Sometimes the best hack has no coding at all.

Hadley Beeman

[Brains] are social-monitoring devices much more than calculators.

Mark Earls

If everyone thinks you have a good idea, you’re too late.

Paul Cheng

The creation of simplicity is a complex process

Sarah Lay

• Smart answers are smart | Government Digital Service The partnership of content designer and developer on smart answers demonstrates the oft-fabled multidisciplinary agile approach we employ at GDS, where we work in pairs wherever possible. Researching the subject, working out the logic and moulding this with technical wizardry (at the same time writing great microcopy as we went along) meant the smart answer was devised and built in hours.
• Enabling tomorrow’s public services – Reform Technological innovation must be combined with business process redesign and improvement. In addition, services should embrace the future, in terms of both the capabilities of those delivering the service and the demands of those using them.
• 5 things to leave out of a social media proposal « A Pretty Simple blog A great argument for engaging with social media is to be part of the conversations that are already happening. But be wary of thinking that means you can take control of the conversation, or even have any impact on it at all.
• The Symbiotic Web blog: Crazy Europeans!?! This is an industry that has developed the surreptitious gathering of people’s personal data into an art form, yet an industry that can’t keep its data safe from hackers and won’t keep it safe from government agencies. This is an industry that tracks our every move on the web and gets stroppy if we want to know when it’s happening and why. This is an industry that makes privacy policies ridiculously hard to read whilst at the same time working brilliantly on making other aspects of their services more and more user-friendly.
• 7 Foundational Principles « Privacy by Design Privacy by Design advances the view that the future of privacy cannot be assured solely by compliance with regulatory frameworks; rather, privacy assurance must ideally become an organization’s default mode of operation.
• The human factor in service design – McKinsey Quarterly – Operations – Performance It’s no secret that the quality of a company’s service interactions matters greatly in creating a positive experience with customers. Yet few companies focus on how customers form opinions about those interactions. By applying well known principles of psychology and behavioral science to service designs and working harder to understand what really motivates—and irritates—customers, companies can begin improving the experience quickly and at low cost [requires free registration]
• Behavioural Insights Team publish paper on fraud, error and debt | Cabinet Office This is the first time that the Government has explicitly sought to draw upon behavioural insights to tackle fraud, error and debt in a systematic way. The insights outlined in this document, applied in a range of different contexts and settings, show that not only is it possible to apply behavioural insights to reduce fraud, error and debt, but also that it can be done in a highly cost-effective way.
• Briefly, on Agile | Seldo.Com Blog Great teams produce great software. Great teams using agile release software every two weeks. Bad teams will produce shitty software. Bad teams using agile will release shitty software every two weeks.
• Rosenfeld Media | Luke Wroblewski on the Most Common Web Form MistakeFor example, if you are offering home loans, a useful conversation might go something like this:”How can I help you?” “I’m trying to see if I can afford a home.” “I can help you with that, is this your first home purchase…”

  Whereas, a typical Web form conversation goes more like this:

  “First Name” “Umm ok I guess” “Last Name” “Phone number” “Wait why do you need my phone number?” “Agree to my terms of service!”

  Clearly there’s a big difference between these two approaches.

• Nick Bradbury: No More Free Tech SupportA big reason software is still so unfriendly is that most developers spend very little time understanding how non-geeks experience the tech we build. We surround ourselves with fellow techies and start thinking everyone uses software the same way we do, so we keep building stuff for ourselves.The only way we’re going to stop spending so much time giving free tech support is by making stuff that’s easier to use and less breakable. It’s when we step into the world of non-geeks, where people type URLs into Google’s search box instead of the address bar, that we start to understand what we’re doing wrong.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

Most of us don’t have the power which Humpty Dumpty claimed for himself to make words mean what we want them to mean. We may be able to stretch and pummel meanings, we may even be able to add new meanings to existing words, but we can’t generally obliterate older meanings, and we certainly can’t choose which of a set of meanings to accept and which to ignore.

Take ‘Whitehall’, for example. It’s a street in London, and at one level, that’s all it is. But apart from being a very literal place, it is also a figurative place. It is symbolically the seat of government, the collective noun for civil servants, or rather for mandarins. It is the setting for Yes Minister and is the scene of Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom’s many triumphs. Decades after they were last seen in the wild, there is a slight – though wholly misplaced – feeling that bowler hats might be encountered there. It is even said to be the frontline in an apparent war between civil servants and MPs.

In being all of those things, it perpetuates imagery and understanding which is not wholly wrong but is in many ways outdated and inaccurate. It has subtexts which are never said and so can never be unsaid.

Meanwhile, in another part of ‘Whitehall’, though at some distance from Whitehall, the iconoclasts of the Government Digital Service are readying themselves for the next stage:

Later this month we will unveil another bit of our GOV.UK beta – the element that explains the work and workings of government. This is intended to replace the many separate sites run by government organisations, simplifying things for people who are personally or professionally interested in how government works and what it is doing.

Neil Williams, who leads the work, is well aware of the difficulties intrinsic in it, not least in pinning down quite what it is we are talking about:

In developing this component we’ve found ourselves returning frequently to the question: “what is government policy?”

Not “what is government policy on issue X” (a separate problem which I will return to in a minute) but, more philosophically, what is and isn’t a government policy and how do you know when you’ve met one?

Neil’s post – and the many interesting comments on it – reflect the difficulty of this challenge and the determination of GDS to meet it.  But parenthetically and unwittingly, I wonder if the thinking is being constrained in a way which may turn out to be unhelpful:

(We’ve never settled on the perfect name for this bit of the project – we sometimes call it ‘the corporate platform’, we sometimes call it ‘Whitehall’, if you’ve been reading this blog you’ve probably come across both terms, but we mean the same thing. We will attempt to be consistent in future and call it ‘Whitehall’.)

