Design Principles

As well as the Service Standard, in government we also adhere to the Government Design Principles.

First published in 2012 and mostly recently updated in 2019, the Design Principles are a set of values and guides that describe how an organisation should design its services. They’re particularly important in government, where people often do not have a choice but to use a government service.

You can read more about how they have been applied in various government projects in the blog posts linked on the Design Principles page on GOV.UK.

There are 10 principles in total – just like the Service Standard, the first is Start with user needs.

“Service design starts with identifying user needs. If you do not know what the user needs are, you will not build the right thing. Do research, analyse data, talk to users. Do not make assumptions. Have empathy for users, and remember that what they ask for is not always what they need.”

Both the Design Principles and Service Standard start with users, showing how fundamental user research is to the process of designing and building services.

It is clear how user research fits into further principles:

Principle 5, Iterate. Then iterate again, means starting with a simple first version of a product or service, testing it with users and improving it incrementally. We learned about how user researchers contribute to this in step 2.2.

This is for everyone, principle 6, is about accessibility and inclusivity, in the same way as point 5 of the Service Standard.

Principle 7, Understand context, can only be achieved through research.

Focusing on users and their contexts – the problems they’re trying to solve, the ways in which they interact with your service, their accessibility needs – and not focusing on a particular solution often means that you learn unexpected things. You might even discover that the real problem might not be the one you originally thought you needed to solve. Testing your assumptions in the context of your users is central to building the right thing.

Another way of putting this is to do what users need by finding what works – not what is popular.

In a 2015 blog post, the Head of User Research for GDS at the time, John Waterworth, wrote that, “there’s always time and money for user research.” This excuse – that there is no time or money to do it – quite often just means that the people saying it either do not think they need to or do not want to do user research, but it is essential.

User research does not need to be time consuming or expensive – it runs alongside the rest of the development process and can help cut down on cost and wasted time by focusing efforts on user needs.

While this is true of all products and services, in government we have made user research central to our process, so that we can most effectively help our users – those who rely on the UK government to provide vital services.

Task

Have you ever heard of the Service Standard or the Design Principles? As a user, what do you think of them as guidelines for service design?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.