PAUL MCGARVEY Government Service Design Manual and Information Architecture

What is the Government Service Design Manual? ‘A pool of guidance and advice about how to design and build digital services from teams across government’ Designed with the Digital by Default Service Standard in mind

What is Discovery phase? Five steps to making a service Discovery Alpha Beta Live Retirement

What is discovery phase? Short phase in which you start to: Find out what your users need Find out what you should measure Find out what your constraints are

User story Achieve this by: Expressing/defining the need in a user story Write story from user’s perspective Define success criteria Create and deliver a solution

Assemble the team Team must be: Multidisciplinary Able/willing to meet regularly Able to work closer together to deliver rapid iterations

Outputs At end of discovery phase, you will have: A list of user needs/story cards Understanding of team and capability required Ability to scope and plan an alpha A decision to progress to next phase Some rough prototypes List of stakeholders and their input Understanding of existing services

What is IA? Information architecture is all about: Organising content Describing it clearly Providing ways for people to get to it

What an IA is made up of Defining a project and its goals Researching people and content Designing IA, navigation, visual approach and content Building and testing Maintaining

What is IA? Good IA helps people find information they need by understanding: People Content Context

IA in a project Main IA deliverables in a project: The IA itself Navigation Metadata

Navigation

Do IA and GSDM overlap? Five steps to making a service Discovery Alpha Beta Live Retirement What IA is made up of Defining a project and its goals Researching people and content Designing IA, navigation, visual approach and content Building and testing Maintaining

Do IA and GSDM overlap? Both place user needs first Both place great emphasis on context User needs and context inform the content Both are essentially a process for designing and building a digital service

Where do they diverge? GSDM specific to government culture GSDM focused on services Resources (what it defines as a small team) Emphasis on Agile methodologies