WIREDGOV

Blog posted by: Kate Ivey-Williams and Sam Dub, 30 November 2017 – Categories:Content design, GOV.UK, Transformation.

Doing complex tasks like ‘starting a business’ or ‘learning to drive’ means users have to find lots of different pieces of content and interact with government lots of times. The content and the transactions might be owned by different, siloed parts of government. And users are often left to figure out how to complete them in the right order and at the right time.

Because much of this content and many of these transactions are hosted on GOV.UK, we’ve been working to take all these bits and pieces and build them into a coherent service journey. This will be displayed on a single page, that will show the user all the steps in the process, what they need to do, and in what order.

We’ve just launched our first service page – for learning to drive. Now we’re planning to use this approach with other services on GOV.UK. Here’s how we’re embedding end-to-end service design in GOV.UK – the home of digital government.

Joining things up for the user

There is a huge amount of content published on GOV.UK. There are currently about 400,000 different bits of guidance, transactions, forms, publications and other pieces of content on the site.

We’ve already done a lot of work to make it easier for users to find content on GOV.UK. This included creating a new taxonomy, improving the navigationand working on search. This work is aimed at making it easier for users to find the thing they are looking for and to navigate around the site.

Elsewhere in GDS, work had been done to develop the ‘task list’ pattern, which is a list of tasks that users will have to do in order to get the thing they need. This helped to prove the value of the ‘service journey’ approach.

The next step from this is to help users navigate based on the thing they are trying to do, and to put the steps involved in doing a task in order, to build a service journey on GOV.UK.

Driving change on the driving page

To pilot this work, we looked at some services that we knew a lot about and that we knew were relatively straightforward. We also wanted to be able to build on existing research. For these reasons, we settled on ‘learning to drive’. We wanted to develop a basic service page pattern for this service that we could then apply to other services.

Building on this, we’ve created a step-by-step journey for learning to drive a car. From the first step – checking that you’re allowed to drive a car, to the final step – what to do when you pass.

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