Oct 31
The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Student Loans Company (SLC) team released a new loan application service for part-time students on Wednesday. I wanted to take a minute to congratulate the teams involved, and tell you why we’re especially pleased that it passed the ministerial test. Read more
Oct 26
Warning: This is a slightly geeky post about agile – the methodology we use to deliver our projects. It therefore features quite a lot of terminology. We hope this will be useful for those of you building projects like these, but if you’re just an interested bystander you might want to start with this quick intro to agile.
Well, we did it! We delivered GOV.UK. It was big and hairy and we did it by being agile. The benefits are clear:
I’ve been at GDS since the beginning. Well, before the beginning, and after nearly two years here I’ve decided to leave. I’m moving on for a couple of reasons; one, because Blaine Cook (the original CTO at Twitter) asked me to join him at an exciting startup, Poetica, to lead on design; and two, because I have learned and achieved more working at GDS than I ever imagined I would.
GDS asked me to write about what it’s like to work here so here are some reflections on my journey so far.
Oct 26
As Paul’s explained previously on the blog we worked hard to make sure URLs didn’t break when we transitioned from the Directgov and Business Link websites. Although most people found Directgov and Business Link information through search engines, we wanted to make the transition as smooth as possible for users – and for everyone who’s linked to Directgov and Business Link in the past and will link to GOV.UK in the future. Read more
Oct 25
Hens and chickens, or breeders and meat?
Part of a GDS content designer’s role is to choose the best words to explain what a web page is trying to say. It’s got to be easy to understand, simple to find and, it goes without saying, useful. Working on GOV.UK throws extra challenges into this mix. Read more
Oct 25
Local government is facing many challenges in providing digital services to citizens and a significant barrier to that is identity assurance.
In order to understand these challenges, GDS commissioned a small sample review. You can read the full report here. Read more
Oct 23
Last week our new digital service GOV.UK moved out of public beta and replaced the two main government websites, Directgov and Business Link.
As my colleague Mike Bracken explained at the time, GOV.UK is focussed on the needs of users, making it simpler, clearer and faster to find government services and information.
Today we are releasing the beta version of our performance platform which is how we will use data to measure whether GOV.UK really is simpler, clearer and faster for users. Read more
Oct 22
We’ve already written about how we’ve worked to identify user needs for GOV.UK, so now I’d like to explain a bit more about what happens next – how does a need become published content or a tool on the site? Read more
Oct 19
The Identity Assurance team have been working closely with DWP on the first identity provider supplier framework for Universal Credit. They also had a retrospective on the development of the IdA ‘hub’ reference architecture and met with Colin Wallis from the New Zealand ID Programme. Read more
Oct 18
GOV.UK is now into its second day as the new place to find government services and information, and I’d like to share some highlights from our first 24 hours.