Of all the things we might choose to worry about, the internal name for a component might well seem to be somewhere right at the bottom of the list. And in one sense it is. But in another sense, all the baggage behind the term may make the issue much less trivial than that. In some parts of government, there is a reasonably clear cut division between policy and other things: policy is what a traditional policy department does, and anything it doesn’t do isn’t policy. In other parts of government, though, the boundaries are much less clear. Not all that is corporate is policy.  Not all that is policy is generated in Whitehall. There are far more civil servants who rarely, if ever, set foot in Whitehall than there are civil servants whose offices overlook it. The stereotype says that policy is what mandarins do in Whitehall, while delivery is what oiks do in the provinces, but that stereotype is not just pejorative, it is plain wrong.

I am all in favour of the attempt to put some structure and consistency around the presentation of policy. I am sure that the commenter on Neil’s post who wanted policy material kept well apart from the rest of what gov.uk is doing speaks for many. But if even sub-consciously we let the layers of meaning of ‘Whitehall’ cloud thinking in this area, there is a risk that we end up not just with too limited a view about the scope of the corporate activity of government organisations, but even more importantly that we fail to see the continuity across the spectrum from policy to delivery in some of the areas where central government most directly interacts with citizens.

GDS has deliberately positioned itself far enough from the physical Whitehall to create a useful psychological distance and to give itself access to much better sandwich shops. But even now it may not be quite as far as it thinks from conceptual Whitehall, and the closer it gets to transactions and services, the more that will matter.

It’s only a small thing. But while ‘corporate platform’ may lack zing (and by all means call it something which sounds less boring), let that not be a reason for letting the overtones of Whitehall into the engine room of gov.uk. For we all know what happened to Humpty Dumpty.

In a pluralist and open society we have to tolerate many things that we dislike or findoffensive, if no for other reason than because the alternative – suppressing them – is worse.

Francis FitzGibbon

What looks from an adult perspective like radical technological change is just the background radiation of a young person’s life.

Martin Belam

• Top Ten Tips from Mobile Web Experts – Forbes Don’t just scale down your desktop site and try to squeeze as much as you can into the little screen. Use the mobile development process to prune your offerings to the most essential.
• The next step | Helpful Technology Gov.uk is a stake in the ground – a signpost to something better and some examples of what that looks like, as much in terms of process and culture as in terms of pixels. If it can manage the transition to the next stage, it’ll be onto a winner and we’ll all be the better for it.
• With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform – O’Reilly Radar Unfortunately, far too often .gov websites cost millions and don’t deliver as needed. GOV.UK is open source, mobile-friendly, platform agnostic, uses HTML5, scalable, hosted in the cloud and open for feedback. Those criteria collectively embody the default for how government should approach their online efforts in the 21st century.
• The Five Stages of Hosting (Pinboard Blog) 5. The Stately Manor
  Your own datacenter.
  Good: No need to take hosting advice from blog posts.
  Bad: God help you.
• My 2 cents on sharing UX findings | Red Gate’s User Experience TeamWe decided, quite simply, to track usability issues on a whiteboard. On the completion of the first usability test we conducted, we made a list of the main issues that a user encountered and put this up on the whiteboard. As we conducted additional usability tests, we continued to add to our list and made note of recurring issues.At the end of a series of usability tests, we were left with a whiteboard filled with usability issues and the number of participants who encountered them. The UX representatives in the project team then rated the issues based on severity and came up with design recommendations for each issue.Each design recommendation was discussed with the entire project team in a very simple stand-up meeting around the whiteboard. Software developers had an opportunity to help us assess the feasibility of implementing our design recommendations and including development changes to the overall development plan.
• Sometimes solving life’s problems is better by design Seen in this way, design is a kind of counter-narrative to the gravitational pull of producers and service providers – the way they suit themselves without even knowing that that’s what they’re doing. Also, by being consciously and counter-culturally cross-disciplinary, design seeks a larger view than is dreamt of in the narrow philosophies of professional disciplines. Where the practitioners of economics, accountancy marketing, communications, HR and IT pursue their objectives with such single mindedness that it can unbalance and tyrannise our lives, ”design thinking” seeks a more holistic perspective built from an attempt to empathise with all involved.
• World building 404: The unknown unknowns – Charlie’s Diary We can expect the world of 2022 to look similar to the world of 2012, insofar as many of the same cars will still be on the roads, fashion continues to iterate around a bunch of attractor themes scattered over the past century, many of today’s large corporations will still exist (although some will have collapsed), and so on. There will be some surprises (maybe there’ll be a hotel in space, or a Chinese Moon base) but overall it will be recognizable. But by the time we push the boat out to 2032, the unknown-unknowns will be building up. Signs of climate stress and overpopulation will be more visible, we may have driverless cars, there may be major disruptive effects arising from the development of direct brain interfaces or something else that today is a research and development curiosity. And by 2052, the unknown unknowns will have driven the world to be a very different place from anything I can predict today.
• NESTA – Can government think long-term? Geoff Mulgan It seems to take new governments a few years to realise how much they need serious strategy. In the first year or two, they tend to rely on intuition, manifesto commitments, or the belief that political strategy is all that matters.
• Ben Terrett on designing GOV.UK | Government Digital Service The design challenge here seems to be – don’t avoid the obvious. Government websites are needs driven and what people want to do is get in, get what they want and then get out. Quickly.

Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it.

Seth Godin
(via Tim Harford)