I’ve heard the term “digital by default” pop up a few times recently, so I dug out the original definition from the UK Government Digital Strategy:

Digital by default means digital services which are so straightforward and convenient that all those who can use digital services will choose to do so, while those who can’t are not excluded.

I had an opticians appointment the other day and have some standard age + UV based degradation. The preventative healthcare answer to which is 1) kale 2) hats. So, London based hat wearers, any suggestion of hat shops for men of a certain age?

Booking marking this case study of GOV.UK Notify from Hannah White and @eaves.ca to wheel out next time there’s a bit of reductive technical solutionism about common platforms. Scale by starting small and thinking about adoption. Scaling Digital Infrastructure in a Siloed State

Sketching interfaces, riffing off Berg’s Here & There

Because software is eating the world, there are now theology articles in Wired. (I started reading and couldn’t stop).

Thoughts on the NHS 10 year plan (with a digital skew)

The UK government has published the 10 year plan for the National Health Service. It is based around ‘three big shifts’: analogue to digital, hospital to community, and sickness to prevention. Some people have said it’s less of a plan and more of a vision, which is probably fair, but also probably necessary to rewire such a complex set of organisations. I’d add that the three big shifts feel like incomplete sentences: “analogue to digital means …”. ... more

Milton Keynes marathon 2025

I was supposed to run the Brighton marathon last month, but bug between a charity’s CRM and the marathon meant I didn’t actually have a place. Lots of people very kindly sponsored me, so to make sure I delivered my side of the deal I ran Milton Keynes. I hadn’t done a very convincing job of training for Brighton because of other commitments. I thought a month more might mean I could make up for that, but that was wishful thinking. ... more

Administrative Fairness Lab Conference 2025

I was in York for the Administrative Fairness Lab’s conference. Somehow I’ve never visited before. The photo above is from York Minster’s stone mason yard, cathedral’s being things that are never done. One of the sessions at the conference, by Maria Lee and Sam Guy was about due process in the planning system. One of the key ideas I took away was that removing things like consultations doesn’t remove the contested viewpoints they exist to air. ... more

Designing the seams, not seamless design

Designing the seams, not seamless design On YouTube, there’s a compilation of Steve Jobs speeches where he says: ‘It just works. Seamlessly.’ There are ­forty-four examples in total. ‘It just works’ sums up Jobs’ approach to design: remove and simplify. He thought design should ‘get out of the way’. Products that just worked were not there to be meddled with either (when Apple discovered repair shops opening the iPhone 4, they added tamper-proof screws). ... more

Standing inside the machine

I was in the Netherlands to deliver a keynote at the User Needs First conference. While I was there I visited the Zaanse Schans open air museum. Windmills and other industrial buildings were transported and reconstructed there in the 60’s and 70’s. There’s also a museum of industry, mostly chocolate and biscuits. Compared to most preserved windmills in the UK, many of the windmills at Zaanse Schans actually work and it was a very windy day. ... more

Public sector design — time for a reset

Public sector design — time for a reset Public services should work much harder for the public. However, the new UK government isn’t going to meet its aspirations for digital and data unless it resets the public sector’s approach to design. The approach that grew from GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service was, if not flawed, at least incomplete at source. It ended up prioritising utilitarian simplicity, at the cost of designing government out of the way, and shunned technology as inconsequential to the design of services. ... more

Public sector design — time for a reset

Public services should work much harder for the public. However, the new UK government isn’t going to meet its aspirations for digital and data unless it resets the public sector’s approach to design. The approach that grew from GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service was, if not flawed, at least incomplete at source. It ended up prioritising utilitarian simplicity, at the cost of designing government out of the way, and shunned technology as inconsequential to the design of services. ... more

Digital talent and precariousness in government

Given there’s a UK election coming up, there’s going to talk about how to get more tech talent into government. Most is probably going to be encouraging ‘tours of duty’ from the tech industry. That short-term engagements are the way to get people with digital skills in to government. I thoughts I’d share my experience from 2011 on the precariousness that creates. I originally joined the civil service on a 2 year fixed term as a civil servant. ... more

Marathon

Originally published at https://richardpope.orgon January 28, 2024. ... more

Speaker notes: administrative fairness in practice

The following is (approximatly) the talk I gave as part of the Administrative Fairness Lab’s panel at the ESRC Festival of Social Science. Starting with GOV.UK in 2012, the changes to how the UK government designs and builds digital services over the past decade have been significant. User centered design practice and agile development are now the norm, at least in some form. Digital services are tested with real users throughout the development lifecycle. ... more

A measure of value for digital public service delivery

A measure of value for digital public service delivery User need: outcomes for people, their representatives or communities Policy intent: meeting explicit outcomes sought by politicians or ones implicit in legislation Capability to operate: building a collegiate team, unpicking legacy software or answering a knotty technical question Product leadership in the public sector is, more often than not, about balancing these 3 things. ... more

Talk: designing means-tested welfare procedures in government

Talk: designing means-tested welfare procedures in government Short talk from the tail-end of last year that I gave to the Administrative Fairness Lab’s webinar on the Energy Crisis, Fuel Poverty, and Administrative Fairness on digital means testing * * Not a judgement on if means-testing is good/bad and the social implications therein ... more

Government service design: outcomes and ‘fairness’?

Would it be ok if a digital public service makes it simple for users to achieve a proximate outcome (get a widget licence, apply for a widget support allowance, pay widget tax, appeal a widget removal order etc) if the process feels less than fair? Or if the rules are opaque, inconsistent or unknowable? If it’s unclear who is making a decision and why? If no one has designed how it feels to interact with the procedures and processes that sit around it? ... more

Dyslexia

I recently came across my assessment for dyslexia from when I was 14. My mum had been fairly ruthless at decluttering, but she’d kept that, a source of vindication I think. I thought I’d write a couple of notes about it - partly because misunderstandings about dyslexia abound (even from people whose job it is to communicate clearly), mostly as something to point people at to explain what it is like in my case. ... more

The limits of simple

I came across this paragraph in a review of the work of Elinor Ostrom: The better services are, as defined by professional criteria, the less satisfied the citizens are with those services'. This paradox emerges when the evaluation of the production process focuses solely on the part provided by the regular producer, ignoring the part played by the consumer-producer. Consequently, in such cases, the co-production trade-off is drifting away from its optimum and the interaction between the two parts is becoming more and more defective, despite genuine efforts to improve the service. ... more
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