Chapter 10
Consistent, not uniform
We must design for a fast changing world … rather than retreating to the sterility of traditional techniques and built-in obsolescence. We need an aesthetic of change.
Most large organisations possess a talent for dullness. Governments raise this into a fine art. Announcements from the corridors of power are carefully dried and stripped of personality, making even the most interesting stories seem bland.
In their more cynical moments, senior officials and ministers use the power of boredom to their advantage. It can obfuscate, confuse and ultimately bore people into not properly holding them to account. Holding a government’s side of the story up to the light becomes test of stamina; if you have the fortitude to trawl through the verbiage and jargon, the truth may reveal itself.
This can be just as much of a problem for people working within the organisation as it is to those on the outside. Those who are looking to improve what they’re doing make it easy for others to ask questions and give feedback. Few large organisations and even fewer governments do this. This is partly because those working in them are worried that they won’t be able to respond.
Most of the time, however, officials aren’t deliberately setting out to tell stories tedious enough to move the focus of attention elsewhere. Governments and other large organisations usually have a neutral or positive message they want to convey. This problem is that most people working in them are unable to communicate this in the style we now expect, or are simply not allowed to.
Breaking through this barrier can be especially hard in government. Part of the job description for public officials in many countries is to stay in the shadows. The political layer tells the stories, constructing a narrative that fits their aims. An official’s job is to press hard kernels of fact into their boss’s hands, and encourage them to use those facts wisely and fairly. There are few incentives for sensible officials to put their own heads above the parapet – and many are expressly forbidden from doing so.
This approach to government communications is reflected in the structures put in place to manage them. Every government department – as with large corporate organisations – has a dedicated communications team. They handle relationships with journalists, monitor the media, fight fires and offer rebuttals, and try to secure favourable coverage wherever possible. Their main job, however, is to control what message the organisation puts out to the world.
This may sound like a strategic job, aimed at securing a long-term goal like the successful landing for an important government commitment. In fact, the reality is usually much more tactical. Unless things start going wrong earlier in the piece, a government communications team only gets involved at the end of a policymaking process. Their job is to try and translate some finalised technical policy language into words that normal people might understand, make sure it sounds coherent with everything else the department is doing (whether it is or not), put a ribbon and bow around the announcement, and find somewhere for the minister to stand up and read the speech she is handed by her policy team. Very little of this is communication, in the true sense of the word. It is message handling for the benefit of the news cycle. This artificial storytelling creates a gap between what you see on the news and what is really going on.
Telling different stories
One of the most powerful ways for a digital institution to differentiate itself from the rest of its organisation is to interact with the outside world in a different way. In practical terms, this boils down to four things: catchphrases, openness, internet-era tools, and making communications an integral part of delivery.
1. Catchphrases
Some phrases have the power to spread quickly. This can be seen in the memes and viral in-jokes of the internet, the pieces of online conversation that are so easily replicated and adapted they seem to appear everywhere, instantly. These ideas, behaviours or phrases can spread from person to person with immense efficiency. Small ideas, infinitely copyable.
We should be careful here. We’re not saying – really not saying – that a digital team should spend its time emulating the production of viral cat videos and imagining that saying ‘we’re off the internet, this is what we do’ to the rest of your organisation will go down well. People will, quite rightly, take this as their cue not to take you seriously.
Nevertheless, the principles that lie behind how to spread successful memes are instructive for any team trying to achieve widespread change. The biggest challenge facing any new digital team sat within a huge organisation – government or otherwise – is explaining what it is doing, how and why. To succeed, it must do this on a grand scale, leaving potentially hundreds of thousands of people with little ambiguity about the intentions you have. It must also be able do this at speed. Given how fast a digital team should be delivering and iterating on what it does, there is no point in your organisation or the outside world only understanding what you’re up to 12 months after your strategy has pivoted to something else. Traditional methods of conveying a message of change across big organisations don’t always offer that speed. Government is full of great writers that suit a broadcast style of messaging; these are the elegant constructors of the white paper and legislative amendment. Unfortunately, these logical, structured outputs aren’t designed to transmit rapidly at scale – they are too complex, nuanced and complete. What’s really needed to communicate big ideas at pace throughout a system isn’t sublime prose. It’s advertising.
Other than the digital strategy we wrote about in chapter 7, the GDS wrote and published very few things that roughly followed the format of a traditional government paper. Instead, the team focused on creating short phrases, blog posts and presentations that formed the basis of a different method for how civil servants could communicate, both with each other and the people they were working for.
