from government. 

Tackling that kind of complexity is not always easy, but it's definitely worthwhile. And it's what GDS is here to do. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Himal Mandalia and Louise Ryan to talk about the important role GDS technologists play. Louise, Himal, why don't you introduce yourselves to our listeners and tell us a bit about your roles.

Louise Ryan: 

Hello, I'm Louise Ryan, I'm the Lead Technical Architect and Head of Technology in Government as a Platform. I joined GDS just under 4 years ago and I joined us from the private sector where I worked in a digital agency as a Technical Architect.

Himal Mandalia: 

And I'm Himal, I'm Head of Technology for GOV.UK, and I joined about 5 months ago, and I've been working in digital circles for about 6 years as a contractor in several roles, including Developer, Technical Architect and a Technology Advisor.

Louise Harris: 

So, Louise, it sounds like we've been lucky enough to have you at GDS for a couple of years now, and Himal, we've recently lured you over from another part of government. What is it that appeals to you both about working at GDS?

Louise Ryan: 

Oh wow. Such, such a big question. There's so much to like about GDS and working in digital in government in general, really. I always like refer people to the GOV.UK Design Principles and the Service Standard. So if you take a look at that, it's all about doing things the right way, about doing things for everybody, having a multidisciplinary team focussing on what the actual problems are, not solutionising. Building services, not just websites, so we continuously improve things. All sorts of that stuff, but also the tech we use is really cool as well. So it's, it's pretty modern stuff: lots of Infrastructure as Code, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery and lots of automated testing. Yeah, I mean, I could go on for a long, long time, but this is a, you know I think it's a brilliant place to work and I love it.

Louise Harris: 

And Louise, just, just for our listeners who are maybe less familiar with Government as a Platform, or what we call GaaP, can you just run us through a bit what it’s all about?

Louise Ryan: 

So Government as a Platform [GaaP], is a suite of digital services designed to meet common needs which can be quickly integrated into-into other service teams services. This helps reduce duplication, variation and it-it enables other digital teams to build their digital solutions much quicker, much faster, much more efficiently.

In terms of what the various services do, Notify is, is an extremely busy service. It's used by, I think around 4,700 other services. That's around 1000 organisations across the public sector using it. So it's scaling at around 120 new services joining every month. So that is, that's pretty big. So in, in, in terms of the last year, they've seen a-a 25 fold increase in volume of messages. And so that was a massive scaling challenge for the team that they, they just really smashed out the park. They're mostly hosted on the PaaS, which is really cool, and it's kind of asynchronous architecture so there's a lot of queues helping us process messages. You know it enables us to scale and enables us to retry when things break. So it's,it's good architecture. 

[GOV.UK] Pay take payments, take card payments for your digital services. It also, you can also use Apple Pay and Google Pay to pay for stuff. I think one of the main selling points of Pay is how much we care and test about the, the journey, the paying experience for people who use assistive technologies. So we really put a lot of effort into making sure it works really well for everybody. That's built mostly on Fargate, and, and uses some you know, it's got to be PCI [Payment Card Industry] compliant, so it's a, it's a complex, necessarily complex architecture. It scales really well and it's been used by, I think, over 550 large services now, and it's processed over a billion pounds.

[GOV.UK] Platform as a Service: you host your, you can use Platform as a Service to host your web apps in the cloud without relying on, without worrying about the infrastructure underneath. So you can build your app in Python, Ruby or Rust or pop it in a container and then push it up to PaaS. And there you go, you've got a running app in the cloud. Also provides a bunch of backend services you can use. So backend services means databases like PostgreSQL, things like ElasticSearch or queue services like simple queue service from AWS. That's, that's the scale of this is, is, is very impressive. It's being used by just over 121 organisations and between the two regions in London and Ireland that it's hosted in, it's hosts, it's running around 2,800 apps at the moment. And they're processing an amazing amount of incoming requests: so we've got an average of around 300 requests per second coming through those pipes. So that's quite cool.

And then we've got the Design System and the Prototype Kit Team. The Design System look after GOV.UK frontend, which is that set of styles, patterns and components that other teams use to build their frontend. What's really important about those patterns and components is that they've been researched extensively and tested extensively across a vast array of digital devices and operating systems and with real people and with assistive devices. So we can be sure that they're, you know they're, they're working. So obviously we do that once so service teams around the country don't have to keep doing that work. It really is an open source project as well, the Design System. It actively seeks contributions from the design and frontend communities a-across, across government. And that's, that's really cool. And it's yeah, it's used quite. It's, GitHub tells me it's, it's in use by over 2,600 other repositories.

Louise Harris: 

That must be so cool to be involved in work that’s being forked off, and used in so many other contexts. Is it safe to say that there’s some stuff that you can get done at GDS that maybe you can’t get done elsewhere?

Louise Ryan: 

Yeah, I think it is. We are at the centre of government, being part Cabinet Office. If we're not going to do it in the centre, then it's not just gonna magically happen elsewhere in government. Those tools exist so other service teams can-can really benefit from having things done once really well in the centre so they don't have to keep reinventing that wheel. They can-they can just get started really quickly and benefit from all that work that we've done really well just once. 

Louise Harris:  

And it's not, it's not just teams kind of in and around the UK government that are getting to benefit from that approach either right? Some of our code has also been forked by international governments to do their own thing too. What do you think are some of the sort of GDS led technology success stories out there? 

Louise Ryan: 

Oh, wow. Yeah. So there's lots of examples of this happening. So take, for example, Notify. That's been forked and used by the Canadian government and the Australian government to create their own notification platforms. And, you know, t-t-that doesn't just-just happen and then stop. We continue to collaborate with those teams working on this platforms so we can all learn from each other. And it's not just about the tech either - that's really important thing. So obviously Notify have developed a whole bunch of operational practices and services around the service itself. So we share, we share those as well and you know, help people figure out what works, what doesn't.

And it's not just Notify. So PaaS. PaaS works with, that's Platform as a Service, they work with their equivalents in-in Australia and, and the US government to share best practice. And then you've got the wonderful Design System that's been forked by a lot of countries. And not just other countries, but other authorities within-within the UK. So, for example, my own council, Wiltshire Council, they forked the Design System and used it to build their own website. But in terms of other countries. I think it's used in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the Netherlands. So, yeah, massive, massive success stories of-of re-use of our, of our hard work.

Louise Harris: 

Wow, so lots to be proud of. And Himal, I guess same question to you - what is it that drew you to GDS?

Himal Mandalia:

I think GDS is sort of interestingly positioned right at the centre and, and being sort of highly visible, like it can be an exemplar of what good, sort of long live teams, services looks like. So all of the things that are articulated in the Service Standard, in the Technology Code of Practice, you know, we-we work to those ourselves since we-since we developed them. But I think what we've quite clearly put out very recently in the GDS strategy for the next 3 years, the core 5 missions, particularly the ones around GDS being the place, essentially the shop that builds and runs the common components and platforms that the rest of government build services on top of. I think that is now clearer, clearer than it's ever been. And you know there's something that, for me anyway, when I was thinking about a bit of a career change last year, drew me and I thought: this is a really interesting time to come in and join. There's a-there's a real sort of transformation of energy in the air again. 

Louise Harris: 

So it’s great for our teams to know that their work is having an impact not just here in the UK and for our users, but also around the world as well. And Himal, like you say to be part of that, what did you call it, transformation buzz? I think that kind of flies in the face of the idea that jobs in the civil service are sort of slow or old school right?

Do-do you think there are other misconceptions about what a technology job in government might be like, versus what it’s actually like at GDS day to day?

Himal Mandalia: 

I think what's interesting here is, you know we're about a decade into a transformation journey that's bringing in the sort of technology practices around Continuous Delivery, being Agile, having autonomous self organising teams and a lot of the-the technology driven processes that surround that in the ways of working. And I think it's easy for us to lose sight of the uneven distribution and maturity of this across government. So I think it's, I think it's interesting because government can't be seen as a, as a monolithic thing. I think if you're outside and you're thinking of you know, if you're, if you're a Developer or a Reliability Engineer or a Technical Architect and you think, you know you want to work in government, you want to work in the public sector - and that could be local authorities as well of course - it is, it is a very unevenly distributed landscape of maturity. I mean, I would say we're pretty much at the, at the higher end of the maturity curve at GDS here, of course, because what we've been doing for the last decade. And I think what's exciting for me as someone that's worn many hats and played different roles in this sort of journey is: it's, it-it can be, it can be rewarding to work somewhere where a lot of the basic capabilities, the fundamental enablers are already in place and you can deliver value and work with teams. If you consider GDS, then you would find something that's much more a-akin to a sort of modern sort of conventional tech company.

Louise Harris: 

I think that digital maturity curve point is such a good one. Because yeah, with almost 10 years under our belt GDS has definitely been through a lot that foundational and capability building stuff that some other organisations might still be grappling with, and I think that gives us a kind of view on what their pain points are so we can shape products and platforms that are gonna meet their needs at different parts of the curve.

And I think that actually leads us quite nicely to the next thing that I wanted to chat to you both about. 

So our regular listeners will know that earlier in the year, we launched our new strategy and centred it around 5 key missions. If you missed it, check out our May episode of the Podcast where you can hear our Chief Exec, Tom Read, talk more about that. 

But in essence I suppose, over the next few years, our focus boils down to this: helping to create services that just work for the user. So no matter how complex the underlying systems are or how much these people know about government, we’re going to make services that just work. 

So mission 4 in our strategy that’s looking at how we can make sort of effortless for departments and agencies to digitise their services by looking at centrally-developed common components. 

Louise, maybe you can tell us a bit about what’s happening in that area?

Louise Ryan: 

I mean to sum it up, you know, we've got a bunch of really cool services that are already providing value. So as a piece of work, that's ongoing to just make sure they keep delivering value and can scale with the increasing usage that they experience.

