Looking back: CDPS year in review 2023 to 2024

Owen Burgess:

Over the last decade public sector organisations in Wales have been placing more focus on designing and developing digital public services.

Now often they've done that without many standards frameworks or guidance from which to work, now that can lead to inconsistencies in the way that relatively similar or familiar services have been developed.

It can also mean lots of different but related organizations working in silos.

What we've seen through this work is that that actually can create some frustrating and really disjointed experiences for service users.

It can also mean that there's not a great deal of sharing of lessons learned and best practice amongst that community developing and designing those public services.

This research has really looked to understand if there would be a benefit and there would be a real value in Wales having its own design system that would benefit those that are developing and designing those public services here in Wales, but ultimately it would benefit people like you and me – the people of Wales – that are looking to access those services.

Cory Hughes:

So we've all had that one maths teacher who has asked us to show our workings and the end result is as important as how we get there, so for us working in an Agile way on this discovery has really meant being able to start a dialogue with stakeholders across Wales and open up opportunities to spread our findings beyond the borders of Wales too into places like Scotland and the UK.

That's particularly important for a design system which is all about working in the open in public services design systems are shareable products and they help whoever needs to use them to make the delivery of public services better it's also meant that we've been able to do a whole mashup of exciting things from show and tells, to weeknotes, to blogs and it's meant that the whole team has been able to get involved in a multidisciplinary way.

There's a temptation sometimes times when you get given a problem like this to squirrel yourself away work on it and pop out at the end and say here's our finished product that's not what this discovery has been about it's very much been about learning from others finding out things that we didn't know existed sharing that with the community and starting conversations that are going to um take the insights into further stages in a really meaningful way.

Emma Northcote:

It's tricky at the moment to tell what type of impact the work has had on the public sector.

In terms of measuring that impact, but if we look at the reaction to our call to action asking people to talk to us about their daily work.

The reaction was amazing.

We had conversations with over thirty people, and they were all keen to share the challenges they face, the ideas they have and what they think will improve digital public services across Wales.

Holding show and tells has been a great way for us to report those findings with the audience.

And in terms of the impact on public services in Wales, at this point in time, that we can show people that we understand the issues they're facing and the ideas they have.

And we can work towards change for them, either through introducing the design system, or the impact of bringing people together, who all work within the same realm and are aiming for the same thing.

That's a really special type of impact we've had so early on in our work.

Sarah-Jane Fea:

What's been really enjoyable with working with CDPS is that both Perago and CDPS share the same vision and aim which is to improve Digital Services in Wales for both those who create the services and those who use them CDPS's long expertise in design and user research complemented perfectly Perago's experience in helping organisation build better Services through design transformation and user design.

Perago and CDPS also have very different audiences. Perago has long-standing experience with working with those that sponsor digital services in Wales and CDPS through the communities of practice has access to a very engaged audience of design and service designers. The collaboration between CDPS and Perago has been a great example of the digital service expertise that already exists within Wales.

Owen Burgess:

It's been a busy few months with the design system for Wales discovery. We spoken to 27 different organisations designing digital public services in Wales, and over 30 people have taken the time to really feed in their views individually.

We've also conducted a survey which has given us some great detailed insight into how people go around designing digital public services and we've spoken to companies and even countries about the design systems which they use, so from this really robust research base we've now developed some recommendations and some really clear findings about what this could mean for the future.

We look forward to sharing those with the team at the CDPS in the coming weeks and providing the CDPS with a clear set of recommendations for them to consider about what the future for a design system in Wales may look like and what their role may be within that.