Steve Borthwick is an interaction designer working at the Department for Work and Pensions. In this guest post, he writes about how his team iterated the Check your State Pension service and halved the number of enquiries around their biggest query. The service The …
We’re working on a new project at GDS to create a simpler, better way of building user interfaces for government services. Earlier this year we ran a discovery project looking at the tools and resources people in government use when …
Service design is getting more and more attention in government at the moment, but many people still don’t understand what it is. The most common question I hear – from people both inside and outside government – is: “Isn’t that …
Small changes can have big effects. If you have an idea for a small change to an existing site or prototype, a quick way to try it out is by using the browser developer tools. What you'll need A browser …
Over the summer at GDS we ran a discovery on the tools and resources teams in government use when designing their services. We wanted to understand how design happens in teams, what information people use when they design and what …
We recently hosted Design Ventura teacher training at our offices in London. What is Design Ventura? Design Ventura is a competition is run by school teachers, with the support of the Design Museum's education team and design industry volunteers. It challenges students …
As Stephen says in his post Hearts on our sleeves and rainbows on our windows: “Being LGBT+ isn’t like some other diversity characteristics; more often than not it’s invisible.” It's...
It’s easy to spot when a service isn’t working, it’s not always easy to spot why it isn’t working. That said, we’re gradually finding common issues which lead to problems in services across government. Many of them hinge on two …
We’ve already outlined a definition of what service design is, and why matters. In this post, I’ll sketch out some of the ways in which we identify whether or not a service is a good one. This is by no …
There’s a big demand for designers in government. In this post, I’ll explain a few of the ways we work and the different types of design we do in government. Over the years we’ve developed some ways of working that we …
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