Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a post about the word we should use for the people who use government services. Its opening paragraph was:
There used to be benefit claimants. There used to be passengers. There used to be taxpayers. Now there are customers (and patients, who seem, so far, to have [...]
If the people who read this blog are the sort of people I think read this blog, few will have paused over the title of this post. For better or worse, people who read this are people who are comfortable in an online world. They will shop online, bank online, talk to their friends online, [...]
My colleague Chris spotted a thread on a web forum about one of our services. The user was getting confused by a change in the presentation of the search function. Chris tracked down the people responsible for that bit of the user interface with a couple of detours to pillar and post along the way [...]
The Web is not free. It charges customers their time. Successful websites deliver the most value for the least time.
Gerry McGovern
We need to recognise the need for clarity of service design, for clear leadership of service design and delivery as a function of government, making customer understanding a central part of the job for everybody who has anything to do with any of this – and for all of that to to be done with a sense of openness and a recognition of the value of co-creation. That’s a revolution of culture, leadership and innovation which wasn’t on the agenda ten years ago.
The idea of service minimalism is a very attractive one. Perfection - in service design as in other things – is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
I have written before about government being most successful when it is least intrusive and also about [...]
There is – for good reason – no let up in the drive to add to and deepen the range of government services available online, most recently expressed in the Digital Britain report. But it’s important to remember that that assumes a level of choice and opportunity not open to everyone.
As a useful reminder, Leeds [...]
I walk in, slightly tentatively. It’s not altogether clear quite where I should be. I stand in what looks like the right area. Nobody takes any notice of me. There are one or two members of staff talking to other customers. There is a woman whose job seems to consist of walking around importantly with [...]
The latest Oxford Internet Survey was published a couple of weeks ago. It’s been going every two years since 2003, so starting to build up an interesting picture over time. There’s a splendid summary by somebody called Paul Reynolds writing from New Zealand which is rather more user-friendly than the one in the report itself.
I [...]
This is how news travels in the new world. Except it doesn’t because those whose job is to help it travel seem to do the opposite. A bit on the broken process first, then a few thoughts on the elusive information.
Let’s start with the indispensible Public Sector Blogs. Or rather not, since it is one [...]