26. As a user interested in
government activity relating to
[policy/topic/organisation X]
I need to read relevant
ministerial speeches,
So that I know the latest
position and can see what’s
been issued as public record
@neillyneil
GDS
27. No such thing as a ‘general
page’ on GOV.UK
@neillyneil
GDS
51. As a user interested in government
activity relating to
[policy/topic/organisation X],
I need to get emails notifying me
about new or updated content
relevant to my interests,
So that I don’t have to keep checking
the website
@neillyneil
GDS
64. How do we know if
we’re meeting users’
needs?
@neillyneil
GDS
65. As a user interested in
government activity relating to
[policy/topic/organisation X],
I need to get emails notifying
me about new or updated
content relevant to my
interests,
So that I don’t have to keep
checking the website
@neillyneil
GDS
68. ...so our aim is to provide
a useful service, by
helping the people who
want email alerts to get
Exactly the emails they
need and no more
@neillyneil
GDS
2. User needs, and how focusing on user needs is essential to build effective web products
Third, a bit about what it means to have all this content in a single domain and how we help users make sense of that
I’m going to talk to you about 3 things
1. GOV.UK
Well I’m guessing based on profile of the people in the room, most of you’ve probably seen it
But for the benefit of people in the room who are less familiar,
I’m going to start with a video which MB recently took to the Cabinet
Not been shown outside GDS before, so this is a bit of an exclusive
(Pick your fave cabinet member and pretend to be him or her)
...
So that’s what your nation’s leaders watched a few Tuesdays ago
And by all accounts it went down a storm, with much banging of tables
Mike went on to talk about the other things GDS is doing
Because GOV.UK is a small part of what came out of Martha’s original report, revolution not evolution, in 2010
GOV.UK is about fixing publishing, we’re also fixing transactions
Starting with 25 of the 50 most used online services from government
But GOV.UK is our most obvious and best known output
It’s also our most mature product
Been live for a year - we just celebrated its first birthday on October 17th
And it’s won government some prestigious awards, which you may have read about
Most notably the Design of the Year award, beating the Shard and Olympic Cauldron
The Mail kindly wrote this up as “boring.com”
But that’s precisely the point - we didn’t win the design award for making something pretty
We won it for making something useful
2. User needs, and how focusing on user needs is essential to build effective web products
As you heard on the video earlier on, everything we do at GDS starts with needs.
These are our design principles, for building digital product.
But actually they stand as a set of principles for any product or service.
I urge you to go and look at them. Search on gov.uk for design principles.
And look, top of the list: start with needs.
Simply, you can’t make a useful product without knowing what users need.
“People come to our sites to accomplish tasks and to fulfil needs, not just to hang out”.
Users don’t come to government websites for a giggle and a browse around.
Putting things there that you want them to do is naive and a waste of time.
We built GOV.UK around needs, and iterate it around meeting those needs.
This is the standard way we articulate user needs for GOV.UK
Using the format of a “user story”.
As a - type of person / I need to - perform a task / So that - I can achieve an outcome
Applies both to content and software.
Really powerful - makes sure everyone is clear who the users is, what they need and why
And we have a lot of users, with a lot of needs.
GOV.UK is the 43rd most visited site by UK web users
Behind things like Google and Bing, BBC sites, Amazon, Yahoo, banks
Which means we’re handling around 6.5m uniques a week
(You can see this yourself at the URL)
Majority of those users are coming to do the same things, week in week out
3,000 mainstream services and information needed by masses of citizens or businesses
This is one example, you saw it in the video.
We’ve mapped out the individual needs for each of these and we measure our performance based on how well we are meeting those needs
A smaller proportion of users are coming for information about how government works, and what government is saying and doing, which they’ll find in the departments and policies section.
This is the bit of the site I look after, and I suspect the bit that people in this room are most interested in, so I’m going to talk about it in more detail.
This is the proposition of the D&P section - at a high level, the needs it seeks to meet
How central gov works, what it’s doing and how to get involved.
It’s a conversation - it’s the place for interaction between state and citizens/stakeholders/users
As such, fewer users
It’s still for everyone from curious citizens through to engaged stakeholders and professionals
It’s visited by 1.5m people a week, about 20% of the overall site traffic.
It occasionally peaks to more than mainstream, eg HS2 consultation
And those numbers are climbing, as more organisations move to GOV.UK
If you change the axis to scale up and show a comparison you can see more clearly
services and info remains steady
Depts and policy is growing rapidly in line with transition of govt orgs into the site.
And that traffic is spread over a great many more pages
D&P is government’s very very long tail, with 145 updates per day
and we’re a third of the way through moving orgs onto it, so this will go up
We have a lot of different users, looking at a lot of different things every day for different reasons.
Which means there are a lot of user needs.
So whereas we track individual, specific needs per page for mainstream services and info.
In the long tail of content from departments and policy, we articulate the user need in this way.
A given person’s need can be thought of as a combination of the subject matter and the format.
For example, this.
A specific interest in a given area of govt work
Met by a specific format which delivers a defined outcome - in this case, speeches, but could be publication, stats, consultation
Firstly we’ve made it impossible to create page after page of nested “general” content.
You can only create the things users need from government.
Using those principles we got rid of more than double the amount of content we brought across in the first wave of moving websites onto GOV.UK, for the 24 ministerial departments.
Third, a bit about what it means to have all this content in a single domain and how we help users make sense of that
The two ways we make this work are
collaborating around meeting user needs
notifications to meet user need
GOV.UK is helping to drive collaboration across government to produce content in a more user-centric way
So while previously you had to check separate domains, now you can look up what’s happening in one place, by organisation
And you can also look it up by topic - you don’t need to know which orgs first
Organisations are collaborating on managing these topic pages, to provide a joined up view of activity across government around each policy area
And previously, if you wanted to know what the UK government’s policy goals were about a given subject eg Afghanistan
Now you only have to visit one page
Producing this page involved lots of people talking to each other and co-authoring this page
GDS co-ordinated the production of 223 policies in this way
As a consequence, many more people talking to each other now
And those 1000 publishers are all using a single shared publishing system, built for collaboration and co-authoring
to better meet end user needs
And writing using a consistent tone and language and structure to make sure the user gets and understand what they came for.
Go and read it.
Develop the software collaboratively and openly
Anyone can see this backlog
Anyone can suggest feature ideas
And a community, who we communicate with via our blog.
Users and publishers. Feedback on our work.
Much room for improvement - working with depts and agencies to improve content quality
Another user need for communications at scale is notification when things change
...but it does validate the need for the service
We want to send less email
By focusing on user needs, and encouraging content producers to combine their content, we can improve the signal to noise ratio.