We're also you know, obviously building on top of that and looking what else we can do to meet user needs. One exciting part of that is the work we're doing in the collecting information from users team. So that team is well, I think it sums ups, sums up its work. It's...you know, we want every single form that's published on GOV.UK to be accessible. That's huge. A lot of the forms on GOV.UK at the moment are published in PDF or, or other document formats. They present challenges, especially to-to users who, who need to use assistive technologies such as screen readers or magnifiers. And actually completing PDF online is-is no easy task either. It's pretty difficult. Whereas completing an online form is a much better user experience and hopefully much more accessible. So it's, that is a, that is a massive problem space, and a really interesting one. And we're just entering an Alpha-Alpha phase with that team. So it's, yeah, so it's very exciting challenge we presented with ourselves in, in GaaP.

Louise Harris: 

And I don't think we can really kind of understate the scale of that challenge, because I think everybody around GDS we treat PDF's a little bit like our, a 4 letter word. But the team blogged recently and I think equated that if, without doing this work, if we were just relying on the existing kind of form building systems that were out there, it would take government about 70 years just to convert the PDF's that already live on GOV.UK, which are obviously growing, if not every day, then certainly most weeks. So super important work. Was there anything that came out of the discovery that-that surprised you folks?

Louise Ryan: 

I think-I think you've, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It's the scale of the challenge. And it certainly surprised me. But when you, when you think about it, it's, it's not that surprising, actually, because there's teams right around government that don't have the digital capability to do anything else. This is, you know PDF's and other, other document formats are the tool they have, so that's the tool they, they have to use. So, again, GaaP is uniquely placed in the centre of government to do something about that. And that's, that's hopefully what we'll be able to do in the coming years.

Louise Harris: 

So it sounds like through Government as a Platform right now, we are already kind of solving common problems at scale. But, but what about - and sorry to make you solutionise on the fly here Louise, because I know that everything we do is evidence based and user led - where do you see the next, beyond the collecting information from users work, do you see any themes emerging about where that next common problem is that GDS might want to solve?

Louise Ryan: 

Yeah, so we are doing some research on this, so, but I don't want to pre-empt that, but I'm, I can, you know, there's, there's stuff we already know that, that service teams have to just keep doing over and over again. There's you know, there's thin--complex problems that don't seem complex until you really dig into them. So things like a postcode lookup. Service teams have to keep doing that, is-is there a way we can, we can provide a solution for that in the centre?

Louise Harris: 

And that's all such important stuff right if we, if we want to deliver the transformation at the scale that we, we all want to see.

One of our other central focuses is going to be this idea of joining up services so they solve whole user problems even if that means spanning multiple departments. Himal, I guess - as the platform for government services - GOV.UK is going to be pretty fundamental to how we get that done right?

Himal Mandalia: 

Yes, so it's interesting because people can get a little bit, a little bit confused about what we mean when we say GOV.UK. So if we think about it as sort of layers of the onion: the sort of widest layer you have, what is known as the GOV.UK proposition. So that, as a user, you know, you go somewhere, you see a website, you see something that's branded with the crown and the stylings around that: that's a GOV.UK site. But it could very easily be a transactional service you interact with for--to do ev-everything from paying your taxes to a prison visit to renew your driving licence. And those are all on the GOV.UK proposition. So they feel like a single website as you move across them. And we have mechanisms like the Service Standard. If you work to that, that means that you're going to end up with a pretty joined up journey.

But for me, the-the-the layer of GOV.UK that I work on and the technology I'm responsible for, that's the GOV.UK content. That’s-that's the main page that you come to when you go to www.GOV.UK. That is a large platform with hundreds of thousands of pages of content that we-we hold and a set of tools that we run for thousands of users across government to create, to offer that content, to edit it, to manage it, including our internal content teams here. And we also run technology, which, of course, delivers all those pages so they-re, they're available globally.

Louise Harris: 

And right now, a lot of that content is quite static right? Because we need to publish it and serve it quickly and then hold it in the cache and serve it up again over and over.

Himal Mandalia: 

Yeah, exactly. GOV.UK delivers a lot of content right now, but it's usually...it's relatively static, it's relatively flat content, it's pages. And one of the things that we're exploring now is if you have an account, if we, based on consent, if we know some things about you - your approximate location or other attributes we have - we may be able to tailor that content. We may be able to personalise it, to put content in front of you that's relevant to what you're doing. Maybe even be proactive, send you personalised notifications with of course, a full consent model and opt in and easy opt out around that. 

But in order to do that, in order to personalise the content or even have content chunked up so it can be contextual, so a different snippet is mixed in based on a tag or some piece of data that we're using to construct that, that, all of that will require a fundamental re-architecting of GOV.UK's applications. So the front end applications need to change dramatically in order to stitch together that content in real time. The way that content is stored, the way it's structured, the schemas that are used to determine how that content is broken down into small snippets, how it's tagged, the taxonomy - all of that needs a rethink and redesign. And the publishing tools themselves, the tools that are used by the service essentially that is used by the content creators, that experience they have in not only creating content, but the taxonomy they're applying to it, how they're tagging it - all of that needs a rethink and a redes-redesign as well.

So that sounds huge and it is. But it's not a sort of big bang, all at once programme of work. This is an incremental and iterative stream of work, like, like how we do everything, which is going to, which is going to be done bit by bit. The interesting challenges that we are talking about rebuilding the ship while there are people in it bit by bit. And this is very much that Ship of Theseus metaphor right? We're replacing the planks, and when we're done, it's going to be a very different looking ship. It's going to be a ship that does very different things. But we're not even completely clear exactly what it looks like, but if we really extend the metaphor, we do have a good idea of where we're going.

Louise Harris: 

And that personalisation agenda that you talked about there Himal, it sounds to me like it's going to ma-make [laughs] the site work a lot harder. I mean, we're already processing thousands and thousands of kind of transactional services, but this sounds like a real shift. You talked about the GOV.UK Account functionality as well, which obviously we piloted last year and had, I think, about 50,000 people sign up for that as part of the Brexit Checker, Brexit Transition Checker. We’ve obviously been iterating that software ever since. Can you tell us a little bit about where we’re at now with Accounts?

Himal Mandalia: 

So what we've done to test the hypothesis with the Brexit Transition Checker and the-the prototype account functionality, which which has been amazing, which has been an amazing learning experience because we have had, as you, as you mentioned there, 50,000 people sign up, but because we're working off of an architecture and an infrastructure set up that doesn't support this yet, we have done those as, as a separate applications, which we've used, we've hosted in, in Platform as a Service, in PaaS actually, one of the products Louise mentioned and is responsible for which is, which is great, just to be able to use our own tools for things like this. 

But in order to have that as part of GOV.UK's core architecture, to support more of that personalisation, that's what we do need to have that re-think, that re-design and that re-architecting of all of our frontend apps and our publishing tools and the content platform.

So I'm currently working on the future platform services and architecture strategy for GOV.UK. So all of the things I've just mentioned there are going to be sort of written up in plain language around what we're thinking of. And I-I view GOV.UK breaking out into a few really simple long term value propositions or services and platforms, and they are: presentation, or the frontend, what you experience as www.GOV.UK when you go there; the publishing service or tools that our thousands of users across government use; a content platform, that engine, that heart of content that does all the heavy lifting; and underneath all of that, the infrastructure platform that runs the applications, the databases, all of those things. And really looking to put an emphasis on the content platform, that engine of content and trying to move to a world where we can almost think of GOV.UK as a, as a sort of headless machine, that it does have a frontend, but really the most prominent part is the functionality that does all the lifting. Because in future there may be an app, there may be other ways, we may be syndicating content - these are all things we want to test. But having the flexibility and the ability to do that is, is vital because the way people, the way people interact with services online is quite different now to how it was a decade ago, and so we need to move on and have a much more Agile, much more flexible architecture that lets us meet users where they are rather than having a, just a website. You know we don't, we don't live in that era anymore.

Louise Harris: 

So sounds then like we want to shift to a, a bit more of a channel agnostic approach then. Louise, you’re a Technical Architect, what’s your take on Himal’s just said? 

Louise Ryan: 

Yeah, it's-it's a bit daunting actually [laughs]. Himal won't mind me saying that. You've got, it's a, it's a big job to re-architect such a big and important platform as GOV.UK. It's, it's really exciting. And it, you know, it's, yeah, you won't be on your own Himal. You know, the rest of-of GDS is-is very interested in this work as well, and there's crossovers right? Government as a Platform is very interested in, in what's happening with GOV.UK Accounts, because we might be able to use those features in our services. So for example, [GOV.UK] Pay: when someone's paying for something, if they're signed into their account, maybe they can save that, that payment method if they want to. Yeah, just solutionising on the fly, because obviously we'd need to research that to see if it was a, a thing people would be interested in. But, but obviously we you know, we're keeping a very close eye on what, what Himal's up to and, and wanna be part of it where we can.

Himal Mandalia: 

I-I 100% agree with that, Louise. I think the thing here is, I think the, I think what we're doing with our, with our Digital Identity programme, with the GOV.UK Accounts, it really is, it really is that golden thread. It is the thing that ties all of this together. It does, it does offer the cohesion between all of our products and services. So we blur the boundaries between them. And I think notifications, payments, the publishing, the content delivery, all of that, and then, and then you bring into that all of the services across government as well, they're all tied together through your account. So what you end up with ultimately is a completely seamless experience, a citizen shouldn't need to, shouldn't, you shouldn't, it shouldn't even occur to them that a separate group of people delivered this piece as opposed to another bit.

Louise Harris: 

As you say some kind of huge, huge programmes of work coming up, sounds like we're probably going to need a few-few additional crew. If-if people are interested in getting involved in this, where-where can they go to find out more?

Himal Mandalia: 

So if you search for GDS careers, you'll find our careers site. We have a, we have a campaign going to hire Developers right now, but more will be launching soon. I'm particularly keen on trying to see about bringing juniors in. We need, we need more, we need more juniors into to-to-to not only be working with our teams, but also to be engaging in things that we've done previously at GDS like firebreaks, where you get that little bit of free time to experiment and come up with things. And of course, there will be a range of more senior roles as well. They'll be, they'll be more roles going out across-across the board at all levels.

Louise Harris:

So there’s lots of really great new job opportunities coming up across GDS. For people who might be interested in that, what would you say the culture is like in our teams?

