Social media is becoming an integral part of the everyday work of the civil servant, opening the civil service up and allowing us to be more in touch with our staff and the public than ever before.

The practice of user experience is most successful when focused on strategy, vision, and planning, not design and execution. In other words, UX adds value by bringing design practices to strategic endeavors.

Assessments are based, not on whether the decisions made are any good, but on whether they were made in accordance with what is deemed to be an appropriate process. We assume, not only that good procedure will give rise to good outcome, but also that the ability to articulate the procedure is the key to good outcomes.

Websites are complex. Content websites with complex content are even more complex. You will have inevitably got things wrong for some users. I genuinely believe that opening up a new feature or piece of functionality to the user base and opening comments on it is the fastest way of flushing out weird edge cases, cross-browser issues, flaky behaviour, and, frankly, any clangers in the product.

Having the many eyes of the audience on a product is cheaper and faster than regression testing something to the nth degree.

Airplane automation systems are not the first to discover the truth in the comment made by David Jenkins that “computers make great monitors for people, but people make poor monitors for computers.”

None of this is to say that we can’t make public services less complex and thus more efficient. We can and we should. People have done it. But, however much we simplify public sector organisations, they will always be more complex beasts than their private sector counterparts.

In comparing the performance of different groups, Wujec found that architects and engineers performed the best (not surprisingly). But the next best-performing group was a big surprise: kindergarten students. MBA students, for their part, performed the worst on average. Wujec concluded that kindergarten students eschewed the planning stage, which MBAs and other groups used to try and establish who's in charge and what to do. Kindergarten students, in contrast, simply experimented over and over until they found a model that worked.

Although it is essential that they do, policymakers and business people have difficulty thinking in terms of systems. The common sense of everyday observation has an appeal that analytic, evidential reasoning can never match. We “know” that the sun revolves around the earth. Only from the perspective of the planets as a solar system do we realise that our interpretation of what we see is wrong.

Filling in a form should be a seamless process that intuitively moves the reader through clearly defined and signposted phases. It should always be obvious where they will go next. A good online form is shaped by a strong visual metaphor that instantly locates the user within the process.

On the one hand innovation is about change. On the other, you need a reliable — and therefore pretty fixed — mechanism to ensure that change happens. That means you can only successfully innovate in a pre-defined way.

A building of few details would seem to be a building of few secrets. But austerity in architecture connotes a visual and functional transparency that it completely fails to provide. Any seamless-seeming building is full of complex joints and junctions, fixes and fudges that make a thousand parts look like a single monolithic, sculptural whole. To look as if you left everything out, you have to sneak everything in. What seems spartan is usually, invisibly, baroque.

Can you see the thing they need that they don’t even know they want yet? Tell them about it.

However well-intentioned the thinking behind the ICT component of the national curriculum was, the sad fact is that it has become discredited and obsolete. As a result, educational thinking about the importance of computing and information technology in this country has been stunted for well over a decade. We've taken a technology that can provide "power steering for the mind" (as a noted metaphor puts it) and turned it into lesson for driving Microsoft Word.

While there was complexity in all the journeys looked at today they are, pretty much, ‘light touch’ contact. While we need to improve the digital journey they’re almost the easy wins because they absolutely can be done digitally and contact can be avoided.

So, when are we going to tackle the tough stuff? When are we going to look at digital’s role in social care referrals or child protection? I doubt that can be wireframed in an hour long session round a flip chart. And the stakes for getting it wrong are much higher. But we need to do it and I think we need to do it soon.

Like many a management team, the EU rushed to Norm before it had properly Stormed. The result, as ever, was collusion, comfortable debate and the avoidance of challenge. For any group, especially one taking such important decisions, the result is likely to be disastrous. There is a warning there for companies, governments and management teams everywhere.

Strategic Doing represents an agile strategy discipline that is distinctly different from how most of us learned the basics of strategy. Traditionally, strategy in organizations depends on a mechanistic, linear process which we have come to call “strategic planning”.

This approach does not work very well in complex environments that are continuously shifting. Strategic Doing invites us to do our strategic thinking and action differently.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

For 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.

A 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.

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.

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.

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.

