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Just before Christmas, I read the Digital Services Framework tender documents, and I reeled in horror. I was pretty sceptical about the first iteration, and I explained those concerns, privately, to quite a few people. But in those conversations, everyone agreed the framework hadn’t come out very well. So I had hope that it would…

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks thinking, talking, tweeting and writing about the Digital Services Framework and how it should ideally work. I’ve been meaning to write a roundup post to go through all the comment that’s happened so far. I will get that done soon. But in the mean time, a story…

The preparation that leads up to doing a piece of user research is often as important as the research activity itself. Getting participants who are representative of your users, who aren’t accidentally prepped with expectations that might influence them, is key to getting maximum value out of a session. There are a few issues that…

Among the government’s most important priorities is the delivery of a new breed of digital by default public services. This is vital work: it’s not just about making services simpler, clearer and faster. It’s also about making them cheaper, so that we can focus our spending on front-line resources. For some public services, it’s of…

Any website which is around for more than a couple of years will probably go through some kind of restructuring – perhaps as part of getting a new theme, or reorganising and refining content for clarity and usability. Often this sort of process involves changes to the urls (“permalinks”) used to access individual posts and…

How many times a day do you figuratively throw your phone across the room or shake your computer’s monitor in outrage when a website forgets who you are or does something ‘stupid’? I bet it’s more than you think. For every good service that you use, there are 10 poor ones. What is the difference…