Dear Government Digital Service (GDS),
To avoid making the same mistakes as Directgov, and condemning the public sector web to another decade of malaise, you need to change your approach. In theory you've been given absolute control and absolute authority. You need to use your powers wisely. The first step? Abandon government supersites.
Martha Lane Fox's open letter was enough to save Directgov and put you on a path of even greater centralisation, based on the same hypothetical savings as Varney. Maybe this open letter will get you to start engaging with the public sector.
What you've promised us
In theory Betagov (that probably won't even be what it's called) will have a huge impact on the UK public sector. It could even have a huge effect on life in the UK.
Fox and Francis Maude have promised a billion pounds worth of savings in the public sector web. As we saw in
What happened to that £400 million? Directgov received £83 million over several years in pursuit of £400 million in web-related savings that never materialised. A billion pounds is a lot of money - chances are we'll notice having that extra amount in the bank. You therefore have a lot at stake.
If you succeed in creating hyper-efficient online services and close co-operation between government departments and bodies, much of the existing government infrastructure will become obselete. We won't need as many job centres, DVLA offices, or local authority offices; while the call centres and response handling offices for post will have a far lighter workload. Citizens will use online services without having to write to the government or call. In theory, Betagov could make much of the public sector vanish, in the same way that Amazon and eBay are laying waste to our high streets.
I assume my own job will be part of this billlion pounds in savings. Don't worry, my inner Tory rejoices at this. A lot of my job involves arguing with Directgov editors and emailing word documents around.
If Betagov creates a system where my job is performed more efficiently from London, and no-one needs to phone our call centres, I could go off and work in, oh, I don't know, ecommerce. I'd become a private sector producer instead of taking the government's money as a foot soldier in an army of bureacrats.
So when's the launch?
As far as Gubbins know, Betagov is due in January 2012, so it's being launched between now and a week on Tuesday. Directgov will be closed completely by August 2012.
Your blogs have gone a bit quiet on the matter. Why so coy?
You've published slides to show that in the case of 'Tax' and 'Going to court' Betagov shows some improvements on Directgov -
http://www.slideshare.net/DigEngHMG/betagov-content-testing-1312012-final
Smashing, that's a start. Your new supersite may work better than one which is virtually unchanged from five years ago.
You've shown that 'Betagov works better than Directgov for two sets of users, under two limited sets of conditions.'
Next comes the extrapolation. From Nick Breeze's blog post:
http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/13/quantitative-testing-betagov/
By way of context, if (and it is a big if) the same level of improvement were mirrored across the live service, a Betagov-style product could lead to:
- Over 1 million more user needs being successfully met each month (aka a million frustrating & expensive failures avoided)
- Users saving over 215,000 hours of their time each month
- Quantifiably lower levels of user frustration, and higher levels of user reassurance
Come on. Tell us how much that would save? Don't be shy. We love hypothetical savings here at Gubbins. Sometimes we dip into them and go for a slap-up feed at Witherspoon's. Mum's the word!
Hypothetical users
Time to re-cap Leisa Reichelt's blog post Opportunities lost – AlphaGov from 19 May 2011.
Who is the audience?
At no point that I saw did the AlphaGov team ever apparently think deeply about what kind of an end user they were going to prioritise. They talk about ‘thinking about who our users were’ and having a ‘user-base of all the entire adult population of a country’.
As User Experience practitioners we know that although you might want the whole country to use whatever you’re designing, you need to put a ring around the kind of users you MOST want to support ...
You can’t take a User Centred approach to design when your user is ‘Everyone’. You need to define who your users are. You must clearly identify the behavioural characteristics that you most want to support and focus on designing to best support these ...
AlphaGov sends a message that you can say you’re doing User Centred Design but you don’t have to show any evidence of a UCD process – audience definition, research, user involvement, design principles that actually track to specific behaviour attributes.
It's therefore going to be difficult to mirror the results of your testing, on two limited scenarios, across a supersite which offers a range of vastly different services.
And thus your new website will fail to offer the usable experience we should expect from a modern website.
You might improve the overall supersite experience, you might not. I haven't seen any navigation so far. Without local navigation, you get
the Directgov problem.
