Digital
Transformation at Uk.Gov
This week I attended the
“Digital Transformation” event hosted by Dare and it did not
disappoint. Leading off was Russell Davies – Head of Creative Strategy for the UK
Government Digital Services initiative and a proponent of “Usability trumps
Persuasion” paradigm in digital service platforms. In his own inimitable style
with a dramatic opening to the 20th Century Fox sound track, he
described the process they had gone through at uk.gov to transform the
experience for the citizen.
According to Russell, Digital Transformation is about "
making services better
for everyone, not just people who use the website”
The strategic vision for the GDS programme can be summarised as:
The estimated economic
impact of this vision, driving the Citizen towards self-discovery and self-service
has been about 60 millions pounds of annual savings.
The process of digital
transformation started with pulling together multi-disciplinary teams to map
all the hundreds of services and microsites and identify essential services and
weeding out stuff that wasn’t needed.
The transformation delivery paradigm was built around following key
themes:
1
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Understand user needs. Research to
develop a deep knowledge of who the service users are and what that means for
digital and assisted digital service design.
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2
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Put in place a sustainable
multidisciplinary team that can design, build and operate the service, led by
a suitably skilled and senior service manager with decision-making
responsibility.
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3
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Analyse the prototype service’s
success, and translate user feedback into features and tasks for the next
phase of development.
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4
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Consistent User experience: use a common design framework to ensure a
intuitive, responsive experience which
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5
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No link left behind. Use tools to
re-wire the service to the new platform without fan-fare so that the users do
not notice.
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Incremental
Service Delivery
The platform delivery lifecycle was agile,
user-centred and multidisciplinary teams distributed across several sites,
delivering digital services in an incremental seamless manner.
Discovery: A short phase, in which you start
researching the needs of your service’s users, find out what you should be
measuring, and explore technological or policy-related constraints.
Alpha: A short phase in which you prototype solutions for
your users needs. You’ll be testing with a small group of users or
stakeholders, and getting early feedback about the design of the service.
Beta: You’re
developing against the demands of a live environment, understanding how to
build and scale while meeting user needs. You’ll also be releasing a version to
test in public.
Live: The work doesn’t stop once your service is live.
You’ll be iteratively improving your service, reacting to new needs and
demands, and meeting targets set during its development.
Retirement: Even the best services may eventually
reach retirement. That should be treated with the same care as went into the
building and maintaining of that service.
One of the more controversial but immensely
sensible thoughts Russell left us with was:
“ Don’t innovate, first get the basics right!”
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