GOV.UK: 60 million users, 1800 user needs

Time to pop another GDS bubble, and this time it's a big one.

I thought about some alternative titles for this entry:

• GOV.UK: where the traffic comes from
• GOV.UK: Public services all in one maze
• GOV.UK: simplifying the impossible

Haha pretty funny ... I typed 'pubic' by mistake just then!

I should lead with the summary, Nielsen-style: GDS appear to be simplifying the public sector web, but they're using public (careful!) services all in one place as a design principle rather than an advertising tagline. GOV.UK is therefore guaranteed to be just as ineffective as Directgov at saving money while genuinely improving the public (fnarr!) sector. If they let the public (!!) sector run their own websites, they will automatically simplify public sector web content and allow us sorry them to make actual savings rather than hypothetical ones.

Do you actually need to keep reading? This entry is pretty much another cut and paste job. I said last time I'd try building something myself. I'm working on it, promise.

I'll reuse that blog title as a sub heading instead:

Simplifying the impossible

Plenty of GDS prose about the need to simplify.

Oh I can't wait for it. I was going to paste in the quotes then knock em down like skittles!! I'm going to say, 'but these are inherent problems from using a government supersite'. Here goes -

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/11/its-all-about-the-words/

One of Directgov’s main principles was to simplify government language, but it also tried to cover all eventualities.  This often meant that the content was full of caveats and jargon, making it hard to scan (and we know that people tend to scan not read).

Trying to cover all bases meant that we often bombarded  users with information that most simply didn’t need. For gov.uk we are working to make sure that users can find relevant content, read, understand and leave.

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/02/16/smart-answers-are-smart/

Inherent to the content strategy of the citizen beta of GOV.UK is hiding complexity and building tools before writing content. Much of the detail of government policy is difficult for normal folk to grasp and understand – and the proposition of GOV.UK is that they shouldn’t have to.

Smart answers are a great tool for content designers to present complex information in a quick and simple way. Defining what they are – decision trees? calculators? tools? is immaterial – what they do is provide a reusable technical framework to build a quick and simple answer to a complex question.

Tom Loosemore himself has tweeted to say:

 'Every superfluous page we create is one more dead end for an angry, frustrated, confused user ' - @GovUK team seeking the irreducible core

Thanks for that. No superfluous pages, you say?

but ...

as for the needs of multiple users and target audiences, the use of caveats and jargon, the endless amount of potential information you can offer ...

here it comes ...

these are inherent problems from using a government supersite

so what did you expect? I mean GDS. Not you, reading my blog.

Simplifying the impossible sounds like a noble aim. But the trouble with impossible things ... oh dear, blogs posts I don't need to write, sentences I don't need to finish.

All of this complexity of theirs comes from combining the whole public* sector on one website.

* remember in high school science when a kid used to say 'orgasms' instead of 'organisms'?

The Needotron

I stumbled across this yesterday. It looks like a big excel spreadsheet with merged, coloured fields. It's an attempt to simplify the impossible:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2011/09/19/introducing-the-needotron-working-out-the-shape-of-the-product/

Working out the exact “shape” of the gov.uk beta has been a long, difficult process.  Working out what needs it should meet, how best each need should be met and then defining how the whole proposition hangs together are hard problems.

you said it, not me. Then some more about the content strategy -

Starting the long journey from ‘articles’ to ‘user needs’

We started with long lists of pages and search terms from Directgov.  These we rephrased into statements describing something you might need from the government. Things like “I need to report a lost passport” or “I need to learn what Jury Service involves”. This gave us around 1,800 individual user needs, (or “tasks”).
We then

• Decided which of these initial 1,800 user needs should be included in the beta
• Aggregated those needs which made more sense to be together
• Assigned a format  to each user need (in gov.uk-speak a ‘format’ is a type of webpage or webapp e.g. a multipart ‘guide’, a simple answer page, a ‘find my nearest’ webapp. There are getting on for 10 at the moment)
• Assigned a priority to each user need

And so forth.

It does sound jolly clever when they start talking about webapps, though. And that Needotron of theirs. It's OK that our web strategy involves meeting 1800 user needs. We've got a Needotron.

Did I explain the '60 million users' in the title of my post? That's the 60 million people living in Britain. I'm being unfair, there - GOV.UK have only defined the adult population of Britain as their user base, so it's only about 49 million. Although I expect some under-16s will stumble across it occasionally.

One service, one website

The reality is, over half of Directgov's current traffic (and hence GOV.UK's) comes from the customers of only four government organisations: DVLA, Jobcentre Plus, the Student Loans Company and the Passport Service.

So, why keep talking about the huge complexity of public sector web content when you can split it into multiple sites?

Directgov still get £23 million per year. I have to assume GDS will get a similar amount to run GOV.UK.

GDS could spare a million pounds each, per year for a DVLA,  Job Centre Plus, Student Loans Company and Passport services website.

A website costing a million pounds would be a highly attractive, usable thing if each organisation ran it properly. That's a million pounds per year of design, hosting, graphics, and a dedicated professional web team.

Smart answers? Calculators? No problem. Get the code from JQuery. Syndicate the content? Easy.

For the DVLA one you will have a target audience (you can cut out everyone under the legal driving age, for a start). DVLA can start calling themselves 'we' again in their web content, rather than referring to the people providing the service in the third person. The website can have it's own tailored navigation and design, and some nice pictures of cars for users who need contextual images. I'd be astonished in DVLA didn't have some kind of web team already but let's say for the sake of argument they could spend £500,000 per year on designers, developers and writers.

Most of all, dvla.gov.uk would have fewer than 1800 user needs to meet.

Come up with autonomous websites for pensions and benefits and there'd be very few of those 1800 user needs left for GDS to meet with their own supersite. Not that they'd be out of a job, though. They could spend some more time producing sites for their friends in politics.

Wonder if the politicians' needs were among that 1800?