But to build tailored navigation, information architecture and content, rather than 'one size fits all' pages spat out by your CMS, requires considering individual user experiences. In other words, you need to start treating motorists differently from people wanting to find out about their pension and people looking for jobs.
But it's a lot easier to do this on individual websites rather than government supersites. And the organisations who provide public services know a lot more about their audiences than you do.
Are you starting to see the problem?
What you can accomplish in 2012
We're already a year on from Martha's open letter to Francis Maude. Again, in theory you've been given 'absolute control' and 'absolute authority'. What are you going to do with it?
Redesigning and relaunching Directgov is the easy bit. The content is already there. Word 2003 documents full of tracked changes are flying around through cyberspace as we speak. It's funny how your technological revolution doesn't involve that much new technology. But you know best.
You'll probably encounter some resistance from the government departments and bodies who actually provide public services. Hopefully they'll be polite about it. But they'll have a 'myopic view of their own service' as you put it on that training course I went on in Hercules House. They'll want improvements for their own customers, not theoretical improvements for 'the entire adult population of a country’. The debates will become drawn out and complex.
Not to worry, when you do launch Betagov (February? time to publish that date somewhere) it's only for public feedback. Hopefully you can get that bland sort of 'yes looks better' and 'yes I'd tell my friends' feedback you can pass upwards to the politicians.
If you stay the course and don't allow Betagov to become another Project Austin, you will launch it in earnest and close down Directgov. I think August 2012 is somewhat optimistic, based on the amount of stakeholders you have currently using Directgov.
Let's say you will migrate the content by the end of 2012. Two years after Fox's open letter, you will have completed the first step of your revolution, replacing Directgov.
Years three and four - things start getting tricky
At this point, you're going to need to start producing some kind of measurable improvement in public sector usability, as well as the billion pounds of savings.
If you continue on the path of centralising the rest of the public sector on to a single domain, this will take up all your time and resources. You'll have crossed paths with HMRC by now - are you going to bring online tax returns, and a mountain of web pages on to Betagov as well?
Because the first two years of GDS' existence were spent on creating a government supersite, you'll have to stick with it. Trouble is, the new Directgov will ensure that the front end for government services remains poor. They'll reach for a phone or letter rather than using online transactions.
You won't have addressed the transactions themselves, much. The power to change these will remain with the public sector organisations who process the application forms and own the customer accounts. You may plan to build and host new versions of the transactions under your direct control down there in Whitehall. However, this will take decades rather than years.
Governments will come and go, and as your existence relies on the good will of politicians rather than on users, you will need to keep proving yourselves.
The solution
There is a way out. Prove your absolute authority by giving us our websites back.
The majority of Directgov traffic is dominated by a small number of services - motoring, jobs, pensions and student loans, if memory serves. You call these 'flagship services', which is nice. Unless that's a euphemism for the most complicated services with the most demanding owners.
These are big organisations with their own web teams. Let them do their work. We're not converging all the public sector call centres into one, so why have we tried to do this with websites? Focus on something achievable.
Become an organisation that tracks the progress of government services. You will have the power to censure those that fail to make any progress, or even threaten them.
If you like, focus on reducing the amount of avoidable calls and lessons people make to HM government. Measure the overall number over time and get the public sector to put plans in place for how they'll get people to use online services instead.
When you discover an area of government where the rules are too messy and complicated to develop effective online services, feed this back to the civil service and parliament. Public services are only as complex as they want them to be.
The alternative? Years are going to go by while the theoretical savings, based on the experience of theoretical users, aren't going to show up. Expect commiserations from Martha Lane Fox while your board resign and retire one by one; or a new government move you and change your name again.
I feel for you GDS, I really do. I wish I had more power myself - working on a public sector web team, you rely on government policies which change year by year. Websites can only do so much. Some transactions were probably easier to complete on bits of paper. Our customers will always give up and phone us when they encounter something tricky. You need to decide what is possible to achieve while you still have time and good will on your side.
Time to choose your battles.
Yours sincerely,
Your nemesis,
Dorian of Gubbins.
