How designers prototype at GDS
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 …
Experimental
The design of government emails
Posted by:
Chris Heathcote - Product Manager for Accessibility Monitoring, Government Digital Service, Posted on:
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Categories:
Experimental
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 …
When will I get my thing?
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 …
Doing the hard work to make it simple
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, …
We’re thinking about updating the design principles
Posted by:
Mark Hurrell, Matt Sheret, Ben Terrett and Russell Davies, Posted on:
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Categories:
Experimental
The Design Principles have been in Alpha since April 2012. It’s probably about time they went into Beta. But every time we start doing that we ask ourselves ‘Are the principles right?’ We’re genuinely split on that. Mostly, the design …
Do less - Problems as shared spaces
Most traffic engineers will approach a problem with a road by adding something to solve it. This means new signs, traffic lights, or road markings. All attempts to influence driver behaviour. The Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman challenged this thinking …
10 questions to ask when reviewing design work
Picture from Jen Pahlka, stickers by us at GDS. The other day Jason Fried wrote a blog post called Questions I ask when reviewing a design. It's a good list. Reviewing design work is never easy. And giving constructive feedback is …
Linking from start pages to the performance dashboard
Providing good services is difficult if we don't monitor how well we're doing. Fortunately, we're building an entire platform to show, compare and provide insight into how well each service is working for citizens. Joining the Dots On every service …
Betas on GOV.UK
GOV.UK is constantly being iterated and updated and sometimes we need to draw users’ (including departments and agencies) attention to this. We do it by saying something is in 'beta'. Of course, the way we show that something is in …
Two new design guides
At the start of this year a few of us started working on two new guides for the Government Service Design Manual. They're aimed at designers, researchers and front-end developers who are building services for GOV.UK. Design style guide The …
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