Government communications tend to be trapped between an egotistical yet insecure view of themselves. On the one hand, public organisations firmly believe they are important institutions of substance and meaning. However, most public institutions know their power and influence is more transient that they would like to admit. This insecurity leads governments to wear all that substance on their sleeves, producing documents and press releases that make no effort to hide the intellect and effort that goes into them. The trick for a successful digital team comes in feeling confident enough in the substance of what it is delivering to tell the world about it in a way that invites a conversation, rather than an orchestrated round of applause.
For the GDS, this work included crafting what would later become familiar digital catchphrases, first in the UK and then around the world. ‘Show the thing’; ‘Simpler, clearer, faster’; ‘Consistent, not uniform’; ‘Make things open, it makes things better’; ‘Start with user needs’; ‘It’s OK to…’; ‘Digital by default’; ‘The strategy is delivery’. Some of these went viral, for want of a better phrase, and some didn’t. Flat on the page, these short phrases might seem obvious, facile even. But they were incredibly powerful because they were tied to the delivery of tangible things. A small number of short statements made it immediately obvious what the digital team was trying to do. Like a good jingle or slogan, people remembered them. Posters were printed out and stuck them on walls. Stickers displayed them on laptops. Slide presentations were full of them. The catchphrases also made pithily clear that a digital organisation represented something quite different; this was not the verbose, technical language of analogue government.
The logic of catchphrases also applied to naming things. Governments are terrible at naming things. Take ‘V890 SORN’, the name of a service that the UK central government provides. What’s SORN? It’s a Statutory Off Road Notification. OK. What’s that? It’s the form you have to fill in when you register your vehicle as no longer used on the road. Fine. Let’s call it that then. The UK government now has a service called ‘Register your vehicle as off the road’. Similarly, there’s a prize for anyone who can guess what the ‘IER’ service does. If you guessed voter registration, congratulations; you can now participate in your democracy. The GDS didn’t think passing an acronym quiz should be a prerequisite to voting, so we called the new digital service ‘register to vote’ instead.
Every step taken towards simplicity is another barrier removed for users. It’s also a step closer to making things more straightforward for colleagues. Use language that works at scale. This is not about sloganeering or ‘selling’ a digital agenda internally, though it can undoubtedly have a rhetorical benefit. Writing and saying what you mean is fundamental to the vision lying behind products, services and organisational changes that a digital team should be trying to effect.
2. Openness
The default position for a digital team working anywhere – especially in government – should be to publish what it is up to. One of the GDS’s first acts was to set up a blog for the team to explain their progress on building GOV.UK for all to see and comment on.
Blogging by big organisations often ends up being a strange mix of corporate messages and peeks into a bowdlerised version of a senior executive’s diary: ‘Last week I went on a wonderful site visit to see our hardworking staff in the Worksop office.’ Real news is saved for press releases, and the senior executive’s true opinions for the pub. If your organisation’s blogs read like this, close them down immediately. Nobody is reading them.
There is also not much point in only making a tiny part of your communications open, and leaving most of it to a closed, controlled approach. A thin chink of transparency is tokenistic and lacks authenticity. Nobody will be fooled. Blogging and social media should not be thought of as an add-on to a traditional communications approach; it is there to largely replace it.
Openness needs to be the default mode of working across a digital team. The blog is where you put news, admit your mistakes and celebrate the team’s successes. Once a digital team is up and running, it should be able to publish something new every few days. In the 5 weeks leading up to the launch of GOV.UK, the GDS published over 30 blog posts. If people want to know what’s going on in the digital institution, be they colleague, journalist or interested member of the public, they go to the blog to find out. No more press releases.
This does not diminish the importance of digital teams in government building good relationships with journalists, nor the time and effort that requires. Many journalists have become used to getting the inside track on what the government is up to from their contacts. Some may feel irked by the amount of transparency in blogs because they are left playing catch up with everyone else rather than breaking stories themselves. Investing the time building relationships with journalists built on trust and reciprocity will pay dividends later, alerting you to risks and pitfalls before the team unwittingly stumbles into them. Others in your organisation will notice the benefits, and look to copy the digital team’s methods. As Emer Coleman, the GDS’s first Head of Communications, wrote in 2012, ‘Many more of my government communication colleagues across Whitehall will begin to explore how different relationships can be built through the behaviours we manifest in the social web, and how ultimately that just might be a good thing for government.’
