Case Study: GOV.UK Step by Step Journeys

The brief

Whether you need to learn to drive, start a business, or announce that you’ve found buried treasure, there’s likely to be a host of complex government tasks to complete.

A team at the UK Government’s Digital Service (GDS) wanted to bring simplicity to these processes, and so embarked on a project called Step by Step Journeys. The outcome would be to create a single process for previously multifarious actions.

GDS had already established itself as a best-in-class example of user experience design back in 2013, with a Black Pencil in Writing for Design at D&AD. The project was hugely influential in this emerging field.

Speaking on the GDS podcast, Kate Ivey-Williams, Service Designer, and Sam Dub, Product Manager explained the background, process and impact of the project. “The big achievement of gov.uk in its first years was just getting everything together into one place… That was a huge achievement.” Says Dub, “Then there was a follow-on challenge to that which was how do we make this stuff findable and useable and join these transactions up across departments.… We’re able to do what we’re doing because of that work that came before us.”

A core part of the project would mean ensuring that users didn’t have to understand the structure of government in order to find what they need.

Production

The first Step by Step Journey was to be ‘Learning to Drive’. Ivey-Williams explains that this was one of the simpler journeys, and so an easy place to begin, and test whether the hypothesis would work. A visit to the DVLA centre in Swansea kicked off the research. As the journey came together, it was tested in front of real learner-drivers, and through many crucial rounds of user feedback.

The feedback enabled the journey to work, and provided a proof of concept. So it was now up to the team to find more life events to create journeys for. “We deliberately picked these wildly diverse types of processes. [including] something emotionally and legally taxing, to test if the pattern could handle all these different interactions that people make with the government.” Says Dub.

The result of these initial tests was to build a standardised process: once a user need has been identified, the content is interrogated, and a draft journey mapped out.

The team would have to approach government departments to explain what they were doing, and why. It often involved bringing geographically disparate teams together, even bringing colleagues who had never met before into the same room. Dub explains, how this can be productive for the teams in question, “often it’s the first time people have met or thought about making the whole thing better.”

The response

So not only did the pool of simple journeys begin to grow, but the project began to have a transformative effect on the way the civil service collaborated. Dub goes as far to place this point as one of the project’s drivers: “Step by steps as an enabler and transformation of services is a goal of this work.” Ivey-Williams continues: “Sometimes confusing and complex policy is hidden in guidance that’s spread across gov.uk, and when you extract it and expose it in this simplified view, you realise the policy is complicated.”

By June 2019 the number of Journeys had passed 40, and covered processes such as getting married, bereavement, and reporting shipwrecked cargo. The GDS team found government departments approaching them about new ideas for journeys, rather than the other way round.

At the D&AD Awards 2019, the project won a Wood Pencil in the inaugural ‘Service Design’ section of the “Digital Design’ category To date, in excess of 10.5m people have used the journeys. And it’s the end users that drives the team to continue to find more process to simplify. Or, as Ivey-Williams says, “It’s ultimately about making government more invisible. People don’t want to think about the government, they want to get on with their lives.”

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