5. The Stately Manor

Your own datacenter.

Good: No need to take hosting advice from blog posts.

Bad: God help you.

We 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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

in both cases the assumptions I made, as a fairly IT literate individual was that a) people would share my belief that digital is better and that b) people’s spending habits would reflect this.

In fact I was wrong.

But cognitive biases aren’t something which ignorant citizens have and which wise governments are free of. Policy-makers are also prone to them - either because they are as irrational as everyone else or because they have to pander to an irrational electorate. One of my big complaints against Nudge is that it fails to appreciate this sufficiently, and so panders to the ideological fiction that policy-making is or can be entirely rational and evidence-based.

When thinking about designing a digital monument, Jim explained that your main competition was basically big lumps of concrete that tended to last for hundreds of years. That is quite some competition for software, he argued. We really don’t have a good track record of software ageing.

We will be ‘designing for the common case’. That means we will take information that affects most of our users and putting it up front. If you are an edge case or exception – perhaps affected by something that only affects 100 people in the whole of the UK – then your information will still be there – it just won’t be in the first paragraph.

By paying less attention to quality, Facebook has been able to focus on other things, like making the company a fun place to work at that can attract and retain talented engineers. Facebook would probably be less fun if it cared more about quality. Facebook’s product is a website, so it can fix things quickly. It has a process which permits rapid deployment of new code, and rapid rollback of buggy changes. This reduces the cost of recovering from bugs.

We started strongly and soon had a very elegant programme for exploiting the organisation’s resources to drive higher productivity, better outcomes and lower costs. But no-one was interested. I now believe this wasn’t because people disagreed with it, it was because people didn’t understand it. And I think that has more to do with demographics than anything: there are still a large number of people at or near the tops of big organisations that have a blind spot when it comes to anything new: they can’t cope with big paradigm shifts and clever methods changing the way business is done.

In the end, however you try and define it, information architecture boils down to consciously organising the content and flow of a website, based on some principles that can be articulated, that have been derived through evidence gathering.

Given the choice of having a Chief Experience Officer (CXO from a UX background) or a Chief Customer Office (CCO from a marketing/CX background), I’d probably choose the latter – for the more comprehensive, well rounded view of the organisation and all its working parts than the interface obsessed UXer is likely to be. And I’m more confused about where Service Design fits into all of this than ever.

Leaders may have different styles but one thing about them is always the same: They act as if they own the situation, whether they actually do nor not.

We know good and well that we can’t predict the evolution of a software project beyond a few months in most thriving businesses. Change just happens. Why then do we persist in thinking Big Funding Up Front is any different than Big Design Up Front? Some are making inroads with models of T&M funding, fixed cost, adjustable scope, and other techniques like incremental funding. However, for the most part we remain stuck in annual funding models because business Agility, the real promise of Agile, remains elusive.

Think of the coastline. Yes, another line. Isn’t it? It’s obvious where it lies. One side land, the other sea. Now look more closely. Still sure about that? Still confident that you can draw, with perfect accuracy, a boundary between the two? One that doesn’t shift faster than you can study it? One in which every crevice, nook, cell and grain can be defined as being on one side or the other.

Of course you can’t. The coastline is a great theory, but a poor reality.

Interestingly, it Twitter is fixed for me, it might not be great for the money people. And if it’s fixed for them - which seems to be the direction things are going in now - then it might be more completely broken for me.

The first question is, how are you going to design something to ensure users have the easiest access to the best Content, if you haven’t defined at the beginning what that Content is?

Corporations are made up of people. People sometimes do bonkers stuff. Furthermore, large organisations are almost impossible to control. Therefore people continue to do bonkers stuff. Business leaders just have to do their best to minimise the effects of the bonkers stuff and hope that some of it leads to good stuff. And, of course, the business leaders sometimes do bonkers stuff as well.

For example, consider the way that Amazon balances front stage and back stage operations. Amazon’s front stage is its customer-facing website. Amazon can expect that the level of change on the web is likely to remain volatile for some time. Constant innovation in online services will cause customer expectations to evolve accordingly. So it makes sense for Amazon’s web-development approach to be highly adaptive and flexible, with lots of room for creative experiments and innovation.