Himal Mandalia: 

I think having, having just come through a crisis, or crises, where we were highly visible and doing a lot of work to surface essential guidance around Coronavirus, we've had to organise ourselves around mission focussed teams, which has meant a-a lot of the work that we planned and even written about, I-I think I've, since starting you know, I've dug into some of the blog posts that we put out in 2016 and 17, amazing planning around publishing tools and platform that we were not able to pick up or continue because, because of emergency work, urgent priorities around Coronavirus and some of the work around Brexit as well, those are all things we can return to now. 

H aving gotten to know my technologists community over the last 5 months, I think there's a real appetite to return to some of those longer term value streams - so working on services, being in long live teams, and what I'd mentioned earlier around things like a publishing service and content platform. You know, really giving groups of people, not just Developers, but Designers and everyone involved in a multidisciplinary team, that agency and that long term ownership over a problem and o-o-over, over the improvement of something. So I think some of that excitement is coming back now. And so, yeah, it's, it's a great time to join. It's a very active community.

Louise Ryan: 

I-I don’t think I’ve shouted from the rooftops enough about how important long-lived autonomous teams are. They really are the, the reason that Government as a Platform has been suc--as successful as it has. There, there's people that are really committed to these services, really understand the problem spaces inside and out and just, yeah, deliver amazing results and outcomes as, as a result. And yeah, this is, this is not just from a technical perspective that you know, we-we-we couldn't build the tech we build without the help of our, our user-centred design colleagues and product and delivery.

We are...the selling points from me I mentioned earlier is-is how we work in teams, as a unit, how we figure out with things that we-we should be working on, making sure they are the things of most value and really understanding the problem space and then developing the tech to solve those problems. And that, that, that way we work is to me as a technologist, is, is very compelling and, and reason alone to join but...Also we use some really modern tech - so our programming languages in GaaP are, are Python, Java, Node and then we've got some, some other programming language such as Go in the mix, but we build stuff on, on really modern technologies. So a lot of stuff on Amazon Web Services. As I said, we use modern practices like Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, we do a lot of automated testing so we can deploy with confidence multiple times a day to make sure, yeah, we're getting our stuff out there quickly and getting people to actually use it as fast as possible.

And hopefully that's a, that's a compelling story about why GDS is a really good place to work. I didn't actually mention the culture in, in all of that. And I think that's what you actually asked me. But the-the agile culture here is-is to be open, to be transparent, to share what you're working on with others, and that can be through show and tells, through pairing, through having your code open in, out there on GitHub. I really, I really like the culture at GDS. It's a kind of, you know, when I was in the office, come up to my desk and ask me anything kind of thing. No question too silly. Yeah. I think it's a, it's a lovely place to work.

Himal Mandalia: 

Yeah, I think the only, I think the only thing I'd add and Louise said it all there really was: you know, if you a technologist that's passionate about open source development and the technologies that were mentioned there and you, if particularly if you're old enough, you have friends like me who are old enough to remember when open source was very much the underdog, and you know, we were, we were all sort of part of a rebel alliance trying to-to do a good thing. It's amazing that this is now converged with trying to do good for the public as well. So. I could, I couldn’t think of a better argument to sell it than, than that: you get to use cool tech, do open source stuff to do good for tech and do good for the public. I mean, what more do you want, really? And we pay pretty well as well.

Louise Harris: 

That's pretty cool, and if people want to find out about our code, which obviously we publish openly where we can, where can they find that?

Louise Ryan: 

All our code is published on GitHub. So you need to go to GitHub. And it's Alpha GOV.UK is our organisation. It's all in there. I can't remember how many repos that there are, but there's a lot [laughs].

Louise Harris: 

Okay well if anybody’s got a quiet Saturday afternoon, and they fancy digging into literally thousands of repos, head over to our GitHub to do that. 

Yeah so there you have it, an inside look into how technologists at GDS are doing the hard work to make it simple for users. Some seriously impressive and exciting stuff, and if you want to stay up to date with what's going on, please do follow us on the GDS blogs and check out our GitHub. A reminder that if you're a Developer, Site Reliability Engineer or a Technical Architect who fancies a new challenge as part of a great team doing work that impacts literally millions of people, you need to search GDS careers because we're hiring now. 

Louise, Himal, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and chat to me today. I don't know about anyone else, but you have been left with the impression of our technologists acting like a bevy of swans, calmly and gracefully gliding across the surface, totally belying all of the hard work and energy that's happening just underneath to make sure we're headed in the right direction. And thank you to you, our listeners. Remember, you can find all episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all major podcast platforms. And our transcripts are available on PodBean. 

Goodbye.

Louise Ryan: 

Thank you, bye.

Himal Mandalia: 

Thanks everyone.

Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson share how the GOV.UK roadmap contributes to GDS’s mission of building a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. For those of you who tuned into last month’s episode, you’ll know that GDS has launched its new strategy centring around 5 core key missions:

GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services;

Joined-up services that solve whole problems and span multiple departments;

A simple digital identity solution that works for everyone;

Common tools and expert services;

and Joined-up data across departments.

Today I am joined by Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson from the leadership team of the GOV.UK programme to hear more about how their roadmap objectives are contributing to making GDS’s mission - of building a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone - a reality.

Ross, could you please introduce yourself?

Ross Ferguson:

OK, thank you. So I'm Ross Ferguson and the Deputy Director for Portfolio Delivery within GOV.UK. And this is actually my second tour with GOV.UK. I started as an Associate Product Manager when GDS was first set up. GOV.UK was the first product that I worked on and I later worked as the Head of Product Management for GDS. And then after a little overseas tour, I was very pleased to return to GOV.UK in January and, yeah, very excited to be back and to be working with Rachel.

Vanessa Schneider: It's good to have you Ross. Thank you. Yes, Rachel, would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners, please?

Rachel Tsang:

Of course. So my name is Rachel Tsang and I am Deputy Director for Governance and Assurance on GOV.UK. Like Ross, I am, I sort of boomeranged back to-to GOV.UK. So I was, I did a previous role and then stepped away to do something else. And I'm really, really thrilled. I think that's a, it's not a necessary condition to working on GOV.UK that you come back. I think it is testament to like just how much people enjoy working, working on GOV.UK. Before that, I so, I joined government as a Social Researcher and did a range of roles in different government departments and yeah, have settled here in GDS.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you. So as mentioned at the top of the episode, the GDS strategy strongly relies on GOV.UK as outlined in GDS's first mission, which is to establish GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services. It'd be really great to hear from both of you how this mission influenced the update to the GOV.UK roadmap.

Rachel Tsang:

So I think fundamentally our mission for GOV.UK is to provide a joined-up, personalised, and, and proactive service - we-we blogged lots about that recently. And we-we've evolved continuously since GOV.UK was first created in 2012. And what we're looking to do now is really a big step change in-in our offering for GOV.UK. Fundamentally, it's-it's about changing our offering to continually innovate to meet changing needs. I think that that is the crux for how we're feeding into the wider GDS strategy and vision.

Ross Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. I think departments, GDS with GOV.UK and, you know, spend control standards alongside departments has done a really, really good job over the years of bringing services that were previously paper-based and office-based, online. And a lot of them are really great in isolation. But we know that the people who use GOV.UK don't experience them, don't want them in isolation. They don't, it's not a nicely compartmentalised linear process. You know, they-they want them in combination. So really, the next maturity step for Government Digital has to be that these services are joined up. Which means that departments need to coordinate with one another.

GDS is in a great position and GOV.UK is a great platform for, for enabling that join-up to happen in a coordinating sense but also in in a public experience sense: that there is one domain that the public knows they can go to to get the guidance, to get access to the services. And, you know, that's what they would expect in all other walks of life when they're transacting with lots of, you know, utilities and and and entertainment. So it's perfectly reasonable that they should expect that from government, and government is perfectly capable of doing it. So that's work that we want to really accelerate this year. And, you know, it is a big undertaking. So it's something that will continue in the, in the years to come.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yes, speaking of joined-up services, I'd like you to listen to a couple of interviews that we recorded with colleagues in the different GOV.UK teams that are working towards the objectives of the roadmap. So first we’ll actually be hearing from Tina Mermiri, who shares about the work done to connect insights across GOV.UK to enable those joined up services. This is so that government understands its users and users understand the government.

[Start of vox pop]

Tina Mermiri:

I'm Tina Mermiri, the Head of User and Data Insight for GOV.UK. I set out the data and the insight strategy for the programme, and I oversee all the work within data science, performance analytics and user research. So as a team of experts, we have 3 wider objectives and that's understanding GOV.UK users and their needs; that's facilitating data-driven decision-making internally and across wider government; and it's also monitoring the impact of the work that we deliver and the products that we ship. So with performance analytics, we're looking at how people, or users engage with the site, what content they're engaging with and how we can optimise their journeys. 

Then we complement that with the user research to understand what their issues are. We get feedback from them. We're actually looking at why they're trying to do certain things that are, that are failing and how we can optimise those journeys as well. And so what the data science community does is go into a little bit more detail with some of the more complicated techniques whereby we might want to look at some of the data that we've got behind the scenes and create some models and scores and look at something like related links and surface them on the site for users that have done something similar to other users and make their journeys easier. So it's all going back to optimising the journey, making it as smooth and frictionless as possible with the power of data behind that.

We're using Google Analytics to power a lot of this data. And Google Analytics has a cookie consent. So we will only track people who have opted in to tracking, which means that our data is not 100 percent representative of all our users, but it's pretty indicative of what they'll be doing. It also means that we hash out any personally identifiable information. We don't actually track that and don't use it for any of our analysis. And we've worked really, really closely with the privacy team to make sure that, you know, privacy is at the heart of all the tracking that we do and all the consequent analysis that we conduct around it. So personalisation, the way that we're looking at it is two-fold. On the one hand, it is without any personally identifiable information. So it is just looking at common journeys and similar content that's being consumed by different users at aggregate level. So that's the one way of doing it where we don't collect any other personal information and we don't personalise it based on their background or any of the demographics, we don't even track that right now. But it is about that journey and other similar journeys. And then on the flip side, we will eventually be trying to do a little bit more personalisation based on people who hold accounts with us, where they will, again, share some of their information with us as part of their account. And that is information that they will have opted into as well. And we will hopefully use that to personalise further, based on, based on their location, for example, and other similar attributes that we want to start building on. 