Openness is about what you say as much as where you say it. Having part of a large corporate or government talk candidly about what it is doing and what it plans to do next is still unusual. Having those same organisations openly and humbly admitting failings and missteps is radical. You should do as much of this as you can get away with. In the early days in particular, the GDS published a number of blog posts describing in some detail what the team had got wrong. We did less of this as time went on, and, in hindsight, that was a mistake.
Showing humility is a scary idea in most large organisations. Yet being able to candidly admit faults while explaining how you plan to fix them quickly is a demonstration of strength. The flexibility and agility of an effective digital team should make it easier for you to correct errors than other parts of your organisation. Showing a different way of reacting to failure sends a powerful message. When you genuinely aren’t in control of the situation, conceding vulnerability rather than allowing the pressure to build up into a large and messy catastrophe is a good idea. Of course, this is easier said than done. Governments and large organisations have a huge bias towards crossing their fingers and hoping. Yet there is no shortage of examples where this has proved unwise.
3. Internet-era tools
A digital organisation will use the web to tell its stories.
Because the word ‘digital’ has become so bound up in some perceptions the world of marketing and communications, people outside the digital team may be expecting it to use all kinds of bleeding-edge social media tools to tell your story to the outside world. Those same people will find it oddly hilarious if a member of a digital team brings their paper notepad to a meeting. In both cases, the point is not about the technology – it is about selecting the best tool available for the task. A blog and a handful of social media accounts will get you most of the way.
A digital team should experiment with social media to see what works for its audience and ensure it is using the most effective channels for reaching them. A government team, especially, has a duty to figure out whether it is reaching a wide enough group of people. Try new things. The GDS staff tested Periscope for live video streaming. We tried using videos for the organisation’s weeknotes rather than written blog posts. Staff jumped onto comment boards when questions on GOV.UK came up (two of the Office of National Statistics digital team did an official AMA session – ask me anything – on Reddit). Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. Be as iterative with your approach to communicating as you are with the products you build.
The GDS began with one blog for the whole organisation and made that part of government communications infrastructure. From there, the team created many more tightly focused blogs, each with discrete and defined audiences, covering a huge variety of topics from user research to data science and HR. These created bounded spaces for experts to write to an audience they knew was interested, starting a conversation rather than a broadcast. They opened up networks, and left a legacy of knowledge that is still available for anyone to draw on. In many large organisations, hoarding information in emails and memos is a common form of controlling power. Publishing in the open breaks that model, and distributes power more widely. Wrangling with corporate communications teams is a time-consuming chore in all large organisations; using digital tools and practices is an easy way to hack around them. This annoys the hoarders, but is very much worth it.
4. Communications is part of delivery
One of the most important habits you will need to break as a digital team is the idea that communicating about delivery is the job of a communications specialist. Your digital institution will need a team dedicated to communications. They will own the channels you use, set expectations about the style, look and feel, and make sure there isn’t a complete free-for-all. But they are the curators of how your institution communicates, not the creators. The teams delivering digital products and services are themselves responsible for telling the world what they are up to and how it is going.
This does not necessarily mean that each digital product team should have a communications specialist in it. Everyone on the team, be they developer, researcher, designer or manager, is expected to contribute to the flow of communication. This will not come naturally to everybody. To some, it will feel like a distraction from the ‘real’ business of getting things shipped. This response is worth challenging. While imposing the discipline needed to openly communicate about how a product is developing can feel like a distraction, it is an excellent indicator of the product’s health. If you can’t write clearly about what you’re trying to do, or don’t feel you can be honest in print about the challenges you face, then there are some bigger questions the team needs to face up to.
Part of the trick in making collective communication feel less of a burden is to reduce both the number of channels you use, and the amount of tailoring that is applied to the way the team communicates. Teams in large organisations tend to tell different stakeholders what’s going on through individual meetings and emails, tailoring every message to their particular concerns, and doing so in fixed, irregular bursts. They send, rather than publish, what they are up to.
If the team correctly anticipates all these individual concerns correctly, this works fine. If they don’t, and it is six months before the next round of ‘consultation’ is planned, you leave a confused or angry stakeholder stewing for a long time. Communicating little and often through the same open channel, and with the same message for internal and external stakeholders, makes you more flexible and responsive to questions.
One of the communication gaps for most large organisations is creating space for teams to express pride in the work they have done internally. Changing anything is hard. A lot of the time, teams going through that journey are left with little more than mental scars. To fill this gap, the GDS used stickers.
Early in 2012 two of the GDS team visited NASA in Houston. They saw the patches the astronauts designed for each mission and inspiration struck.
