Digital centre for government: content for all

A new group of digital experts and academics will help the government develop a 10-year plan for improving how technology is used in the public sector. In this post, Sarah Winters reflects on what she would like to see for designing and maintaining content in government.

There are many looking at the broader view of digital in government. As you can imagine, I want to focus on the content. I’d like to see a fundamental shift in what government publishes. GOV.UK was the how, now we need a what (and we’ve always needed a why). 

Do it once, do it well

Answer the user need once. Point to it many times but don’t waste people’s time and don’t duplicate.

We’ve already covered a lot of this in our blog post, ‘When you design for everyone, you design for no-one’. 

Cohesion

The whole of the government can work from one set of user needs. Every department would understand the touch points and pain points in a journey, the language, the appropriate channel and the actions that need to happen. 

People who are just trying to do something don’t need 50 pieces of content from multiple departments and an app to do it. I can’t think of a single government interaction that needs that and I’ve been up to my eyes in most of them. We need to go back to the point above: do it once, do it well.

One of our projects in the pandemic pulled together needs for content designers, so you can see what it might look like, Covid-19 user needs: an open source project for content teams.

Content strategy for government

Not a comms strategy, not an editorial calendar but end-to-end content strategy. Online and off-line. This brings the 2 points above together. It should be published and someone senior needs to be held accountable. 

For those who aren’t familiar with a good content strategy it should cover governance, success and value metrics, have an overall goal for government and everything should feed in. We have a very, very old blog post called ‘everything you need to know to do a content strategy’ that I really need to update but you’ll get the idea.

Success and value

These can be 2 different things. You can be hugely successful if you are going for vanity metrics like traffic, but you can’t say it is a success if no-one knows what they are doing. Every piece of content can have these metrics and it is not actually that difficult as all the hard work would have been done at user needs stage.The success and failure of pages should be open - a bit like the old performance dashboard. Digital leaders in government need to be completely accountable for wasting money or failure. 

We cover a lot about success and value in our blog post ‘Is your advice content working?’

Governance

If you have more than 5 people in a governance structure who need to sign-off content, there’s something wrong. Either trust your content teams, train them, fire them or get out of the way. There’s too much ego in governance. If you set up the teams to work together on a problem instead of which department they sit in, you’ll find incredible things can happen. In all government communications - digital or otherwise - the mantra should be: do less, do it well and do it together.

Government services are online, but many users aren't 

Understanding how tech changes and how many people are now close to, on or under the poverty line. Right now, digital is not the default for everyone. Accessibility and inclusion need to absolutely be baked in from the start. That includes British Sign Language (BSL). When was the last time you saw a government page with a sign language connection or function?

New research from Link shows nearly a quarter of UK adults feel digitally excluded.

No AI until you get the basics right

Really. No shiny things until you know who you are talking to, where, why and only do it once. Chatbots do not need to replace navigation.

This isn’t everything I’d like to see but it’s enough to be getting on with. I do think all this should be used on all public sector sites and services. Local councils already have funding issues. Do you need 426 different web teams taking care of 426 pages covering the bin collection details for their area? We should use content in a smarter way. 

And have you seen some doctor’s surgery websites? Sweet mercy.