Designers are all inspired to support and encourage other people to achieve their career goals. The challenge can be in fitting this alongside your day job. Senior service designer Kay Dale gives 3 tips on how you can support them more effectively.
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 …
When we welcome new designers to growing digital design community in government we often send round a bunch of useful links. In the spirit of Mike's 'publish don't send' I thought it was better to stick them up here so …
When designing a new service, a product or just a simple page it is often best to start with a sketch. Or a scribble. Something you can quickly put down on paper to help you visualise how things might work and …
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 …
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 …
Desktop thoughts Use GOV.UK brand colour to highlight information. Preserve green for success outcomes of services. Remove related links that dominate page as before. Only two links, now quieter but still prominent. They are of secondary importance, so experimenting with …
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 …
Some recent work on rethinking the travel advice pages. Hoping to work these into some user testing in the coming week/s. One of the bigger questions is around mapping. FCO use cartographers who manually draw the maps and affected regions …
I’m helping to redesign the foreign travel advice content on GOV.UK. When it moved over from the Foreign Commonwealth Office we used a format we already had. Over time we’ve realised this format doesn’t perform as well as it should, …
Going through the stages of discovery, alpha, beta and live is how government should do things. Beta means that the service is not completely finished but it will still do everything it’s designed to do and must follow the same …