From then on, each GDS team was awarded a mission patch for delivering a public-facing, time-bound project. They designed it themselves, including the GDS motto ‘TRUST, USERS, DELIVERY’ and featuring an animal somewhere on the patch
All the patch design rules were broken. That didn’t matter. Something as simple as a few stickers (which the teams paid for themselves) created very visible signs of progress, and a form of creative expression that was owned by the teams themselves. They put in the hard work to deliver something; they could then display that effort with pride. Allowing individuals to express themselves and feel ownership of the delivery stories they played a part in is a huge part of the culture behind successful transformation.
Presenting in real life
It is not enough to tell stories on the web. You will have ample opportunities to do it in real life too.
Anyone with professional experience in any office-based organisation, large or small, public or private, will at some point have come down with a bad case of PowerPoint poisoning. It begins with a feeling of disorientation, followed by heaviness in the limbs. Left untreated, it leads to depression.
The quality of presentations given around the world, even in the loftiest boardrooms by the most expensive consultants, is generally awful. Presenters are often caught between trying to say too much or having nothing at all to say. As a digital team, you should invest time, thought and effort in the way you present yourself. Too often, teams in big organisations do vast amounts of good work only to trip up at the end with confusing slides.
Being a good presenter does not mean being a charismatic, articulate extrovert (these can be the most self-indulgent presenters). It means doing the basics properly. Say what you actually think. Restrict yourself to a handful of words per slide, so it can be read from anywhere in the room. One idea per slide. Plan your story from end to end. Explain what this structure is to your audience before you dive in. Practicing beforehand. Keep it short – no one has ever complained about a talk being too short.
None of this is complicated, but it does require hard work. Like the rest of your communications, investing time in decent presentations should be part of delivery, not something rushed into at the end. Read www.doingpresentations.com for practical tips on good presenting, and especially the three blog posts on making presentations big, clear and bearable.
Designing for users
Good design is easy to understand. Like a joke, if you have to explain it, it’s not that good.
Governments and big businesses are rarely mentioned in the same breath as good design. Over the last 30 years, the state machinery in most democratic nations has seemed largely uninterested in its power. In the place of design organisations have put advertising gloss and campaigning sophistry, when it can be afforded, there to drape a thin cloak over the rough cogs of policy and implementation.
The power of architecture, visual design, art and iconography has been undervalued by a generation of public officials who instinctively discount what cannot be fitted into a rigid business case assessment. Making things look good is seen as a luxury at best, and a distraction at worst.
This is unwise, because today’s best services are very well designed. The most successful digital organisations invariably find a strong voice for design (Airbnb was famously started by two designers). Services offered by organisations that are not digital natives need to be well designed too. But to do that, they will have to go about design in an unfamiliar way.
Good design meets a clear user need. User needs are hard to identify. You find them by studying what people do, not what they say they do. A well-designed service does the hard work to make things simple. Simplicity is hard; demanding discipline, focus and sacrifice. For large organisations, it means letting go of language or processes that are well understood by everyone – except the people who actually matter. Your users.
Design often gets called UX in a digital world. UX stands for user experience. But, like communications, in a truly user-centred organisation everyone is responsible for the user experience. If the service is terrible because the server speed is slow, because of a legacy contract signed 10 years ago – no amount of design or UX can fix that. Designing the best possible user experience is therefore the responsibility of everyone on the team.
The design of public services often ends up taking a form that makes little sense to anyone but public servants and their peers. The ability of technocrats to craft services in a way that meets the needs of their entire customer base or citizenry is a far more compromised affair. Most government or corporate websites look awful because someone has planned for two weeks of UX at the end of a two-year project. That’s putting lipstick on a pig. It may meet the requirement of ‘doing some design’ but it won’t made the user experience any better.
There are two perceptions of design that Ben and the GDS design team spent much of their first couple of years trying to eradicate from the organisation. Firstly, design is not marketing or communications. The primary role of design in your organisation is to make it easier for users to interact with, in the services it provides and information it publishes. Marketing is about persuading users that something is a good idea. Design is about making it self-evident. Usability is better than persuasion, and often cheaper to boot.
Secondly, your organisation will probably need to tackle an unspoken class system in design. There’s no rule that says that a government website has to look worse than a website for Apple, just because it’s ‘good enough for government’. Some of the best and most loved designs in history come from public sector projects: the 1970s’ NASA identity guidelines were released as a hugely popular Kickstarter project. A digital organisation working in any sector should have high design ambitions.