The nature of the data that we collect and making sure that that's representative is, is very, very important. So we could do a lot of really clever stuff with it. But if it's not in a good place, then the output-- if the inputs aren't reliable, necessary, then the outputs won't be as reliable either. So we're spending a lot of time on revisiting the way that we collect some of the data, the way that we cleanse the data, the way we make sure that it is reliable and ready for us to use. So that's one thing that we're investing in quite heavily. And we need to make sure that we're asking the right questions without, like, probing, leading wording. We need to make sure that we're able to differentiate between attitudes around, let's say, GOV.UK or what they're trying to do and wider government. We need to make sure that our data is representative across all our very, very wide range and diverse users.

I think the work that we're trying to do and the opportunities that it opens up for users and to make their journeys easier is, is, is really impressive.

[End of vox pop]

Ross Ferguson: 

Tina's a...and her crew, you know, clearly, clearly know what they're talking about. She was, she was giving great insights there into, you know, just how important the data usage is going to be to powering the sort of whole journeys work that we’re wanting to do, the personalisation. It's all, it's all dependent on us making, you know, proper, proper use of that, of that data. I think that she, you know, she did talk well about the tooling that we're starting to bring in to help us with that. We are, we're definitely stepping up the recruitment that we do of-of these data disciplines. And, you know, and I think it's about bringing our, the, the data scientists and engineers that we have already and have had for a while much more closer into the work with the with the team so that they're they're kind of doing less reporting and they're doing more in terms of the tactics and the and the strategy work.

Rachel Tsang: 

On the objective to connect insights, I'm not sure we're allowed to have favourites, but this one is-is really, really important to me because I think it really goes back to the heart of why GOV.UK was first created. Right? You think about the world before 2012, where there are almost 2,000 websites, and you needed to understand the structures of government to interact with it. And so we've come a long way. But fundamentally, the way that we analyse and approach problems remain siloed by departmental boundaries. So you know, the work that we are looking to do over the next year to join up those insights, to be able to understand aggregate trends and patterns, that's super important, not just for GOV.UK like in helping us to improve the product, but for the rest of government more generally in terms of how we approach a much wider whole user journeys.

Vanessa Schneider:

And I guess as with any insights, what’s important is what you use them to enable. I think it’s time to hear from Daisy Wain, one of our Lead Performance Analysts, about what we’re doing to translate insights into a more personalised and proactive service for users.

[Start of vox pop]

Daisy Wain:

My name is Daisy. I'm the Lead Performance Analyst on GOV.UK. It's my job to make sure that we are at the cutting edge of analytical technologies and practises to make sure that we're aligned with what the latest developments are and to make sure that they're fit for purpose, for what we want on GOV.UK that obviously has a strong focus around privacy and security.

So one of the things that we've been doing is doing a cross-government data commission. So it's been working as a small team to find out all the different transactional services there are in government, what data attributes they all collect, and if they have an account that's associated with that transactional service. And if they do, how many accounts there are, and all that sort of thing. And obviously what that allows us to think about then is how we can use that data to be proactive. So, for example, if we were to have, if we were able to know somebody's postcode or to know their date of birth, we can then start to infer things about them. So that means we can proactively show them things on GOV.UK that are specific. So, for example, we know you live in Scotland, we can show you the Scottish content first and foremost, as opposed to the English. What else we can do is obviously helping the product teams to deliver the first trial of the account. So that was what we did on the Brexit checker. So that was the product where any person could go through a series of questions related to their personal circumstances around, you know, where they live, what their nationality is, what their plans are for business and for travel, and what the output is, is a series of actions that you may need to take related to the changes related to Brexit. And the account allows you to store that information, to revisit it and to get notifications of when that might change. The job as an analyst is to look at how people are using that thing so we can look at the sign-up journey to see perhaps where certain steps might not be working as well. And then that starts to help us build a picture about the types of people that would like to use this account and where the value is.

I think it's important for us to think about developing this, like, next generation of GOV.UK and how people interact with government and government services. But it can't be designed just for people that want that. We have to consider people that would not want to opt into that world and to make sure that we are still designing things that allow people to not have to consent, but still have that optimised journey based on the data that we have available on those people, which is non-consented, kind of basic, so from the server. Obviously this is an important aspect for people that don't want to have that universal government sign-in, which is completely, completely within a user's discretion. So from an analytical perspective is, what can we learn about your behaviour on GOV.UK that allows us then to personalise your experience and even be proactive. It could be that you have the option to save some of your preferences. So there's things that we can start to do, which is purely based on your behaviour on GOV.UK that we can say, “hey, we think this might be useful for you” purely based on this behaviour, and then you can opt in to say, “actually yeah, that's handy. I want that to happen. I want that to persist”. Or you can equally say, “no, I'm not interested. I just want it to be, I want to be completely anonymous”. 

I also think that some of the biggest hurdles around this is making sure that users’ experience reflects the reality on GOV.UK. There is an expectation, I think, around - for some users - that government is government and everything is joined-up behind the scenes. And there is a confusion around “why do I have to tell my, the tax service my personal details and I have to tell the-- things related to my vehicle, the same details. Why are they not joined up? Also, why can't I sign into this thing and do the other thing?” So the hardest thing is like how can we build something that has those privacy concerns at the centre, but also then reflects users’ expectation of how to, how to interact with government. Meeting those expectations but from our perspective of delivering it, it's how can we do that kind of crosscutting, bringing all of government services, different departments together, creating this kind of, almost this single sign-on vision, which is what we're hoping to achieve in the long term, where you only have to do things once. But how you do that is very, very challenging. The front, the front of it looks simple. The underneath is horribly complicated.

[End of vox pop]

Vanessa Schneider: 

I think one of the areas that really impressed me was how much collaboration there is across government on it. And essentially that you've got this buy-in on this objective through the commission.

Rachel Tsang:

Definitely. I think we were saying before, this isn't just a project for GDS or for GOV.UK, right. It-it only really, really works, and you only get the real value for users if you're enabling that cross government collaboration. And to be honest, that-that is tricky because departments don't necessarily always have the same priorities; there, there is a lot of stuff that is happening across government. But I think we all have the shared objective of fundamentally making things better for our users. And I think the extent to which this is driven by data and driven by insight is incredibly powerful, right? Because it's all very much evidence-led and led by what is going to make a difference to meeting user needs.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Definitely, and I think, again,Daisy also reiterated something that Ross mentioned before at the very beginning, actually, about how the user perception of GOV.UK isn't that there are these separations between the different departments, that it is just the monolith of government and how we're really trying to make that perception of reality. I was just wondering if you had any more reflections on that, Ross.

Ross Ferguson:

I think that GOV.UK makes it possible to engage with and transact with government as-as one thing, if-if that's helpful to you as the, as the user. But it is also possible to say you're a-a particular-an academic or maybe a business user - there are you know, we also do cater for those more specialist journeys through, through government as well. I think that's one of the things that GOV.UK has over the years put a lot of effort into, listened to a lot of user feedback, made use of the data that we have had to get that to get that right. And so I, you know, I like what Daisy was pointing out there that: when we're thinking about personalisation, we're thinking about it like, you know, individual needs and that somebody might be operating, coming, coming to GOV.UK, as you know, a private citizen, but they might also be a business owner. And, you know, we-we-we want to be able to-to cater for those different sorts of profiles that one person could-could have. And, you know, and that's what we, that's what we do well. We--is the care and attention we pour into these kinds of nuances, these-these complexities. These--Daisy's right to say that it's-it's complex. That's what we love. That's what we're here for. That's what every person on GOV.UK is here for, you know, to-to do that hard work to-to make, to make the things as simple as people need it to be for their circumstances.

Vanessa Schneider:

And it's also beautiful how you're working at it from both ends, whether somebody wants to fully connect all of their personal information that government holds, make sure that everything is bespoke to them, or if somebody prefers to really just have that interaction standing on its own, and just as they need to be in touch with government, they'll handle it on a case by case basis and and just sort of like be shepherded down the right path without government necessarily knowing everything about them.

Ross Ferguson:

Yeah, I think that there is so much that we can do with all the data that we generate automatically through, through our logs and that we've gathered over the over the years and that we can analyse very quickly to be able to make pretty good bets about other information on GOV.UK, other services that would be of interest to you based on the patterns of usage in a given session. Which is, you know, very unintrusive. And, you know, I think that there's lots that we can do without people telling us lots of attributes about themselves and having to sign up to things - that will always be at the core of GOV.UK. However the account is very exciting because it will put the user in the position of being able to say, to build up a profile for themselves and be able to choose how they then use that, and that will just make government work so much harder for the public. 

And I think that that is maybe a little bit of, has been a pipedream for many for many years, but it's a reality that we can that we are delivering now, that will start to see come to fruition over the next year. And I think the public will be really excited about that and it will help make government more efficient. And so I think that's-that's something that everybody wins from. And really, you know, the teams are excited about that, not just the account team, but all--that's one of the good things about what I'm seeing on GOV.UK is the way that the teams are working alongside one another. There are data insights teams that have been really proactive about how they get in touch with our team that's working on starting and sustaining a business journey. They're saying to the accounts team “look we could, we could really benefit from this functionality, this feature, can we share data on this”.

Vanessa Schneider:

We obviously need a really solid foundation for all of this work, so I guess that’s why our objective to ensure GOV.UK is always available, accessible and accurate is so important. Let’s hear from Kati now on what’s happening in that area.

[Start of vox pop]

Kati Tirbhowan: 

I’m Kati Tirbhowan, I’m a senior content designer in the GOV.UK Explore team. Our team is working on making GOV.UK easier to navigate and we’re currently working on ideas that include improvements to the site-wide navigation, mobile experience on the site, page-level navigation elements, so things like how the breadcrumbs and related links work on the site.

In our team we run multiple rounds of user research to improve our designs and we're doing research with different types of users. That's people who come to GOV.UK for different reasons to do different things. And within those groups, we're also including users who might have low digital confidence or skills or access needs, for example. And then each discipline brings their expertise to make content accessible. So that's from design to developers, to content design. And for content design, for example, we've got our content guidance that includes an accessibility checklist that we use to design and review content changes as part of our regular work on the site. 

