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GDS Podcast #39: Improving navigation on GOV.UK Mar 01, 2022

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When was the last time you noticed any changes to GOV.UK? We share how and why we’ve updated its homepage and menu bars. Podcast update note: We have made some editorial changes to the podcast published on 28 February 2022 to improve clarity on the work we are doing. --------- 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 th…

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GDS Podcast #38: Understanding the complexity of users’ lives Jan 26, 2022

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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. --------- 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 whi…

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GDS Podcast #37: How to break into a career in tech Dec 17, 2021

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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. --------- 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…

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GDS Podcast #36: Maps in services Nov 30, 2021

Show notes

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: --------- 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 differe…

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GDS Podcast #35: How our Site Reliability Engineers migrated GOV.UK Pay Oct 28, 2021

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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. --------- 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] tryin…

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GDS Podcast #34: Collecting information from users Sep 28, 2021

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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: ------------- 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…

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GDS Podcast #33: Digital identity - working with government services Aug 25, 2021

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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: ------------- 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? Helen…

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GDS Podcast #32: Technologists at GDS Jul 28, 2021

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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…

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GDS Podcast #31: The vision for GOV.UK and the roadmap to get there Jun 30, 2021

Show notes

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 b…

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GDS Podcast #30: Tom Read talks GDS’s future strategy May 28, 2021

Show notes

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 importan…

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