As well as using design differently, you’ll need a different type of designer. Good designers work side by side with user researchers and with developers. Good designers can code. Good designers are involved at every stage of a service, not just coming in at the beginning or the end.
You don’t need creative directors and you don’t need some dabbler from the finance department who’s ‘really into all that art and design stuff’. You need integration designers, front-end developers, graphic designers and service designers. Which designers the team needs depends on the service your organisation is building and where you are in the process.
Interaction designers work on the interactions throughout a service. Should this form be one page or split one question per page? What’s easier for the user? They make prototypes.
Front-end developers code the front-end of a website, seen by the users. The best ones overlaps with back-end developers and the designers. They have a good eye for what works best for users.
Graphic designers think about the aspects of design that are perhaps more familiar; what font a website should use, or how to structure a page so it’s easy to read. They can provide a vital link between interaction design and service design.
Service designers think about the whole service end to end. They can join all the parts together and often cross over with business analysts. They do this all with the user in mind.
As in modernist architecture, ornament is a crime in digital service design. When the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions launched the Carers Allowance benefit service the analytics showed many people completing the form at 4 a.m. We asked users why this was, and the answer was that for many full-time carers it was the only time they got to themselves. In a context like this, there is no place for ornament.
That said, design need not become entirely functional. A digital organisation needs designers who understand the heritage of design in your country or company, and have a strong sense of the mission this work needs. Their ambition should be the same as when Henry Beck designed the Underground map. Their goal should be to place this project in the same canon as those great designs; not by pastiche or homage, but by using the principles of good design adopted by the organisation’s pioneers.
If they do this well enough, digital teams can unlock design patterns their organisation has never faced before. In the UK’s Ministry of Justice, a team redesigned the lasting power of attorney service following GDS’s design principles. Soon after a beta version was launched, the department’s call centre began getting more contacts. This was a puzzle and potentially a worry – the new service was supposed to reduce the number of people ringing up, not increase it. It turned out the spike in calls had been caused by users who wanted to praise the team on how smooth they found their experience. A positive feedback button was duly added to the online service.
What if a user doesn’t know what they need?
The idea of designing for user needs can be a problem if the user doesn’t appear to know what they need. In government, this paternalistic view is surprisingly common. It is also a bit of an excuse. Users may not always know (or care) that they need to pay certain taxes in exchange for certain services, but are well aware they need a public service that is simple and clear enough for them to complete it accurately and quickly so they can get on with their day. The user need of government services often boils down to ‘I don’t want to get into trouble.’ Public services should provide that reassurance with the minimum of friction. They often fail in this.
In the corporate world, a well-worn route to success is to create demand for something that a user never knew they needed – but they are now desperate to pay for. The old Henry Ford quote that ‘people would have asked for faster horses’ is relevant here. How do you design in a user-centred way while overcoming that barrier?
The answer is essentially that same as for government. Your corporate strategy and the available technologies might seem like enough to determine what products or services you should go with, but you are flying blind without some sense of user need. Users might not know the shape of the product or service that they need, but they intuitively know they need it to have certain qualities. That might be speed of transaction, convenience or a set of functions. Finding how how much your users value these things, relatively speaking, will give you clues about how to build your offering.
Beauty at scale
Being disciplined about design has organisational benefits (saving the money and time that goes into creating different logos or websites for every individual department or business) and user benefits (a consistent look and feel are familiar, reassuring and easier to learn how to use). If a user only has to learn how one government online service works to understand how all government services will behave, that removes a lot of friction from the process.
For a digital team to create designs that work at scale, it must make it easier to work in their way than to build something different. There are two ways of doing this. You can impose a cost on teams elsewhere in the organisation choosing to design things differently by imposing rules and constraints on alternatives. Depending on your organisation’s culture, you may need to use this stick. Ideally, though, you will offer a carrot.
Design patterns – small chunks of html that give templates for buttons or boxes, colour palettes, style guidelines, microcopy text – are ideal for this purpose. Creating and publishing these patterns create little pieces of utility that have been built and tested thoroughly, so others don’t have to do the same. This makes the act of designing consistently good-looking services the path of least resistance, rather than additional effort. Start and end pages, drop-down boxes, layout, typography, colour and forms – all can be done once and shared.
Having created design patterns, the role of the digital team and design community across the organisation is to curate and improve them. Templates should not be considered to have been set in stone, so it must be straightforward for teams working on services across the organisation to easily get hold of (and apply) any improvements. Publishing your patterns in the open and creating a thriving community of designers to keep them fresh is the best way to make this happen.
Summary