In November Stephen, Rebecca, Henry and I spent a day and a half with design students at Middlesex University. Why we got involved The Product Design course was having its ‘5 year revalidation’. This was a week-long discovery where the …
In a few of our recent research sessions, we saw users get to the end of the service and bookmark the confirmation page. We asked them why they did this - generally it was so they could return later and check …
On Wednesday we printed all the start pages on GOV.UK onto a big sheet of paper so we could get a better look at them. It turned out to be really useful, so I thought I’d write about why and how …
Using data to understand the content is a useful guide when making design decisions. Knowing that, for example, page summaries don’t usually exceed a certain length, you can make a decision based on this and feel confident that the design …
Lately, Louise Downe and I have been working with the DVLA to think about what services and user journeys really are, and how we can build teams around them to design and make them. To do that, we have to …
I was looking at the Ikea website at the weekend and noticed this smart design pattern. Many websites tell you whether an item is in stock and many tell you whether a product is available in store. But this tells you …
All of the designers at GDS can code or are learning to code. If you’re a designer who has used prototyping tools like Axure for a large part of your professional career, the idea of prototyping in code might be …
We are starting to look at the design of emails that the government sends to users and what should be standardised in the service manual. It would be good to get feedback from service managers and designers about what would …
I'm working on the performance platform. We're showing data about how government services are doing, to help people who work on government services to improve them. I've been working on a new module to show how long you might have …
I'm working on the application form for the apprenticeships exemplar for NAS. As we've been researching and prototyping the service we've seen that a part of the form users find difficult is where they input the details of their previous jobs. In particular, …
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