And in our team we've also just done some accessibility testing on the new site-wide main menu design, which is one of the ideas we're working on. And to do the testing we used accessibility personas the GDS accessibility team have created and those personas are really helpful and an engaging way of raising awareness and understanding of accessibility. And from that, we identified some improvements we can make to the design and we'll continue using those personas to test our work as we go on. Um we’re also optimise-- mobile-optimising the pages and components that we're working on. So they feel like they're designed with mobile in mind, and that includes things like expanding the touch target. So the area you need to tap on to follow a link so that they're larger and easier to use, um especially for people who have a tremor or a long term impairment, for example. 

I think one challenge is the size of GOV.UK. It's a huge and varied site, with many different types of content, and GOV.UK provides the route to hundreds of government services operated by departments, as well as the guidance published by every department. You also have a lot of people looking for information and services to do important things in their lives. And that means for us it's critical that people can find what they need quickly and as easily as possible. And it really is the hard work of all the teams and all the different disciplines and all the talent that makes it happen. 

And one of our design principles is “do the hard work to make it simple”. And I think people are really passionate about this and care about making things work for users the best we can. And I feel like this is a big part of it, making it such a great place to work too. We can help to make a real difference.

[End of vox pop]

Ross Ferguson: 

I might point to this one as being one of my one of the areas I care about the-the most. I think getting the basics right is so foundational to the innovation that we might want to put on top of that. It's really important that GOV.UK is there in times of need for people. It has to be reliable. And it's the sort of site that you go to when you're not sure if the internet's working properly, you can go to GOV.UK to see well, if GOV.UK's up then it's and then everything's all right. So we do put a lot of stock in making sure it's reliable, that it's secure, that it's performing quickly and smoothly for people.

And, yes, that-that would--includes how our search and navigation works, how our-our pages help people to find their way around the information services and through it. And so, yeah, we've got some-some pretty major changes taking place to the navigation on GOV.UK planned. That starts with a test, of course, because we like to, you know, to test with users before we go, you know, rolling this out to everybody. We will do some multivariate, or A/B testing, with a proportion of our users on GOV.UK, who will see the site in slightly different ways: so the menu bar at the top will have some, some new options in there. And through the early testing that we've already done, we're pretty confident that's going to help people to find information quicker and then to find other related information if they, if they need it.

A lot of people will want to come to GOV.UK, get the thing that they're after and then get going. But some people will want an ongoing journey. And so this new navigation bar helps people to understand where things are and how things relate to one another. And then later on in this year, that same team, well obviously they'll continue improving that that nav, but they will also then be working on the homepage, which, you know I suppose, it's a kind of a cliche that people say, well, Google is the homepage, but actually, you know, really you know, a lot of people it's actually one of our it's like our top page is the homepage - lots of people go there. And so it can work harder, we think, helping people to understand what's timely, you know relative to events that are taking place in society, maybe or maybe because they've given us, they've signed up to an account and they want maybe a more personalised experience. So we're going to start with some changes to the homepage, which make it clearer what's, what's available and what's timely. And so these will be really two of the biggest changes to the design of GOV.UK, really since-since its launch in 2012. And so we're obviously a little bit excited about those.

Rachel Tsang:

Yeah, definitely. So I think fundamentally it all starts with this, right? We support millions of users every day. And to be able to do that effectively, we need the platform, we need the information and services on it being reliable, resilient and secure. You can't have accounts and personalisation without this fundamental infrastructure. And-and so it's super duper important. And I think it also touches on something that's been implicit to what we've been discussing throughout, which is about retaining user trust. And that is inherent in how we need to build the account, that's inherent in how we do personalisation, but it's also inherent in just being available, accessible and accurate. 

And you know, we think about the sort of the premise of the work that we're doing now to increasingly personalised GOV.UK, right? We start from the premise of like, well, people's expectations have changed. They think about how they interact with you know, like Citymapper or with Netflix. And-and so our premise is that why should, why should the user experience of interacting with government be any different? That's the starting premise, but for us, it--trust takes on an extra important angle, and this is where having that infrastructure of content, of the platform, of availability is so, so important.

Vanessa Schneider:

You're so right, you're so right. But, yeah, obviously what's coming through through all of this is really that it's all about iteration. I mean, trying out new concepts is a part of iteration, isn't it? Like GOV.UK accounts is building on things that already exist. But one of the bigger questions really is the: how everything that we're doing right now supports what the rest of government is doing. So we talked with Anna Sherrington, who is working on that objective within the GOV.UK team.

[Start of vox pop]

Anna Sherrington:

Hi, my name is Anna Sherrington and I'm the Lead Delivery Manager at GOV.UK and I'm responsible for supporting the government priorities of the day objective. What that means in practise is that I work with a number of multidisciplinary, highly-skilled teams to ensure that GOV.UK is responsive to the issues of the day and that we are the source of the government is saying and doing and what it means for people day to day. 

So there are 4 teams working on this objective at the moment, 2 are concentrating on coronavirus, 1 on Brexit and 1 on starting a business. This means we have around 60 people working on this objective. At the height of the pandemic, we had more people covering our coronavirus work and the team structure has been changing as the situation with the pandemic has developed. For example, last spring and autumn when things were very busy, we had a weekend and late evening support rota in place in order to support any updates as they happened. And although we don't have these rotas anymore, we still have the flexibility and the teams to support plans. So we have really adapted to changing needs for this objective. I feel very fortunate to be working with the teams I’m working with and very proud of the work we do every day. There's a very supportive culture within the teams and we have made it our priority to build resilience and flexibility with everyone's wellbeing at the forefront of our minds. And this has been crucial.

[End of vox pop]

Vanessa Schneider: 

A lot has been achieved in the past year first of all, and it's important to recognise that. We've really managed to-to sort of scale up in a way that we are resilient.

Rachel Tsang: 

Talking about resilience and being able to meet the government's priorities of the day, I would completely agree with you, like it's been an extraordinary 18 months and it's super important that GOV.UK is, as the online home for government, is able to be able to be comprehensive and responsive to provide support for the government's critical priorities of the day. For-for the past 18 months, that's been Coronavirus and Brexit. And we've seen som,e we've seen some record levels of traffic. So I think during the pandemic we reached a peak of it was around 42 million page views at our daily peak. And that that is truly extraordinary, thinking about how the value and the importance of GOV.UK has grown over time. And I think what the last 12 to 18 months has shown us has really been the value of the value of GOV.UK as this critical source of truth, the value of collaborating across government, we've already talked about that, and the value of making sure that we're providing that trusted, accurate information and support to the millions of people that are relying on GOV.UK.

Ross Ferguson:

I am not surprised that given that people on GOV.UK are the sorts of people who will care about pixel widths on things like hover states and, you know, and and and punctuation to almost the pedantic degree - but I would never say that - that come, you know, a national, you know, emergency, an unprecedented event for for the UK and the world, that those people would rise to the occasion. You know, nobody wants a pandemic but thank goodness we had GOV.UK as a place that, you know, the civil servants, and GDS, GOV.UK and then across the government could all use to collaborate with one another in the creation and curation of guidance and services very, very swiftly. But also, you know, and then the public could be given a really clear steer on where they could go. 

And so I think that it's been interesting looking at the usage patterns we see, yes, an increase in the number of people overall coming to GOV.UK, but, you know, an increase in the regularity of those visits. So I think that that cross government collaboration that we saw come to the fore during the intense COVID period, paid off. And actually I think that it's, although we are glad that there's not the same urgency, I think that focus on collaboration does need to continue on now for and lots of aspects of running government, but particularly in that digital space where we're, we're good in the UK at digital government, but we're still not meeting our full potential. And so I think if we can keep that focus on-on good public services online, across government collaboration, I think that they, I'm very optimistic about the future for-for the digital government here, here in the UK.

We want to be doing more and we want to be doing better. And because that's what people here in the UK want us to do, and I think, you know, where you mentioned our, our blogs, podcasts, our code is all open. And we you know, we do, we share this so that our peers and other governments internationally also at the local level here in the UK can, you know, can can benefit from that and that we can benefit from their feedback and their scrutiny as well. I think that's-that's one of the things that I think the GOV.UK, GDS, UK dig-government digital does really, really well that that openness, that willingness to share and that drive to keep-keep doing better. And I think that that's what and that's what that gets me really motivated.

Vanessa Schneider:

We have now come to our final objective, is: be channel agnostic. So personally, I know we've done fantastic work in collaboration with third parties like search engines in order to link content outside of the confines of the website itself. I was just wondering, maybe Rachel, you can tell us about how such partnerships came about and how this has changed things for users.

Rachel Tsang:

Definitely. So I think we, unsurprisingly, are huge fans of-of collaborating. You mentioned that we've done some good work recently with Google to make sure that more GOV.UK content is available through-through rich search results. We also did some good work on the recent local elections as well. And so I think we start from the premise of wanting to collaborate and to think about how we can make more of our content more available. 

I think the broader objective on being channel agnostic, I mean, we know that users are increasingly accessing information through other channels. Right? Search engines or voice assistance and-and so on. I think we also know that in May of this year, it was around 67% of our users that were accessing GOV.UK on mobile. And we see that number increasing year on year. So the work that we've done so far is good. We're-we're responding to changes in user behaviour where possible. But this objective for this year is really about enabling that step change. So through coronavirus, all of our services were designed as mobile-first. But what we need to keep pace with technology. So this is thinking about exactly to your question, designing for provision for access to-to GOV.UK information and services beyond the website. And that's yeah, super exciting because I think it's-it's keeping it's keeping pace with the user needs and changing user behaviour.

It highlights how the 5 objectives that we have for our roadmap for the year, they're not, there's a huge amount of interdependency there. Right. We started out with the fundamental building blocks of being available, accessible, accurate. We build on with like supporting priorities of the day. We talk about personalisation. We talk about being channel agnostic. You put all of that together and like holistically that is about GOV.UK and enabling users to access information about government and services in a way that is tailor, that is personalised, that suits their needs. 