But radical, disruptive innovations on the fulfillment side of Amazon’s business are less likely. It’s reasonable to predict that customers will continue to want fast, efficient delivery; and that warehousing, shipping and logistics, because they involve large investments and existing physical infrastructure (ships, trucks, planes, railroads and so on), won’t change anywhere near as rapidly as online services. So it makes sense for Amazon to focus on reducing variety through standards and controls in its back-stage operations, while maintaining maximum adaptability on its front stage with customers. And indeed, Amazon web developers have a very different work experience than workers in an Amazon distribution center, although the company’s cost-focused, thrifty culture is in evidence throughout.

When there is inherent risk in using a technology, we try to build systems that take into account obvious, single-point failures and prevent them. The more single-point failures we try to prevent through system design, however, the more complex the systems become. Eventually, you have a system where the interactions between different fail-safes can, ironically, cause bigger failures that are harder to predict, and harder to spot as they're happening. Because of this, we have to make our decisions about technology from the position that we can never, truly, make technology risk-free.

Accepting that we cannot always predict the next advancement in mobile or tablet technology, we can create solutions tailored to existing technology and devices that remains flexible enough to adapt to innovation ahead.

What governments don't seem to understand is that software is the nearest thing to magic that we've yet invented. It's pure "thought stuff" – which means that it enables ingenious or gifted people to create wonderful things out of thin air.

What a wall satisfies is not so much a material need as a mental one. Walls protect people not from barbarians, but from anxieties and fears,which can often be more terrible than the worst vandals.

James recommended that UX lie, cheat and steal to cope with being in an agile environment. His examples included lying about what something was called - i.e. a paper prototyping session could be described as a “UX spike”. Or cheating by making sure that test data is specifically designed to stress the UI and reveal flaws that have to be fixed. Or stealing concepts from agile, like using the phrase “UX debt” to describe sub-optimal solutions that have been deployed as “good enough”, but which need to be re-addressed in later iterations.

Organisational addiction to email has long since passed the point of dysfunctionality and now borders on the pathological, with employees sending messages to colleagues in nearby cubicles, people covering their backs by cc-ing everyone else and managers carpet-bombing subordinates with attachments. The real problem, in other words, is not that email is dying but that it's out of control.

The question is not whether innovation is needed, but rather how we will choose to approach the task of innovation. So what key considerations must a public sector innovation strategy include if it is to make a difference?

The place to start is by increasing our understanding of how people in 2011 live their lives. It's fair to say that, at the moment, we have a limited understanding of what our residents do at home – how they access their work, leisure, and recreational activities.

In fact, we make a whole host of assumptions and broad generalisations based on historical patterns of understanding. The way we provide leisure services has changed very little from the way councils up and down the country would have provided such services to our grandparents, possibly even our great grandparents, despite the fact that the way we keep fit bears little resemblance to how people behaved in the early 20th century.

You shouldn’t rely on soundbite articles to tell you why other soundbite articles are wrong.

A form is a conversation. And like a conversation, it represents two-way communication between two parties, in this case, the user and the organization. In fact, the user has filled out the form in order to initiate communication with the organization.

But most of all we need to develop identity services around the needs of users – if we don’t then people will not trust or use them. Many people have described this subject as ‘identity management’. That is an organisation centric phrase: a notion that organisations hold data about people and have the responsibility for maintaining it. We have to reset the subject around the user and recognise that in the digital age people assert identity in many different ways and contexts.

Plans are great.

But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.

Somebody who spends their professional life thinking about decision-making and examining the extensive research in this field is likely to be able to help me make decisions that I'll be happier with.

A strong theme through out the day was: Problem first. Technology second. It’s all too easy to say “social technology is the answer. What was the problem?” – be pragmatic, and start with a well defined problem was the wise advice.

A useful dialog would negotiate with your users. Give them actions and power to change their situation. Don’t ask users to acknowledge your troubles and stop the negotiation there. Reconnect! Try Again! Even simple actions can help people correct the situation.

