UK Government Service Design Manual: “…The service manual is here to help service managers and digital delivery teams across government make services so good that people prefer to use them. It’s made up of two things;
- the Digital by Default Service Standard, a list of criteria that services and teams must meet before they go live
- the Government Service Design Manual, a pool of guidance and advice about how to design and build digital services from teams across government…
Typically, government services are built after long, costly procurement processes.
In this way of working, users are seldom – if ever – consulted about the service they’ll be using. The first time the public might see a service is when it goes live, by which time it’s too late to make any changes when it turns out to be unfit for purpose.
This way of working tends to encourage the creation of overly prescriptive policy, which then forms the basis of the requirements document. Instead, teams need to constantly iterate against user feedback.
This means building and testing in small chunks, working quickly to deliver improvements to a service. Teams will work out how to best meet the needs of users, releasing code regularly and working in an agile way. This new approach allows closer working between policy and delivery teams and as a result, the development of more responsive policy, two aims of the Civil Service Reform plan….
When you’re confident about the basics of service design and the requirement of the standard, you can start exploring the advice and guidance in the manual.
You can explore the manual by phase of delivery, specific roles, or by topic…(More).”