Ross Ferguson:

GOV.UK's getting close to being one of the top five, most used to most visited sites in the, in the U.K., and it goes up that-that list every-every year. And so I think that people will always value there being a site that they can go to or certainly they will value that for-for many, many years yet. There have to be other other channels that you are able to benefit from the information and parts also the services that are on the GOV.UK platform. And because, again, you might not know that you you could benefit from that information and other services, other parties might usefully be able to suggest, OK, actually you need you need to know this from the government or actually at this stage in your transaction with us, actually government can is the best place to help you with this. 

And so I think that we want to explore those and call them partnerships, those and those crossover's a bit a bit more. Yes with some big household name technology companies, but also with groups that are involved in civil society. And this could be a national, it could be at a local level as well, and they are providing great support and services to-to their and their constituents, their members, their-their users. So I think there's a lot that we can do there. 

I think what cuts across all of these, whether you're using a voice assistant more, you're perhaps engaging with some citizens advice and service or information on BBC is that you want to know that that information from the government is-is-is quality, is reliable. And so I think that that's where the GOV.UK verification, the GOV.UK brand, if you like, can really, really be useful there. And that is new ground for us. It's exciting perhaps to be--have a presence off of our own domain. And, you know, you mentioned we've been talking about trust earlier on, whatever we do in this space has to be underpinned by trust. And to get that right, we'll do experimenting and we will, we will talk to users because that is what we've always done. And that will keep us right.

Vanessa Schneider:

So before we start to wrap up, I was wondering, what are you most excited for on this journey? Let's start with Ross.

Ross Ferguson: 

That's a tough, that's a tough question. I-I am excited to see what the, what the response to the account will be. I'll be interested to see the way when we--as we roll out across the whole of GOV.UK this year and how people will respond to that, whether they will see it as a good utility. I'm anticipating the feedback, anticipating it being positive. What-what I'm looking forward to most is, is the detail about what more it could do and about how it should interact with services. I think that will give us a lot to go on.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you Ross. Same question to you, Rachel please.

Rachel Tsang: 

I think for me this is going to sound incredibly broad, but I think it's the energy around the delivery that we're doing right now. Like, we've got a really clear vision and direction and we've blogged and can I say podcasted? We've podcasted about it. And I think having that honesty and clarity about what we're doing and being really open about it is super important. Right. And I think that buzz is we're-we're kind of generating that buzz out externally.

But it is also very, very much with the team that's delivering on GOV.UK. And that's super exciting. And-and we can, I--can I talk about recruitment? Because I know we're very, very, very keen for lots more people to join GOV.UK. And we've got super exciting vision. We've got a clear direction of travel. So we are recruiting lots and lots of different roles. So user researchers, data scientists, product delivery, design, technology. I would say, particularly in the technology space as we design the architecture we talked about we platforming earlier on and so worthwhile having a look at the GDS career site to see our live roles, have a look at the blog. Ross and I, we published a blog post on four tips for applying for a job on GOV.UK. And we're hiring with a particular focus on our Manchester hub. Indeed, both in--both Ross and I are based up North.

The only thing I would add with that: this is actually really exciting, I think this is important to both Ross and I is that we are investing in junior roles, right. We want to build our-our pipeline of talent and invest in the development of people. So I would say that this isn't just about recruiting at a senior level. We're looking at all sorts of roles and all sorts of levels. So please do come join us.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Thank you to both of you for joining us today on the podcast, and thank you also to all of your colleagues who joined us to share their contributions to the GOV.UK Roadmap objectives.

As a reminder, we are currently recruiting across GDS, and quite extensively for the GOV.UK programme. So we invite you to look at our vacancies and apply if you’re interested in any of the opportunities. 

You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean.

Goodbye.

Rachel Tsang:

Bye.

Ross Ferguson: 

Thank you very much. Goodbye. 

Tom Read, CEO of GDS, sits down to chat about his first few months and what’s next, taking us through the GDS strategy for 2021 to 2024.

Do you enjoy the GDS Podcast? Help us to make it even better by completing our short, anonymous survey.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Vanessa Schneider: 

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today I'm joined by the Chief Executive Officer for GDS, and that's Tom Read. 

Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. I know that you joined GDS back in February, which in these times feels like an eternity. But could you please introduce yourself and what do you do to our listeners? 

Tom Read: 

Sure. And thank you for having me. So I'm Tom. I'm the Director General and Chief Executive of the Government Digital Service. As you said, I've been here just over 3 months now. So effectively my job is to set the strategy for the Government Digital Service, work out how it aligns with ministerial priorities, how much money we've got, what we're currently working on, and then keep out of people's way as much as possible and let people get on with delivery. That's sort of what I'm here for, I think. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

OK, I hear it's not your first rodeo at GDS: do you mind sharing how this experience is different? 

Tom Read: 

Yeah. So I was, I was at GDS from for about 2 years in 2013 to 2015. Back then, I mean, everything was quite different. I worked in Liam Maxwell's area, which was the sort of, the more, the tech area than the digital area, and I was brought in to run a technology transformation programme in the Cabinet Office itself, plus DCMS [Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport]. It was great fun, really good fun. 

How is it different? I don't know. It's... GDS back then was was smaller, much more sort of a scrappy start-up. It had this sort of triumvirate of real heavy hitters in Mike Bracken and Liam Maxwell and the Minister, Francis Maude, now Lord Maude. And so it had a really, it sort of felt very much on the bleeding edge and it was very much going out and trying to push down some doors to get people to-to let it exist and let it really make a difference. I think a lot of that spirit is still, still here in GDS. But there's a little thing I've written in-in our new strategy, which is we're not in start-up mode anymore. And I think that's it's quite important to recognise, we-we've, we've done that phase and now we're sort of maturing a little bit. So it's slightly different. But the spirit is the same. 

So after 2015, I basically I did 2 years of just like super intense work, like it was just, you know, really, really fun. So much fun but incredibly tiring. And I basically sort of said, right, that's, that's it. That's my little tour of duty in government done. And I-I went off and joined a consultancy and about 3 months in working for the consultancy, which was a lovely place, really lovely place, great people. I suddenly thought, ‘ack, I'm not done, actually. I-I-I really miss government already’. 

So later that year I applied for a few roles and I was successful in a role as the Chief Technology Officer at the Department for Business, as was. And I'd worked there with amazing people like Emma Stace, Mark O'Neill and other people, it was just - Andrew Greenway - it was, it was a really great team. And we really started to create a digital movement in that weird department because it's like a small policy department with loads of arm's length bodies. And it was good fun and we really got going. 

And then there was the machinery of government change. So energy and climate change came in, education went out so universities and things went out to education. And I don't know if any of our listeners have been through machinery of government changes, they're like mergers acquisitions in the private sector. I kind of saw the writing on the wall. I thought that there isn't space for, for 3 directors in what was to become BEIS [Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy]. 

And so I started to look around government and it happened. There was a vacancy coming up at the Ministry of Justice [MoJ] working for Sir Richard Heaton, who I worked to when I was at GDS, he was the Perm Sec[retary] of the Cabinet Office and one of my all time sort of heroes in government. And so I was sort of managed moved across to MoJ. And that's where I've been for the last 4 and a half years. Up until now, by a long way, the best job I've ever had in my career. It was just this incredible, meaningful work of helping some of the most vulnerable people in society to fix their lives and get an education and get their lives back on track. It was brilliant. So yeah, I've been, I've been in a few departments. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Well, they tend to say, don't meet your heroes, but it seems to have worked out really well for you. I also wanted to give a shout out to Emma Stace because the Department for Education Digital and Technology team has just launched their first podcast episode with Emma in it. 

Tom Read: 

Oh, awesome. Oh, well, fantastic. Well, listen to that one. She'll be amazing. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

[laughs] But also listen to us!

Tom Read: 

Obviously listen to us!

Vanessa Schneider: 

So it's clear to me, just listening to you that you're passionate about digital government, always coming back to it as well and looking at your resume in general. But I was wondering why that was. What is the power of digital? 

Tom Read: 

What is the power of digital? That's a really good question. So the thing that's unique about digital teams in government, but also outside government, is we just have a relentless focus on users and how they work. And I know a lot of bits of government do that as well - it would be a bit insulting to policymakers to suggest we're the only people who do that. 

But any bit of digital design, whether you're working for a supermarket or a retailer or a bank or government, you have to design around how users use things because otherwise they don't use them. And then you're wasting everyone's time, right? In government, I think we've used digital, now more the word data, user needs, these sort of things, kind of as stalking horses, they're, they're ways of expressing designing things around how users work. And I just think that's a great opportunity. 

I also think government itself is fascinating because some some bits of government have been around for hundreds of years and some bits have been around for a thousand years. And without being simplistic, some of the processes haven't changed very much in that time. And so you can stick a website over it. But really, you need to look at the whole, you know, policy through to what outcomes you're trying to get, the process, and then digitise that. And I think that's really missing from how we talk about digital in a lot of cases. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

So, you mentioned obviously that you've been here for 3 months and some people make a big deal out of it - the first 100 days somebody has spent in a new job, especially in a leadership position. Is there anything that you're keen to share that you've learnt in this time, or maybe you found something that surprised you? 

Tom Read: 

Yeah, I mean, just so much. It's quite weird hearing it's been 3 months actually, because, in the nicest possible way, it feels like a lot longer. And I do mean that in a positive way. I've learnt a lot. There's, there's a lot. GDS is a funny place because everybody's got an opinion about GDS just anywhere in government. And beyond actually, everyone's got an opinion about what's good, what's bad. There's a whole set of people on Twitter who seem to spend most of their lives just commenting on what on what GDS is doing. And it's really peculiar. And so coming in, or sort of back in, but, but into this role from a department has been fascinating. 

So it's sort of off the top of my head, a few things I've I've learnt. One is I think the, GDS is just completely full of, like, super intelligent, incredibly civic-minded people who care. And I think, yeah, I don't want to go on a soapbox rant about this, but that's probably the thing that people really miss when they're judging GDS, is just how much people care about, you know, service design and, you know, the underlying technology and content design, accessibility, all these things that really matter. It just, it really infuses everything when you're speaking to people. And there are people who have been here for like 7 or 10 years who just still have the same absolute passion for improving public services, which is amazing. I mean, I've got a short attention span, so a lot of respect for those sort of people. 