Because of the nature of the Jobseeker’s Allowance service, pages are delivered up to the user in a dynamic fashion. This means that there is essentially no concept of ‘a page’ and instead questions are presented to users based on their previous inputs and answers. This is fine from a user perspective but it causes problems when it comes to gathering and interpreting behavioural data.

In essence, there is no ‘hook’ within the data for orientation. You cannot assess where people are within the journey or at what stages they drop out because all of the URLs are dynamically generated. Looking for patterns in behaviour is therefore meaningless because each user journey is completely unique.

Haakon and Kjetil went on to explain what a challenge it was to make banking “fun” visually. For most people, online banking is a necessary evil, not an exciting web destination. To impress the client, though, they showed lots of mock-ups of how the site could be, complete with plenty of polish and drop-shadow. Banking will be fun, the designs shouted.

Regardless of whether I stick with mobile development, the lessons I've learned from it are ones I'll apply to everything I create in the future. Keep it simple, keep it uncluttered, and keep it focused. That's how you create great apps for any platform.

As we have argued in our policy making work, this is often the missing link in government – where we assume that policy concepts translate seamlessly into delivery – without putting in the effort to make sure that the policy is deliverable by the people who need to deliver it. That means prototyping, testing and insisting that things work before they are unleashed on a waiting public. It also meant an insistence on excellence with which people who run government feel naturally uncomfortable.

But transactions are where it's at. We built the government gateway to support both single transactions and joined up transactions (that is, ones that would link more than one department and send each of them the relevant data. The vast bulk of those transactions come from sites other than direct.gov; the vast bulk of direct.gov's transactions are for Car Tax. That all needs to change. We didn't ever crack it. It needs cracking - integrated transactions, simple pan-device (and even pan-channel) authentication, pre-population of data that government already knows about you and so on.

As on the Internet, so in the enterprise. In its infancy, it’s the organisation that shapes the intranet, designing it around the needs of internal users. Or at least, that’s the theory. In truth, organisations get the intranet they deserve, with flaws and compromises and sometimes just bad decisions.

But thereafter, it’s the business that has to live with this, and it’s the people within it who have to suffer the consequences. The decisions you make at the design stage will affect the way employees work every single day, for years.

Though it may seem like semantics, just think about it for a moment: what impact might a 'beta ethic' bring to how we currently design and develop public policy solutions and services? How might it help to overcome some of the challenges governments face when trying to innovate, such as an aversion to risk and public criticism? How different the engagement of public citizens and professionals, when a beta version is launched first?

Outside of Hercules House ‘digital by default’ seems a long, long way away and requires making compromises in order just to get some momentum. Small wins are achievable (and you can bet we celebrate each one!) but getting anything larger out of the door requires considerable patience and fortitude.

Personally, I am much better at my job because of social tools. I’m better informed, often helped by others, better connected, more grateful, and more ready to share my own thoughts than I would be without tools like Yammer, Twitter and blogs.

The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you’ll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter, not the domain name you own. You don’t pay Big Web a single penny so it can take away your identity and all your data at any time. The things you can say and do that are likely to be seen and used by any significant number of people will be the things that Facebook, Google and Twitter are happy for you to say and do. You can do what you like on your own website but you’ll probably be shouting into the void.

Privacy today feels like what security did 10-15 years ago - there is an awareness of the issues steadily building and blog posts from prominent technologists is helping to steamroll public consciousness. The risks around privacy today are just as serious as security leaks were then - except that there is an order of magnitude more users online and a lot more private data being shared on the web.

So if we take our responsibility seriously, why don’t our clients? Why do they so often try to cut corners, cut out research and prototyping, shudder at the idea of iteration (which will equal cost now but provide potential benefit later), and railroad us down an agile path that promises iteration, but so often delivers linear, scaled-back development with no opportunity to evolve already built functionality?

Prototyping and testing gives you a real opportunity to test, iterate and re-test. It allows teams to incorporate learnings (other than their own) so that the end results more closely resemble the type of result that users might actually find useful.

One problem with multi-channel authentication is that the owners/maintainers of the individual channels may be unaware of the consequences to the end-user of their security weaknesses.

The criminals use a fake card to get a new cell phone SIM, which they then use to authenticate a fraudulent bank transfer made with stolen credentials.