On the, on the, sort of, the more complex side. I think, the first, we still sort of hark back quite a bit to sort of the first 5 years of, of GDS, which I don't think is uncommon in a sort of quote unquote start-up. You hark back to the early days - I was speaking to a friend who works at Monzo recently. And he was saying everyone still talks about when there were 30 of us and we were trying to build from scratch. We're not like that anymore. So I think, I think a lot of people still look back at where we had all this support and we were crashing down doors and building things. And it was busy and we were on stage a lot. And then there were 5 years of much quieter GDS over the last 5 years - still doing very important work, but taking much more of a collegiate view. And I think one of the things I've been puzzling through over the last 3 months is how do you get the happy balance between those 2? I think maybe we need to get back a little bit into the setting direction and pushing delivery as well as working together. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Yeah I mean, I think one of the things that people remember when they hearken back to those good old days is also the mottos that sprung up. There's a lot of stuff that we say at GDS that has spread beyond, that's really been used a lot. For instance, doing the hard work to make it easy for the user. So obviously our ambition is to make dealing with government easier. Where do you think we are in this mission? 

Tom Read: 

That's not what I thought you were going to ask me. So I think we're at a really interesting point. So thing, things that have been done well over the last 10 years, we talk a lot about the really good services. There are lots of services in government that are better than you would find in the private sector. And I think that the narrative that government's never going to be quite as good as the private sector: I've worked in the private sector. It's just not true. 

We're all roughly trying hard, dealing with legacy, dealing with complexity, competing demands, that kind of thing. So there are a bunch of things that have been done just incredibly well. So, you know, the passport service is just an exemplar. There are amazing things in digital tax. There's stuff we were doing at MoJ, there's there's stuff at DWP [Department for Work and Pensions], which is really, you know, pushing the boundary and properly, you know, micro-services, architectured services that will last and stand the test of time. 

Equally, I think I think we just declared victory way too early. So it's one of the first things I was sent when I joined GDS was, I was like, we've got a list of the the paper forms in government, you know, the, the services that have never been touched. And I was sent a spreadsheet with with 4,000 lines, and each line is a PDF or a Word doc, that a user has to download, fill in, so they need a printer, then they can fax or post it. So you either need a fax machine - I genuinely don't know how that, how that technology works in the digital age - or you go to the Post Office and I think it's just not good enough. 

So I think from that perspective, we've done a lot. We've embedded amazing digital talent across government. GOV.UK is standing firm and is still a really excellent sort of front end of government. But we've got a lot more to do. And I also think we're slightly, we have still been thinking in the context of 10 years ago, where it was a publishing layer and then individual silo transactions, I think we need to move beyond that now. We'll probably talk about that a bit more later. But I think we need to move beyond what was a good idea 10 years ago and iterate - use some of our, use some of our own secret sauce for that. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

I am so curious. Where did you think I was going to go with that question? [laughs]

Tom Read: 

I thought you were going to ask me about some of the mottos [laugh from Vanessa] and whether they still stand up. So, you know, ‘the strategy is delivery’ and you've got on your laptop ‘Make things open. It makes things better.’ In fact, I've got it on mine as well. I-I thought you were going to ask about some of those things. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Do, I mean, if you want to riff on that, go for it. [laughs] [laugh from Tom]

Tom Read: 

There is a lot to be said for the, the memory that goes with catchy, meaningful slogans like ‘strategy is delivery’. It's great because the strategy was never delivery. Right. The strategy was deliver something quickly and make it so good that once people come to tell you stop doing it, they'll look like idiots because you built something brilliant, fast and cheap. It's not-- the delivery isn't the strategy. Strategy is let's not talk about it. Let's let's deliver something and then we'll have something to show for it, which is great and similar with, you know, the talk about user needs, not government needs. It's still government needs. It's just if you build it around how users work, then the service is cheaper and it'll actually be used online. It's it's sort of proxies for for what we're trying to do. Big fan of that sort of proper marketing. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

So I was wondering if you wanted to reflect on the mission of GDS now and for the next 3 years in context of the 5 points that you outlined in your blog post? 

Tom Read: 

Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing we're trying to do is we need to kind of say, what are we really going to focus on? Because it's, I don't just want a shopping list of what we're busy with. It's like what can we uniquely do in GDS? We've got this, like, incredibly privileged position of being in a centre of government. We're reasonably funded at the moment. Good ministerial support. What are we uniquely able to do in that position? Let's let's leave the departments to do, to do what they do. 

So we've we've we've come up with with 5 points, as you say, and I'll sort of rattle through them, but sort of explain why I think they matter. So the first and kind of most important one is we have to keep the things that we're already running running. So we, GOV.UK is a obviously fundamental part of what we do. We need it up to date, we need the publishing tools to be modern. We need to be iterating some of the design patterns around finding content, around exploring, sort of navigating content. And we need to re-platform it. It sits on a tech stack in the cloud. But but that's coming out of support. So so keeping things running, it's not always sexy, but it is the most important - if we do nothing else we'll keep GOV.UK running. 

The second thing we really want to go to is, focus on is, is kind of what I meant earlier around moving the dial from just doing transactional services. So we want to focus on what we're calling whole, whole services or solving whole problems for users. So an example. And we're not sure which examples we're going to use, right. But an example that that we're looking at at the moment is around having a baby. 

So if you if you are a person and you're having a baby, I've made a list here. Things you might need to know about, that government can help you with are: maternity pay, shared leave, maternity allowances, registering the birth, getting child benefits, getting tax credits, finding childminders, getting nursery places. And at the moment, you need to understand all of those things individually. Then you need to apply for each to work out whether you are eligible. It's, well, well-intentioned nonsense. And really what you should be able to do is what you would expect in a commercial transaction where you would go on, you would have your details already stored and it would say you are eligible for these 5 things. One click and we'll sort it out for you. 

And I think that's, maybe that's pie in the sky, there's so many reasons why that might not work. But that's what we're going to aim for. So so we're going to go hopefully for, as I said, really early days. And a lot of people have thought about this before. We are not unique in this, but we're going to look at maybe 5 or 10 ideas and try to push them through to delivery and work out: does GDPR stop us doing this, does money stop us doing this? Does the fundamental structure of government and accounting officers accountable to Parliament stop us doing this? I don't know, but we’re gonna have a good crack at it. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

I think I saw on social media, because that's part of my role as well behind the scenes, that there has been work on that previously by the government, I think it was in the days of Directgov and Business Link, that life services was actually already a concept. So will it be resurfacing that kind of work? Are you going to look back at the old material and see what learnings you've made since? 

Tom Read: 

Probably, yeah. So Jerry Fishenden, formerly of this parish, blogged about tweeted about it. I think it was before Directgov actually, that that that screenshot. So that was kind of based around life events. So having a baby is one. I think, I think some of them aren't life events. Some of them are whole, just just whole problems, like going abroad isn't really a life event. But you do need to think about what - particularly now - you need to think about passports, COVID[-19], political unrest. You need travel insurance. You need, yeah, vaccinations, you need visas. You know, that's not real life experience. It's more a collection of whole problems to solve one thing, which is the person wants to go abroad and needs government help. So we'll definitely look back on on on on that thinking. There's very little new under the sun. But equally, we haven't done it yet. So we need to, we need to press on and deliver. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

No it's that agile principle of iteration, isn't it? 

Tom Read: 

Right, exactly. [laugh from Vanessa]

Vanessa Schneider: 

All right. You've obviously mentioned that we're looking at areas that maybe aren't being captured by government departments and also haven't had that attention previously. So I was wondering if there are still opportunities for us to learn from other departments in that area. I know, obviously, like the thing that you were mentioning with the forms, those are sort of those low-usage services, is that right? Will we be leaning on government departments that own those services a little bit or will it be solely in our purview? 

Tom Read: 

It's a really good question, we cannot do, there are bits that we can do ourselves from the centre, but they are quite limited. I talk to, I keep talking about the getting the balance right between centralisation and working with government departments, things like the long tail of digital forms in government. That's something we can't force people to do. The, we kind of have a two-part strategy here. 

So you'll be aware that there's a new bit of Cabinet Office called the Central Digital and Data Office. And basically that's set up to take the the strategy, policy, capability, those sorts of bits, and also the spend controls and like the mandate. And so they will be looking at which departments, which agencies, which bits of government still have a lot to do. And flagging that, being, you know, I don't know, a scorecard or something, but some way of measuring progress. 

We're ‘good cop’ in GDS. So our job is to build platforms, continue the work of government, so platforms, so Pay, Notify, we're going to build a way of submitting information in forms. And there may be 3 or 4 others that we're looking at. And the idea is if departments haven't digitised their simple lower transaction services, we'll give them everything that they need to do that, and we'll give them some help if they need some help to do it, and kind of slowly remove all the possible reasons why you wouldn't digitally transform. So we're the, we want to be the oil, the enablers to to help the long tails transform across central government primarily, but but also local government. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

And if you're interested in any of those products that Tom mentioned, we have a couple of podcast episodes that could be of interest [laughs]. So is there any chance that you can share more about what's happening at GDS right now with that focus?

Tom Read: 

So we're in planning stages, is what I'd say. So we've got some some platforms that are really quite mature now, so GOV.UK Notify, I don't have the data with me, but GOV.UK Notify has an awful lot of organisations using it. We're going live with the alert cell broadcast system. And other platforms we're in planning stages. It's really looking at what are the barriers to adoption. And then we're also going to spin up a team to look at what are the next 5, what are the next 5 things that should be done centrally, may have already be done in 5 departments. So can we bring those together and package it and offer it back as a service, or do we have a federated approach to the platforms? We need to look at those different options over the next 3 months. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Yeah, just to add in, it's been 2.9 billion messages sent since May 2016 when Notify started up. So honestly, hats off. 

Tom Read: 

It's cool. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

And a shout out to Pete Herlihy. I hope he's enjoying New Zealand. [laughs]

Tom Read: 

I'm sure he is. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Yeah. So I was also wondering, I think there might be some work on single sign-on and personalisation. I was just wondering if you wanted to give a sneak preview on those?

Tom Read: 

Yeah, sure. So a single sign-on for government and a way of verifying your identity. So fundamental parts of our strategy for the next few years. We've got money this year. We've got a lot of political support for this. The, some of the most brilliant people I've ever worked with anywhere, worked on Verify over the last sort of 6 or 7 years, genuinely, just utterly brilliant technologists, designers and that sort of thing. And, and Verify worked, right. It's branded as like, that didn't work. It worked for millions and millions of people. 

Equally, there are some design patterns that that that that haven't quite worked. It didn't work for for certain sets of users in government. And we are now in a position where we take all of that learning and we're going to effectively build a new set of services that allow, as I said, a single sign-on for any services that need them across government and a way of proving your identity to government regardless of your social situation. 

I'm really excited about this. I'm genuinely excited about this for a couple of reasons. One is we've got all that learning from Verify that we can pick up on. Secondly, a load of governments around the world have done this now, they've they've they've gone out and built on what we did and they've built their own. Thirdly, we've got proper buy-in from across government, real buy-in from ministers and senior officials in DWP, HMRC [HM Revenue and Customs], Home Office. Everyone's kind of on board for this. They know this is needed and our new sort of, very sort of collaborative approach that we're taking is-is hopefully going to bear fruit.

Vanessa Schneider: 

It's great to have those big hitters on board. Those are the services where users will find themselves logging in, in order to access the information that is specific to them, which I think brings us quite neatly onto personalisation, no? 

Tom Read: 

Sure. Yeah. You'll probably be getting the feel for this, that a lot of what we're talking about is interdependent. These aren't completely sort of separate silos of delivery. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Then what is in government, right? 

Tom Read: 

Well, exactly. So the way to imagine this, we're not simply building a portal, that's first thing to say. I know that’s sort of a bogey word in government and or digital design in general. GOV.UK for a lot of people is just there to get information from. And that's fine. That's fine. For for for other people, for whom government is very important because they don't access it 4 or 5 times a year, they need to go in quite regularly because they need a lot of help from government or they’re going through something quite complex in their lives. 

The concept is that you will use single sign-on to log on to a GOV.UK account. And from there, you will be able to access services ideally with one click, as I mentioned previously, you could have one click access to things you're eligible based on what we already know about you, or you can change your data. So the the great mythical beast in government is this thing called Tell Me Once. Right. So we we don't have a single register of citizens in UK government, but we have hundreds of them. We have, you know, our addresses, our names, dates of birth, addresses will be in a lot of databases across government. And if we move, I don't move very often because I'm at that stage in life, young folks move a lot and it's likely that most of those bits of data are wrong across government. 

So that's sort of, a by-product of a personalisation is we should be able to update that data and push it out to other parts of government in a really seamless way. And what's really exciting about personalisation, though, is there are, there's so much information on GOV.UK and so many services. You kind of need a Ph.D. in Government Studies to be able to to know how what you're what you're eligible for, what's out there. If you could personalise it by saying, you know, so for me, I'm in my 40s, I have children, I travel sometimes, I earn a certain amount. The amount of information on GOV.UK will shrink right down to, I'm making up numbers here, but 5, 10 per cent of that information and I should only be offered services that are relevant to me. 

And I think from that you're doing, you know, that old adage of - it's written on your laptop - doing the hard work to make it simple. We're doing the hard work of trying to get information about a person and yes, shrink down the complexity of government to what, to what is relevant. And equally, we're not going to mandate this, right? That's really, really key to remember. If people don't want to do that, you will be able to go into your GOV.UK account and, you know, show what data we're linking and and de-link it. If you don't want to do even that, you know, you can continue accessing services how they are now and certainly we’ll always have an assisted digital method for people who don't want to or can't access services in the ways I'm describing. But I think personalisation is-is the big, our big play over the next few years. I think it will be transformational for a lot of citizens. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Yeah, you mentioned the next few years. Obviously currently you're in post the next 3 years, am, is that right? 

Tom Read: 

Well, no, that's that's kind of artificial. I think, I'm here forever. Right. So what I've been trying to say to people, I think because GDS has had quite a lot of change at the top, I'm just trying to make it clear that I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. I think if I'm still here in 5 years, you know, maybe somebody should start to say: ‘you should probably freshen up soon’. Equally, I'm certainly not staying less than 3 or 4 years. I mean, we've got a lot to do. I'm already enjoying it.

Vanessa Schneider: 

I was going to say, this is this is what you're doing for 2021 to 2024, is that right? 

Tom Read: 

Yeah. I've, I've, I've tried to-to sort of focus on the current Parliament cycle. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Right, but it's a lot. [laughs]

Tom Read: 

It's a lot. It's a lot. And we don't do anything. I also didn't, I sort of think it's slightly artificial sometimes to say, you know, here's our 10-year strategy. Who knows what on earth is going to be happening in 10 years in terms of maybe they'll be tech innovations or maybe they'll be - more likely - machinery of government changes or something else. So I want us to focus on, you know, more than a year, less than 5 years. So our Parliamentary cycle, it also slightly secretly sharpens the focus for colleagues in the Treasury and so on for for the upcoming spending review. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Very strategic, I see. I know why they hired you. [laugh from Tom] Do you want to dabble in a bit of future casting? What happens beyond, or you know, say we achieve everything that you set out? What can we do after? 

Tom Read: 

I have absolutely no idea, I don't think. So, I think - what do I think? - The, the, the-I'm sort of stepping into areas of the Central Digital and Data Office here rather than GDS, I think. But. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

It will influence our work. No doubt. 

Tom Read: 

We work hand in glove already. It really will influence our work. I mean, things that I'm really interested in long, long-term is the there is still a relatively low digital literacy across senior policymakers and ministers, you know, with some notable exceptions across government. And I think that will change organically. I think that is changing already. But I'd quite like to see, yeah, without wanting to be hyperbolic, I think fundamentally the way we do policymaking, it's not wrong. But it's the way we've done it for a lot of time. 

What what what slightly worries me about that way of doing it is 2 things. One is we've never properly stopped and really understood what are the most important policy changes for users, for people out there. You know, really, would this policy change your life or is there something else that we could do for the same amount of money with the same ambition that would change your life more? And I think we need to, the very qualitative, but I think we need to do more of that when we're doing policymaking right at the beginning. That's one. 

Two: We tend to use data to prove hypotheses rather than than to suggest policy ideas. Really, I think we should be, you know, the really good work that Alison Pritchard is doing over at the Office for National Statistics around creating a data analytics platform that takes government data from all departments. That that's key because you should be able to look at the data, use, you know, authentic machine learning or similar, or just complex algorithms and say ‘find the connections’ that we don't quite know. What is that group, that for some reason they share a set of character traits or share a set of socio-economic situations? And then later on, they are the people who end up in prison or big users of the NHS or similar. And let's create some policy initiatives from the data. I think that would be spectacular. So anyway, so once we fix, once we've fixed all of the long tail of government and we've made GOV.UK personalised and we've done a digital identity service, we've moved all the legacy technology in the government to the public cloud, we've made everything secure. Yeah, that's where we'll go next, I think. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Obviously yeah, that-that's some amazing work to look forward to, I hope. But I think we should finish on the hardest-hitting questions that I have for you today. 

And we'll start off with Marmite. Yes or no? 

Tom Read: 

Uh, yes. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Working from home or working on location? 

Tom Read: 

Both. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Jam before cream or cream before jam on a scone? 

Tom Read: 

Oh, well, my mum lives in Devon, so I'm going to get this the wrong way around and she'll be very upset. But jam and then cream.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Ooh, that's the Cornish way. 

Tom Read: 

Damnit. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Early bird or night owl?

Tom Read: 

I'm a night owl. I'm not good at morning's.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Morning coffee or gin o'clock?

Tom Read: 

[laughs] Both! That's healthy isn’t it?

Vanessa Schneider: 

We've been stalking your Twitter feed. [laugh from Tom]

Planes, trains or automobiles? 

Tom Read: 

Well, I'll get in trouble with climate folk won’t I? Look, I really care about it. It's...I really miss travelling. I really miss travelling. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

You're allowed to say cycling, walking, canoeing. 

Tom Read: 

Yeah, a bit of that. Bit of, I don't really canoe. I really miss travelling on-on planes. I do live near a flight path and I'm quite enjoying not having planes going over. So I'm a hypocrite like everyone else. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Totally understandable. And this is quick fire isn't it. 

So Batman or Superman? 

Tom Read: 

Sup--Batman. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

All right. All about the journey or the destination? 

Tom Read: 

[laughs] I don't know! 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Too, too airy fairy for you, that's OK, no worries. 

What about crunchy or smooth peanut butter? 

Tom Read: 

I don't eat peanuts, so neither. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Allergic? 

Tom Read: 

No, just don't like them.

Vanessa Schneider: 

Fair enough. And finally, what do you think of the idea of an office cat? I know this one's hot on people's minds.

Tom Read: 

So. I'm a big fan of an office cat. I think we should have an office cat. I don't know if it's practical. We talked about an office dog when I was at MoJ with a, with a little you know, pass on its collar that was quickly squashed by our DGs [Director Generals].

Vanessa Schneider: 

Yeah I feel like I've put a cat among the pigeons by mentioning this. So [laughs] [laugh from Tom] there's always, there's always chatter amongst the staff, ‘Oh, can we please have an office cat?’. But unfortunately, because we share this building with other tenants, it's not been, not been an option, apparently, especially with cat allergies. I don't know how they get away with it, with Palmerston and FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office], for instance, you know, there's probably going to be people with cat allergies. But if you can put in a word, the cat people will be very grateful. 

Tom Read: 

OK, here's my most political statement of this whole interview. I will look into whether we can get an office cat. I think it's a great idea. 

Vanessa Schneider: 

Oh, fantastic. Well, I've run out of quickfire hard-hitting questions for you. 

Thank you so much, Tom, for coming on today and sharing with us what you see as GDS's new mission and how that's going to be achieved. If you want, you can listen to all the episodes at the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on Podbean. 

Goodbye.

Tom Read: 

Goodbye.

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